Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 will stimulate billions in PC hardware sales
JPR estimates $2.6 Billion will be spent on PC gaming hardware in next three years
Google Stadia joins the cloud gaming market
Not a subscription service, a delivery system of your games
Google Stadia joins the cloud gaming market
Stadia is making headlines with its streaming game service but a pack is forming close behind. Sony has been in the game. Watch for entries from Sony, Microstation, Nividia, and Samsung Cloud gaming has been tried since 2003, by several companies. Since then, the internet has gotten a lot faster, and processors have too. The time may be right … Read more
Consoles vs. PCs
Nobody said gamers would stop gaming. The detail is simply, like audiophiles used to have much higher end equipment than what anyone else could afford, or a high-end cell phone was different than a low end, technology being a great equalizer has made consoles, “good enough.” In the bad old days of the 80's when computer memory was still measured … Read more
Done deal: GitHub now belongs to Microsoft
Microsoft announced its plans to acquire GitHub last June. At the time the announcement inspired considerable gnashing of teeth. No surprise there. GitHub is a community of developers—free-spirited, open-source type of developers. We actually found it interesting that the revulsion was not so vehement. The announcement made us realize that GitHub is actually company. Yes, of course, it is a … Read more
Microsoft builds out its game dev talent
Microsoft is aggressively increasing its in house game development work and is adding five new game development teams through acquisition and is also founding a new development studio called the Initiative, which will be based in Santa Monica and led by Darrell Gallagher. Gallagher told Dean Takahashi in a VentureBeat interview just about nothing other than that his job is to … Read more
Inventing the future: Alex Kipman reflects on Hololens at LiveWorx
PTC’s LiveWorx conference is all about the Internet of Things and AR. It has grown out of the PTC acquisition of ThingWorx and the subsequent remaking of the company to put it in the middle of digital lifecycle of products. In January 2018, PTC and Microsoft announced a strategic alliance around the HoloLens, which would encourage the development of … Read more
PTC announces powerful alliances at LiveWorx 2018
The PTC conference kicked off this year with a show of strength and confidence. The company announced three major alliances this year and they highlight three different areas of focus for the company. The company is teaming with: Ansys, is known for its simulation technology especially FEA. Ansys has developed technology they call Discovery Live, which enables lightning … Read more
Sony revives projection AR with Superception
Outward AR is an interesting approach Microsoft’s Beamatron was one of the fist AR projection systems in 2012 using a fixed location projector (video here). Valve spinoff, Cast AR, was the first in 2013 to try using a projector as part of an AR headset. Microsoft tried it again in 2014 with their RoomAlive project. The idea was to turn … Read more
Nvidia claims real time ray tracing now possible
At GDC, Nvidia and Microsoft made a joint announcement about the possibility of doing real time ray tracing, something the CG community has striven for since ray tracing was popularized by Turner Whitted in 1979. Whitted did it on big computers at Bell Labs, just before the PC was introduced. Since then, scores of papers and books have been written … Read more
Seeing, hearing, and now feeling
Smelling and tasting next? VR resurgence into the consumer space has brought with it a host of wants. It is pretty clear that people want to have VR experiences and want them more realistic. One by one the challenges are being reduced if not totally eliminated. Resolution and FOV have been improved, screen door effect minimized, better apps and faster … Read more
Big screen TVs used for gaming to be stutter proofed
FreeSynch on HDMI tears our tarring. Why should PC gamers have all the fun? Indeed. Just because you can get a beautiful, large screen 4K UHD monitor and drive it with a powerful GPU that is used in supercomputer, doesn’t mean folks who can’t afford that kind of rig, or people who want to sit back and game on a … Read more