On Monday, I had the opportunity to sit down for a chat about indie development with Exato Games co-founder John Getty. Getty, whose studio just released the voxel-based shooter Guncraft, was happy to share with me some of the insights he’s gained during his years as an independent developer.
I recently visited SYN Shop, a hackerspace located in downtown Las
Vegas. A hackerspace is a place where inventors and hobbyists, or simply
those eager to learn, can (for a small usually monthly fee) come and
use equipment, take classes and basically create.
At GDC 2013 towards the end of March, an organization known as Tactical Haptics revealed a rather revolutionary new piece of motion control technology. It’s called Reactive Grip, and combined with tech such as the Oculus Rift, it could very well revolutionize the way we game. Last week, I decided to track down Professor William Provancher, Reactive Grip’s inventor, for an interview about its creation and development.
If you’d like to learn a few tips and stellar advice from industry,
energy, design and other innovative juggernauts, be sure to attend the
Innovation Uncensored event in New York City April 23-24!
Big.Little technology allows a single processor to provide both high performance computing for tablets, yet also allow the kind of power saving capabilities that a low performance processor could provide. By using two sets of core, this may revolutionize tablets in the coming years.
Back from Belize, crazy-man extraordinaire John McAfee has settled down in Portland for the time being. And, of course, he’s still giving some characteristically insane interviews. Before he’s asserted that if he’s going to do drugs, they’re going to be good ones. Now, in an interview with Willamette Week, he’s extolling the virtues of sex with “ugly women.” In a conversation about money, no less. More »
Yes, we’re back in magical Las Vegas. And while it was tough getting it through airport security, for the second year in a row, we’ve brought our stage with us. Starting Tuesday, we’ll be spending the week talking tech with some of CES’s biggest and most innovative companies. You can lock into an on-going livestream of the week’s events after the break and check out a full schedule of interviews just below that (Note: All of the below times are listed in ET).
Continue reading Engadget’s CES 2013 stage schedule
Filed under: Announcements, Cellphones, Desktops, Cameras, Displays, Misc, Handhelds, Household, Laptops, Peripherals, Podcasts, Robots, Tablets, Transportation, Wearables, Wireless, Storage, Networking, Software, HD, Mobile
When I first saw this tiny gaming cabinet this morning, I was fascinated. Who was the creator, Sprite_tm, and why did he do such and excellent and thorough job of turning a tiny Rasberry Pi device into a little gaming cabinet? In short, how did he get inspired as a maker?
I sent him a few questions and he was kind enough to reply.
TC: I love the project. Why did you do it?
Jeroen: The intro to the article basically states that already: I had a Raspberry Pi and I wanted to get familiar to how it works. It’s a great tool to have in your toolbox: need a powerful controller running a standard OS for your robot / Internet-controlled doorbell / Twitter-based death ray? Just get one of these for a few quid. Knowing how they work means I can put them to work much faster the next time, which may come in handy if I actually try to make something useful.
TC: Who are you?
J: I’m Jeroen Domburg, nickname Sprite_tm. I’m a 30-year old software/hardware guy from the east of the Netherlands. I’ve been fiddling with electronics all my life and when I studied electronic engineering, I decided my projects should get a site of their own. That site became Spritesmods.com and I’ve been adding projects to it since. In real life, I have a job as a software engineer at a broadcast equipment manufacturer.
TC: What was the most difficult part?
J: I thought it would be designing the case; I’ve never designed something to be lasercut before, and immediately trying a ‘weird’ shape instead of a cube to try it on meant I’d have to learn about quite a few things. In the end, it did take up a lot of time to make sure I got everything right, but the process itself wasn’t as complex as I thought.
The most difficult part probably was the LiIon circuitry. Not only because the design itself is tricky (some components have two or three separate functions, making it hard to not break function A when you want to modify function B) but also because LiIon-batteries have the nasty habit of going ‘boom’ when you mis-treat them. It took some time and calculation to convince myself it was actually going to work OK all the time, and even if one part doesn’t do its job, I still won’t have an explosion on my hands.
TC: How did you start hacking?
J: I don’t know why I started it, mostly because I was probably too young to remember. It’s always been a hobby of mine, even in my childhood I’ve been tearing apart stuff to see how it works. I’ve never made hacking in itself my daytime job, although I’ve always been trying to get some overlap: hacking and electronic and software engineering go well with each other ofcourse.
TC: What’s your advice for folks trying to hack their own Raspberry Pi projects?
J: Just dive into it! Raspberry Pi’s are cheap as chips, and the community supporting it isn’t half bad. So, if you have an idea, just get one, read up on whatever you’re going to need and just try to make it work.
TC: Easy for you to say. What’s your favorite arcade game?
J: From a technical point of view, I really like the vector arcade games. It’s awesome to read the engineers had to almost build their own secondary CPU from scratch to get the vectors working, not to speak of the analog mess involved. I actually built one myself – Black Widow – just to see if I could do it.
Just to play, I have a soft spot for Dragon Saber. I ran into one of those on a holiday, and fell in love with the levels and especially the music. I also like Outrun, I was addicted to the PC-version when I was young and the arcade version is even better.
Blackberry’s future is the tech debate du jour, with pundits on either side promising either a BB10 renaissance or a slow-motion tailspin. While the jury was still out, we had a few moments to speak with RIM CEO Thorsten Heins about RIM’s way forward and where BB10 was going to put the company when it launches.
He was unsurprisingly forthright and more than accommodating even when we asked him the questions any BB fan would ask today: Why should I buy a new Blackberry device?
TC: In this interview we wanted to see what was in store for the consumer, what RIM is doing to maintain the energy that a lot of the BlackBerry users currently have, especially at work or in academia. What do you see as the best way forward for those folks?
