Augmented Planet has compiled a 2-part list (part1, part 2) of Augmented Reality concept games. None of the games on the list are publicly available yet, but it’s a great selection. Many of the games on the list we’ve covered before like Ahrrr. So go check it out, and then make sure to browse the full list of Augmented Reality News here on VizWorld.
Top 10 Augmented Reality Concept Games – Part 2 | AugmentedPlanet.
Bungee’s Halo 3 : ODST (Orbital Drop Ship Troopers) has a fantastic commercial done by Asylum showing a tear-jerking scene of a warrior’s return home in a casket, and his rise from nobody through boot camp and into the front-lines. Digital Arts talks to Asylum’s Rob Moggach about the project:
“Our biggest challenge with this project was time. We had just under three weeks from when we received 2K plates to finish the 2:30 film. Integration with the almost entirely hand-held, motion-blurred footage proved to be the next biggest challenge.
“In the end we used a lot of brute-force visual effects to get the job done quickly instead of devising any complex revolutionary technique. We did make use of the Flame’s 3D capabilities for doing the reflective visor replacements but the rest of the work can be attributed to just pushing hard until the image looked right.”
See the commercial after the break.
A new product breakdown in the Autodesk Area discusses how several Autodesk products were instruments in bringing the 2D world of Street Fighter IV into 3D.
When developing the texture of the graphics, the team created a real-time shader based on a mental ray® software image prototype they developed on the Autodesk Softimage Render Tree and FX Tree. FX Tree is a 2D compositing feature which the team said was helpful not only for compositing with backgrounds, but also for material compositing with shader elements. A shader prototype was created on Render Tree using a graphical user interface (GUI). This enabled the designers and programmers to operate with the same mindset, meaning that instructions for graphic processing, which usually tend to become abstract, could be communicated more clearly between them.
At the Technology Review EmTech Conference at MID, Steve Perlman spent some time demonstrating the OnLive gaming service live in front of the audience and discussing some of the technology they use.
Perlman was willing to talk briefly about the hardware that powers things at the server level. The basic functional unit is a standard PC motherboard. Casual games get by on built-in video, while they’ll be using motherboards with high end hardware from NVIDIA and AMD for the current generation of games. The only custom hardware is a single add-on board that handles both compressing the video for transmission to the end users and smoothing over the inevitable network hiccups.
via Cloud gaming service OnLive shines at MIT conference – Ars Technica.
GDC China is rapidly approaching, only a few weeks away, and the speakers have been announced and it’s a great list of experts in Game Design and Art from all of the major studios.
Chris Hecker will be presenting a session on the challenges and meaning of user-generated content in Spore, Colt McAnlis of Blizzard will be addressing the technical challenges of generating and affixing art to the massive terrains of World of Warcraft, and Tobias Dahl and Mikael Lagre of Dice EA will discuss the unique task of creating a robust perspective for Mirror’s Edge, a game emphasizing fluid first-person movement and perspective. Professionals from Activision, Take Two Asia, Volition and Ubisoft Chengdu will be among the full roster of speakers presenting varied and informative talks.
Headlining the solid roster of speakers is Jordan Mechner, the accomplished game designer, programmer, screenwriter, and creator of Prince of Persia who will be providing a keynote lecture titled “Prince of Persia: 20 Years From Game to Film.” The list of featured speakers at GDC China includes:
AMD’s on a roll, now up with a powerful demonstration of the combined potential of their new GPU architecture and the OTOY remote gaming service.
While AMD gave a number of very impressive demos of their next-generation DirectX 11 part (detailed technical discussion to follow later this month), OTOY’s demo of Crysis running on an iPhone was probably the most profoundly intriguing use of AMD’s upcoming GPU that I saw all evening.
Ok, I know that 90 percent of you just did a double-take—Crysis, the standard gaming benchmark for high-end 3D hardware, running on a next-gen GPU on an iPhone? Let me explain.
Remote visualization services are very similar to this new generation of remote gaming services (Gaikai, OnLive, OTOY), and I look forward to the cross-pollenation of data between them. Getting my 2 Terabyte dataset back to my PC at 60fps remotely would be awesome.
via AMD’s next-gen GPU powers Crysis on an iPhone – Ars Technica.
First OnLive, and now Gaikai have entered limited betas. While OnLive is targeting the US first, Gaikai is heading for Europe.
“Gaikai is all about reaching a massive audience, so we are embracing Europe right away.”
Europe first, America next.
“After we choose the hardware configuration in Europe, our next phase will be our USA Nationwide Network Test, that will be using 8 Tier-1 Data Centers, getting hammered by Closed Beta testers,” Perry added.
The signup form is already online, but already 30,000 people have signed up.
via VG247 » Blog Archive » Gaikai closed beta to launch in Europe “later this month”.
Via the OnLive Blog, they’ve just announced that they’ve pushed the service into beta and are letting real people log in and try out games. The purpose: gathering data on network latencies, speeds, and general bugfixes.
One of the key challenges that OnLive technology addresses is providing a high-quality, fast-response gaming experience over a wide range of situations: different speeds/locations/types of broadband services, a variety of different PC and Mac configurations, several kinds of input and display devices, etc. So, a major focus of OnLive Beta is to test as many of these different situations as we can
If you don’t recall what OnLive is, you can read our previous coverage of their impressive web-based remote-gaming technology via our OnLive tag.
Sucker Punch Productions’ ‘inFamous” for the Playstation 3 is out and getting rave reviews for not only the complex storytelling, but the amazing graphics. CGSociety takes an in-depth look at some of the technology behind the game.
inFamous uses an outstanding real-time rendering system which results in the solid frame-rate that moves at a very consistent pace and will very rarely chop. Given the right circumstance, the game will actually run at a perfect 60 frames per second for a short time provided that the camera is not viewing a part of the game with heavy polygon geometry. The camera is freely controlled with the right stick and normally never presents a problem but every now and again will decide to have a mind of it’s own.
So you work for a wildly successful video game company. You’ve had a good run, but finally just feel the need to do something else. No ordinary resignation will do, so what do you do? Tap into your natural assets, and make a game.
That’s exactly what Ubisoft developer William David did with his game ‘Leaving’, to explain the whole move with both literal & subliminal means (“You can’t go back”), and put the whole thing to Frank Sinatra’s “You can’t take that away from me.”.
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