Posts Tagged ‘playstation’

If you just can’t wait until October to see Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe star in the PS3 game Beyond: Two Souls , there’s some good news, as 35 minutes of game video has been released. The footage was revealed as part of a two hour-long panel at the Tribeca Film Festival, which featured both Page and game director David Cage. According to the PlayStation blog , the scene was chosen carefully “to avoid many of the major, major spoilers” in the game, though if you want to go into the experience completely fresh you should probably avoid clicking play (if you’re wary of spoilers you can check out the brand new cinematic trailer instead). For the rest of us, it’s a great chance to see just how well the game manages to blend the worlds of film..

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Watch 35 minutes of Ellen Page in ‘Beyond: Two Souls’

The PlayStation Vita was released in North America one year ago today. A little earlier, I’d given the system a glowing review upon its Japanese launch, and what I wrote holds true: the hardware is still fantastic, the screen is still beautiful, and there’s still no better platform for playing games on the go. In theory. In practice, things haven’t quite worked out that way.

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Life support: can Sony save the PlayStation Vita?

Monkeys are controlling bipedal, walking robots thousands of miles away using only their minds. Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroprosthetics researcher at Duke University, has been working for years on the interface between brain signals and electronics, and in 2003, was able to get his rhesus monkey Aurora to accurately control a robotic arm with her brain. “Aurora realized that she didn’t need to move anymore, she could just imagine the movements and this interface… was able to enact her will,” he explained to Scientific American . In Nicolelis’s more recent experiments, signals from the brain of a monkey walking on a treadmill were used in the same way to control a robot in Japan, while it watched video footage of the walking robot in… Continue reading…

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Monkey mentally controls robot 7,000 miles away

A month after North Korea started allowing foreign tourists to use cellphones within its borders, the country has given the go-ahead to a move with far broader implications: for the first time, it will enable access to the internet via mobile data. The 3G network won’t be available to ordinary North Korean citizens, but the AP reports carrier Koryolink informed foreign residents that the service will be offered no later than March 1st. It’s unclear Following his recent visit to the country, Google chairman Eric Schmidt noted that it would be “very easy” for North Korea to offer mobile internet access to its citizens. It’s unclear what restrictions will be placed on the service, and the country is unlikely to grant North Koreans wide… Continue reading…

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North Korea to switch on 3G internet access for foreigners within a week

Last year PayPal took on Square in the mobile payments arena with the introduction of PayPal Here — and now it’s bringing the service to Europe , albeit with some different hardware. The original PayPal Here uses a triangle-shaped attachment that hooks up to a merchant’s iPhone or Android device, allowing them to scan the magnetic strip on a customer’s credit card. For the international deployment, however, the company is using a separate scanning device — roughly the same size as a smartphone — that connects via Bluetooth to a merchant’s smartphone. It’s designed to work in concert with the more rigid set of rules and guidelines in places for such transactions in Europe; in the UK, the system is branded as “Chip and PIN.” That..

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PayPal Here mobile payment system coming to Europe with new hardware

Several security analysts issued warnings today that hackers were distributing malware from the website of NBC, one of the top four TV networks. Brian Krebs, a former Washington Post reporter and well-known internet security expert who writes the blog Krebs on Security , told The Verge that the hackers inserted code into the NBC.com homepage. This caused visiting browsers to load pages from third-party sites that were compromised. “The compromised sites tried to foist the Citadel Trojan, a variant of the Zeus Trojan,” Krebs said

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Hackers exploit NBC.com to spread malware

Movie- and TV-aggregating service Fanhattan has already made a name for itself with an iOS app that lets users categorize and find content across the wide variety of iOS entertainment apps out there, and now the service is moving that functionality to your web browser. The company is now sending out invites to the beta of Fanhattan on the web, a service that essentially mirrors the functionality of iOS app, but offers a total of 29 streaming video providers like Hulu, Amazon, NBC, and Netflix (compared to the 16 in the app), which means there’s nearly three times more content available to those using Fanhattan in the browser. Aside from the greater content selection, the experience of using Fanhattan in the browser is largely the same… Continue reading…

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Fanhattan’s video-aggregating service expands beyond iOS with new web-based interface

Snapchat has moved its Android app video capture and sharing feature out of beta and into full release in the Google Play Store. The video feature is available as an update for the regular Snapchat app, which works for Android versions 2.2 and up. The move comes after Snapchat first started letting some Android users test out the ability to send self-destructing timed videos last week, but almost three months after the same feature came to the iOS app . In a blog post, Snapchat explains that it had some trouble when porting video over to Android: The Android phones that many of us use were never designed with Snapchat in mind, and that can be tough when developing a hardware-based application. The video feeds and playback behavior can..