Thorsten Heins: What we are doing right now is, if you look at the installed base, specifically in enterprise, corporate and consumers worldwide, there is still a lot of phones running BlackBerry 5, mainly in Asia-Pacific. So we are still working on a program to upgrade the installed base to BlackBerry 7, which from today’s view and perspective still is competitive, and I think an exciting platform.
So we are absolutely working on our consumer and enterprise base to get us to BlackBerry 7, which is a real upgraded experience compared to 5 and 6, and to a certain extent also 6. That’s the first thing we are doing.
Second is we are working on the BB10 platform to be launched in the first quarter next year. And this is not, as I said, based on a QWERTY device, which is a device type we dominate today. This will get us back into the full touch game, and this is where we will fight hard in the U.S. to regain market share and convince consumers that, well, BlackBerry is not just a great platform for productivity or for business people; it’s a great platform for consumers as well.
We will specifically talk to those consumers that are constantly on the move or need to stay ahead and introduce them to BB10. Given the ease of adoptions for this platform it will be a great gaming experience, a great media experience, and a great content experience.
TC: It seems like BlackBerry itself has always been very specific about the email side of things. Is your vision to bring the company into more direct competition with the iOS/Android situation, or is email still paramount?
Heins: The way I look at this is that email certainly is a core element of BlackBerry, but I would put a bigger frame around this. I think this is about being extremely socially connected.
In today’s world, email is not the only way to communicate anymore: it is Twittering, Facebook, BBMing, and other means of social communication networking.
So what it really is about, I think, is to put a different frame around it and say “We keep you extremely well-connected through your various communication channels and we are making it really easy to deal with and to manage and to respond to notifications.”
TC: In terms of BB10, are you at all concerned that the time involved in releasing this update is going to affect things negatively, and especially with 7-inch iPad rumors swirling?
Heins: First, those are rumors. But as for BB10 I think this is not just a product launch, this is a whole new platform launch with a really new BlackBerry experience. So from that perspective, am I to a certain extent disappointed that we have that delay in BlackBerry 10? Yes, I would say yes.
But on the other side, I just want this to be the best user experience, the best compelling quality that people see on a BlackBerry, and I will not sacrifice this. I just want this experience to be fantastic. And that’s what we are working towards.
So knowing what we are building our BlackBerry 10 on, the product, the capabilities, the empowerment it actually gives to the people that use it, I have no concerns about our success. We will be successful.
Also if you look at the channels that we are serving, basically through the carriers, they see not just the risk anymore, I think they see reality coming that there’s a duopoly of suppliers they can work with and that they can source from right now.
They have a huge installed base of BlackBerry customers out there, they want to protect that installed base. They want them to be successful too. We get a lot of endorsement from carriers and the carrier partners globally on BlackBerry 10. So I am confident that we will make a good appearance in the rest of the world, but I am also confident that we are actually in a position to fight back in the U.S. based on the BlackBerry 10 portfolio.
TC: I guess it seems like people need a pep talk. So what would you say to the folks who say, “RIM isn’t thinking about us specifically, us early adopters, us hardcore BB users, we haven’t put down our BlackBerry since the late 90s.” What will you say to them?
Heins: The pep talk is that we will continue to make the people that use a BlackBerry successful. That is really the DNA. It just allowed people to manage their life and have a very comfortable way of communicating. And with BlackBerry 10, we will take this to a whole new level.
It’s not just about you communicating with somebody else; it’s about actually communicating with the whole network around you. So the strength in this whole social network and the strength is also in other elements that are not particularly BlackBerry elements, like gaming, because the platform supports it. We will not develop our own games, but the platform we are building allows game developers to program and to deliver really fantastic-performing games.
I myself, I use PlayBook a lot to play racing games because I can look at PlayBook from a performance perspective and say, with the highest rendering requirement, with the highest load on the graphic unit, is it a good performance, is it a good experience? And it is.
TC: And how many BlackBerrys do you carry around with you?
Heins: I have a PlayBook I use for work. I have a PlayBook that I use privately. I am on a 9900 right now. And I am using a kind of an ultra device for L-series right now, for BB10.
TC: You don’t have a secret Google Galaxy Nexus hidden in there somewhere?
Heins: What I always do is try be connected with the industry and know what’s going on there. I always have competitive devices on my desk that I check out that I work with, just to really understand what’s going on. I think this is just a good way of understanding what the industry is and where it’s headed. So we constantly do this.
Most talk of a Nokia Lumia for Verizon has been relegated to small-scale rumors and incidental CDMA references. Nokia’s Worldwide Developer Relations head Richard Kerris has rather suddenly brought the elusive subject into focus through an interview: he tells Neowin that it “won’t be long” before the can-you-hear-me-now network gets a taste of an experience that has previously been limited to the GSM side of the US telecom world, like AT&T and T-Mobile. We’re not getting a roadmap for any Verizon devices just yet, to no one’s surprise, but Kerris is more than willing to share when we can expect the next wave of Nokia devices. We should expect a refresh of the line sometime in the fall, and whatever’s arriving in the spring will purportedly be good enough to have people “climbing over themselves” to get it — just in case Nokia’s role as a Windows Phone 8 partner for the fall launch and beyond wasn’t clear enough. The question-and-answer session touches on a handful of other subjects, including a hint that the near-mythical Windows Phone with PureView may be a bit closer to reality, so click on through if you’d like a peek at where the Lumia is headed next.
Nokia: it ‘won’t be long’ before Verizon gets its due, and we’ll have more gear in the fall originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Jul 2012 10:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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