Hasta La Gadget!

A very strange new study has been published by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that tries to link the behavior of gamers in the real world to the avatars they use on gaming services. The study took 194 undergrad students and got them to play a game where they were assigned one of three avatars. The avatars were either heroic (superman), villainous (Lord Voldemort), or neutral in the form of a circle.

After playing the game, the students participated in another study. In this study, the student had to taste and then give either chocolate or chili sauce to a future participant. The study showed that the players who were assigned the Superman avatar overwhelmingly chose to give future participants chocolate. On the other hand, the players assigned the evil avatar more often chose to give the chili sauce.

The study participants generally claimed equivalent levels of self-identification with heroic and villainous avatars, so they weren’t aware that the avatars were influencing their attitudes. Of course, correlation does not imply causation, so it could just be that the meaner people happened to be selected as Voldermorts.

[via C|NET via Business-Standard]

The scenes of Pandora in Avatar are still some of the most impressive naturalistic CGI worlds to ever grace the screen. Between the floating islands, the greenery, the waterfalls, and the exotic flora and fauna, it was really a visual spectacle. So when I saw that somebody had attempted to create the lush world of Pandora in their aquarium, I didn’t know if it could be done.

What you’re looking at here is an incredible recreation of the world of Pandora – inside a fish tank. It was created by a DIYer in China, and it replicates the lush green feel of the planet, albeit underwater.

Yeah, the plants look a little like floating broccoli, but the most impressive part of the tiny world is the waterfall effect – which I had no idea you could do underwater. Basically, it’s done with very fine sand being pumped into a trough and recirculated back to the top after it falls. Neat. Here’s a diagram which gives you an idea of how it works:

You can see more info on how to build underwater waterfalls here, but the site is in Chinese, so you’ll want to enable translation. Personally, I’d like it translated into Na’vi.

[via Reddit via The Grue]

James Cameron’s Avatar was definitely a watershed in showing off the potential of 3D movies at the box office, and most folks who watched it for the first time in their lives were blown away by the visuals. It was simply stunning, to say the least, with fantastic computer rendered special effects as well as a box office performance that broke records along the way. After other movie studios saw the insane success of Avatar in 3D, you could say that just about every other major motion picture that was released afterwards too, did tout the 3D feature as a selling point, although not many managed to use the effect to its fullest. Good news for those who cannot get enough of Avatar – 20th Century Fox and director James Cameron have announced plans that they intend to make Avatar a quadrilogy, which means another three more Avatar movies are in the pipeline, with the first to arrive sometime in December 2016. Hmmm, that would mean we would have completed the entire Hobbit screening by then.

As for Avatar 3 and Avatar 4, those should follow up in 2017 and 2018. WETA will still be behind the special effects, and we are excited to see what kind of new technological advancements will be incorporated into the other three Avatar movies. Do you think that the remainder of the quadrilogy is going to perform or bomb?

Like It , +1 , Tweet It , Pin It | Avatar Said To Get 3 More Sequels original content from Ubergizmo.

For folks who miss the colorful 3D world of giant blue people and/or want to see more Dances with Wolves movies, Avatar 2, 3 and 4 will come out in December 2016, 2017 and 2018. [Deadline]

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Unless you have loads of cash at your disposal or work for the federal government, chances are you haven’t heard of Robotex. The start-up, featured here at CES 2013’s Eureka Alley, specializes in creating automated solutions for a variety of security applications (think: SWAT busts, radiation level monitoring, etc.). Traditionally, these high-end robotic solutions carry a price tag in the tens of thousands, but starting this week, Robotex is targeting the consumer market with its Avatar. Set to retail for $299, the blue tank-like bot links up with iOS devices (an Android version’s coming in Q1) via USB to communicate with a companion app over Bluetooth 4.0 for remote monitoring. In its current incarnation, the Avatar doesn’t do much apart from offering telepresence — authenticated by the company’s servers — but the robot has been designed to be open source. To that end an SDK and HDK will be made available allowing tinkerers to craft up their own innovations. Unfortunately, due to the abundance of wireless signals here at the show, Robotex’s reps weren’t able to get the Avatar up and moving around the floor. But in a typical home environment, users should expect to get up to an hour and a half of “driving” time out of the robot. There’s no video of the Avatar in action, so instead, check out the gallery below.

Filed under: Misc, Software

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