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Snapchat video for Android exits beta, now available in Play Store

We still have absolutely no idea what the PlayStation 4 looks like , but we’re getting a better picture of what’s within: Sony’s just released a list of tech specs for the console. Confirming months of rumors, the PS4 will primarily have AMD silicon inside, in the form of a “single-chip custom processor” with eight AMD Jaguar CPU cores, and a next-gen Radeon graphics engine capable of 1.84 teraflops of performance. Here’s the full spec sheet: Single-chip custom processor, with eight x86-64 AMD Jaguar CPU cores and 1.84 TFLOPS next-gen AMD Radeon based graphics engine 8GB GDDR5 memory Built-in hard drive 6x Blu-Ray and 8x DVD drive USB 3.0 and auxiliary ports Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.1 HDMI, analog…

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PlayStation 4 tech specs revealed: AMD ‘Jaguar’ CPU, faster Blu-ray, 720p 3D camera

A missing mural by renowned street artist Banksy has re-emerged for sale in an online auction, and neighborhood residents are understandably outraged. The mural, which depicts a young boy toiling over a sewing machine making Union Jack textiles, was discovered last year on the wall of a Poundland discount shop in the Wood Green neighborhood of London. Residents noticed scaffolding and tarps surrounding the artwork last Wednesday, and by Friday only a hole in the wall remained. A few days later, the work was listed for sale by a dealer in Miami on an online auction site, with an estimated value between $500,000 and $700,000. The piece was widely interpreted to be a critique of child labor, believed to have a part in producing many of…

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Banksy ‘child labor’ mural torn from London shop wall, surfaces in US auction

Status Symbols are devices that transcend their specs and features, and become something beautiful and luxurious in their own right. They’re things that live on after the megapixel and megahertz wars move past them, beacons of timeless design and innovation. Continue reading…

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Status Symbols: devices that transcend time

Last June, Sony purchased Gaikai , a company that can stream games — delivering them over the internet in real time from remote servers, by sending their compressed video frames. Now, The Wall Street Journal reports what many have suspected for months: the next PlayStation will use the service to stream games to the console. However, according to the publication, Sony won’t necessarily use Gaikai to deliver brand-new games. Those will still be delivered on optical disc. Instead, the next PlayStation will bring existing PlayStation 3 titles to the new system using streaming technology.

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PlayStation 4 will stream PS3 games, reports WSJ

You love Star Trek . You love Benedict Cumberbatch. And you’ll love this new teaser for J.J.

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Super Bowl ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ trailer shows off a lot more Cumberbatch

Later today most Americans will be huddled around their televisions, watching the 49ers take on the Ravens in Super Bowl XLVII. But if for some reason you aren’t able to watch it on the big screen, just like last year there are still ways to check out the game online. CBS Sports is offering a free stream of the game from its website , and it comes with a few benefits: including both on-demand commercials and the ability to switch between 22 different camera angles. And if your laptop is out of reach, the game will also be available via the NFL’s mobile app on both iOS and Android, though you’ll need an NFL Game Pass subscription in order to watch. Whether you end up watching it from your smartphone or from space , the game will be kicking…

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How to watch Super Bowl XLVII online

With February 9th quickly approaching , it won’t be long before you’ll be able to buy a Surface Pro of your own. But if you want to try before you buy, it looks like select retail stores are getting demo units ahead of the release date, starting today. That’s according to reports from both Engadget and WinSuperSite , but unfortunately it’s not clear exactly which stores will be receiving the units, though the device will likely be on sale at Best Buy, Staples, and Microsoft Stores, much like the Surface RT . The 64GB Surface Pro will be available for $899 when it launches in both the US and Canada later this month — be sure to check out our in-depth impressions of the device from CES 2013 in January. Continue reading…

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Surface Pro demo units reportedly available in select stores ahead of launch

Statistician Nate Silver knows numbers, and in a piece in the New York Times he’s decided to put that skill to excellent use — predicting the Super Bowl. Historically it’s great defensive teams that have a better record in the big game, but in the case of this year’s Super Bowl the San Francisco 49ers happen to be statistically better than the Baltimore Ravens on both sides of the ball. “There isn’t much to recommend the Ravens,” Silver writes, though he points out that Baltimore is superior when it comes to special teams. Check out the piece in full to see his methods, and then watch the game later today to see how his prediction pans out — and be sure to stick around for the commercials . Continue reading…

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Nate Silver uses numbers to predict the Super Bowl

Museums can be overwhelming — often, there’s simply so much to see that it’s hard to properly interact with each piece you come across. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is looking to change that with 82nd and Fifth , a new web series aimed at teaching you why 100 different pieces from the museum matter. In each episode museum curators examine one work — whether it’s an Antonio Rossellino painting or a room designed by Frank Lloyd Wright — and spend two minutes or so explaining why it’s important and how it has influenced their view of the world. Each episode also comes coupled with an interactive feature, letting you explore the work in a different way, like a 3D model of “Madonna and Child” that can be viewed from… Continue reading…

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Learn why art matters with The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new web series

