Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve pretty much exhausted the high profile fall premieres for now, but there still presidential debates and baseball playoff action to be had. Also, while we have not moved so far in the future that we’ve reached the date Marty McFly went to in Back to the Future Part II (that’s in 2015, perhaps by then people will stop reposting photoshopped images), we have reached the data Avatar is available at retail on Blu-ray 3D. Look below for the highlights this week, followed after the break by our weekly listing of what to look out for in TV, Blu-ray and videogames.

Avatar (3D)
It’s taken a couple of years, but Avatar is finally widely available on Blu-ray 3D after being tied up as a Panasonic pack-in exclusive. The bad news? It’s not the Extended Collector’s Edition, so if you want 3D and extras your wait may continue. Otherwise, James Cameron’s special effects should be enough to thrill the eyes of anyone that snagged a 3DTV in the last few years and is looking for a good demo disc.
($24.99 on Amazon)

MLB Playoffs
We have reached the league championship series and, assuming both series need some extra games, should be in for excellent baseball all week. The Yankees have lost Derek Jeter for the postseason, but are by no means done… unless their bats stay as cold as they’ve been. In the National League the Giants and the Cardinals are duking it out, we’ll see if the 2-3-2 home field format plays into the outcome for either team, after the Giants took three on the road in the last round.

NBA Preseason
It’s finally time for hoops again, and after some overseas exhibitions you can watch NBA teams work their way back into shape as they take each other on this week. If you’re a basketball fan you probably love TNT’s Thursday night broadcasts, and the first preseason one features the Celtics and the Nets at 8PM.

Continue reading Must See HDTV (October 15th – 21st)

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

Must See HDTV (October 15th – 21st) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Oct 2012 18:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As head-mounted displays and motion controllers improve, the possibility of truly-immersive virtual reality in our living rooms continues to get closer and closer to our reach. However one of the big challenges is that you’ll still be standing still or walking in place in any game that involves moving around. While there are omni-directional treadmills that solve this problem, you won’t be able to afford one (or fit one in your living room) any time soon. Now, there’s an odd little gadget in development that aims to solve this problem without any moving parts at all.

Created by Julian Williams, the WizDish is a disc that you stand on, while wearing special shoes (called, of course, WizShoes), which enables you to move around in any direction, while standing in one place. The action isn’t exactly what I’d call walking, though – it’s more like shuffling. The 14 pound device relies on a small amount of friction between the bottom of the shoes and its platform to allow you to move around – without falling like you might do wearing socks on a slippery floor.

According to its maker, “The WizDish exploits the fact that you have 29 bones in each foot to balance with. You slide your feet over a slick concave surface in a simulation of walking that gives surprisingly similar proprioceptive cues to real walking. Once you can see where you are going [using an HMD] you take more confident strides and quickly forget it’s a simulated walk. The key advantages of the WizDish are that you can start, stop and turn with absolute ease…”

Personally, I’m not yet convinced, but then again I think that the cumbersome headgear and eye-strain inducing optics of HMDs still have some big hurdles to overcome before I’ll be strapping one to my head for a 3-hour gaming session.

(I have high hopes for the Oculus Rift HMD though. Please let it be as good as it sounds.)

[via Road to Virtual Reality]

If only telekinesis were a real thing, we wouldn’t need to resort to such cheap parlor tricks as sticking magnets inside our gloves, but unfortunately we live in the real world, and as far as I know, The Force doesn’t actually exist in our universe. But if you’ve been thinking about dressing up as Darth Vader this Halloween, and are looking for that finishing touch, then you might want to grab one of these.

This is the Darth Vader Force Glove – which is basically just a glove with couple of big-ass magnets in it. The glove comes with a couple of small magnetic  toys that you can practice your Force Push and Force Pull with. There’s a small cutout of some droids that you can push along your tabletop, as well as a tiny lightsaber you can pull towards your glove. It’s too bad it’s not strong enough to pull a can of beer out of the fridge and fling it across the room, though.

In addition to manipulating these little playthings, you could always use the glove for truly Dark-Sided tricks, like erasing your buddy’s ATM card, or wiping out the hard drive in their MacBook. Probably not a good idea to do either of those things if you don’t want them to chop off your hand with a lightsaber, though.

You can grab the Darth Vader Force Glove over at ThinkGeek for $19.99(USD).

If only the news of the day were as easy to digest as pictures of cats, we’d all be much better informed. That’s the idea behind Cheezburger Network founder Ben Huh’s latest creation, anyway. Meet Circa News, the streamlined future of your information diet. More »

Here’s some bad news if you’re a con and you want to keep up with your friends on the outside: if somebody sends you printed-out Facebook pages, they’ll get confiscated. The confirmation comes via Mark Nixon’s appeal, which was rejected by the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Mark Nixon, who is currently incarcerated in a medium-security prison in Pennsylvania, had accomplices send him printed Facebook pages. They were taken away, and he brought a civil rights case in Federal court. He lost, appealed, and then lost the appeal. (more…)

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