Hasta La Gadget!

Say it ain’t so! Within the next few weeks Microsoft will be phasing out its 250GB Xbox 360’s glossy finish in favor of the murdered-out matte currently found on its 4GB models. Major Nelson recently took to his blog announcing the news amid apparent speculation that the pricier variant would actually be offered in both flavors. If you’re a fan of shiny things — and a lover of fingerprints — Major says you’ll still have time to pick one up as stock is shuffled, and also noted there’ll probably be glossy limited editions in the future. Rest in peace dear glossy friend, our microfiber cloths won’t know what to do with them themselves.

Continue reading Xbox 360 to go forever matte as glossy is discontinued, fingerprints look for a new home

Xbox 360 to go forever matte as glossy is discontinued, fingerprints look for a new home originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s a little shocking to think about the impact that Microsoft’s Kinect camera has had on the gaming industry at large, let alone the 3D modeling industry. Here at SIGGRAPH 2011, we attended a KinectFusion research talk hosted by Microsoft, where a fascinating new look at real-time 3D reconstruction was detailed. To better appreciate what’s happening here, we’d actually encourage you to hop back and have a gander at our hands-on with PrimeSense’s raw motion sensing hardware from GDC 2010 — for those who’ve forgotten, that very hardware was finally outed as the guts behind what consumers simply know as “Kinect.” The breakthrough wasn’t in how it allowed gamers to control common software titles sans a joystick — the breakthrough was the price. The Kinect took 3D sensing to the mainstream, and moreover, allowed researchers to pick up a commodity product and go absolutely nuts. Turns out, that’s precisely what a smattering of highly intelligent blokes in the UK have done, and they’ve built a new method for reconstructing 3D scenes (read: real-life) in real-time by using a simple Xbox 360 peripheral.

The actual technobabble ran deep — not shocking given the academic nature of the conference — but the demos shown were nothing short of jaw-dropping. There’s no question that this methodology could be used to spark the next generation of gaming interaction and augmented reality, taking a user’s surroundings and making it a live part of the experience. Moreover, game design could be significantly impacted, with live scenes able to be acted out and stored in real-time rather than having to build something frame by frame within an application. According to the presenter, the tech that’s been created here can “extract surface geometry in real-time,” right down to the millimeter level. Of course, the Kinect’s camera and abilities are relatively limited when it comes to resolution; you won’t be building 1080p scenes with a $150 camera, but as CPUs and GPUs become more powerful, there’s nothing stopping this from scaling with the future. Have a peek at the links below if you’re interested in diving deeper — don’t be shocked if you can’t find the exit, though.

Microsoft’s KinectFusion research project offers real-time 3D reconstruction, wild AR possibilities originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on September 18, 2006 by CyberNet.

Just when you thought you were a mad gamer because you had a few different systems! The picture above is from Joystiq’s contest and this was the winner who had 32 systems and 21 of them are actually hooked up.

Instead of dumping the cash on a decent TV this gamer decides to put all of his money into video game systems and adding to his collection of games (looks like he has 568 right now). It also looks like he must be a little short on cash because there is no PSP…maybe it is just tucked behind one of his Atari’s.

So, who’s up for a little Virtual Boy?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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