Our very own Paul Miller told you how StarCraft changed his life (and more recently, how much he’s been missing the game ), but you couldn’t ask for a better primer to the competitive video game subculture than PBS Off Book’s latest episode. In “The Rise of Competitive Gaming and E-Sports,” our favorite new YouTube series traces the roots of today’s most popular multiplayer titles back to the arcades, accessibly explains the four most popular genres (shooter, real-time strategy, MOBAs, and fighting games) and — through testimonial and loads of footage — gives you a rough idea of what it looks and feels like to be part of the video game tournament scene. Watch it below. Continue reading…

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Watch this: PBS ‘Off Book’ explores the world of competitive video games

In a talk earlier this week at the University of Texas, Valve founder Gabe Newell explained that many of the economic, content distribution, and piracy issues being encountered in the video game realm today will probably apply to “a much wider range of industries” in the near future. Newell also discussed Valve’s history, its unique lack of organizational structure, and the company’s underlying values in the wide-ranging talk, Polygon reports. Valve wasn’t always the gaming powerhouse it is today — in fact, when Newell and co-founder Mike Harrington were first hiring, many developers turned the pair down. Newell said, “We were like ‘Let’s go, let’s storm the castle!’ And then it was like, ‘Where’d everybody go?’” Through a combination…

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Gabe Newell discusses Valve’s history, gaming economics, and hats

Last night’s episode of Conan was a monumental moment for late night television. In an experiment dubbed “Occupy Conan,” the host stepped aside and gave his loyal fans control of the show. Working with a provided script, members of Team Coco — the nickname bestowed upon Conan O’Brien’s avid fan base — were tasked with recreating the episode using anything at their disposal. Hundreds of videos were submitted, according to O’Brien, as fans (and more than a few celebrities) took on the role of talk show host for a day. We’ll leave it to you to decide whether Occupy Conan was ultimately a success, flop, or something in between.

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Fans occupy ‘Conan’ in crowdsourced episode of late-night talk show

We didn’t expect to see HTC’s rumored flagship phone , the M7, until the company’s press event on February 19th , but it looks like company CEO Peter Chou just couldn’t wait any longer. After chants of “HTC! HTC! M7! M7!” at the firm’s year end party today in Taipei, the CEO took the rumored 4.7-inch Android device out on stage to test its camera. There aren’t any up-close photos of the device (above is about as good as it gets), but Chinese site cnYES reports that both a silver and black version of the phone were revealed on stage.

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HTC M7 briefly revealed on stage by excited CEO Peter Chou at company’s year end party

When you drive that Honda Civic in Gran Turismo, a small portion of the money you paid for the privilege goes to the car manufacturer. As Eurogamer’s Simon Parkin points out, the same is true when you use a Heckler & Koch M8A1 assault rifle in Black Ops 2. “We must be paid a royalty fee,” says a spokesperson for gun manufacturer Barrett, “either a one-time payment or a percentage of sales.” In a detailed look at the industry’s practices , Parkin examines the historic links between video game publishers and arms manufacturers, and questions the need for licensed weapons at all, especially considering the ongoing debate on gun violence.

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How video game purchases help fund gun makers

Sony is starting pre-orders in the UK for its upcoming flagship Android handset, the Xperia Z. First unveiled at CES last month, the Xperia Z has a 5-inch 1080p display, Android 4.1, and is powered by Qualcomm’s 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro quad-core processor. Pricing, in the UK at least, seems in line with other handsets, with Three selling the phone at £449.99 without a contract, and O2 offering it for free with a pricey two-year agreement. At launch, it’ll be available in white, black, and purple, although the purple edition is an exclusive for O2 customers

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Sony UK bundles $299.99 headphones with Xperia Z pre-orders

Proponents of online education have long branded it as a way to bring free knowledge to the masses, but in a thought-provoking piece for The Awl , Maria Bustillos argues that the rise of so-called massively open online courses (MOOCs) may not bode well for the quality of higher education. As Bustillos points out, online programs are being rapidly adopted at colleges across the US , where tight budgets and overcrowding are forcing some lawmakers to look for alternatives, but profit-driven interests from startups like Udacity are threatening to dilute the “techno-utopian ideal” that MOOCs once promised with derivative facsimiles of a college education. “[P]ublic money has been mercilessly hacked from California’s education budget for… Continue reading…

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The false promise of online education

The sight of blue and yellow blobs crashing into a slow-motion explosion of green on your screen is usually entertaining enough in itself, but how about cranking up its resolution to a mighty 4096 x 2304? That’s what Jacob Schwarz has done, with the help of a RED Epic camera, a Canon 100mm macro lens, and Adobe’s Premiere CS6 software. Together with his partner Katie Schwarz, Jacob has put together three minutes of stunningly detailed footage of ink drops diluting and intermingling in water. Admittedly, you’re unlikely to be able to appreciate its full beauty, given the still scarce availability of affordable 4K displays , but that’s a classic chicken and egg issue: the more awesome content we have to watch like this, the more we’ll feel..

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Watch this: the arresting power of ultra high definition ink drops