Items tagged with reality
Nearly a decade ago, it was smartphones. A few years ago, it was tablets. These days, it's all about 3D printing and Augmented Reality, as evidenced by the availability of the former in conventional shops such as Staples, and the multi-billion dollar purchase of Oculus by Facebook in the case of the latter. Qualcomm has toyed around with emerging technologies for quite some time while still pumping out silicon that slips inside of many of the world's mobile devices. While its smartwatch didn't ever reach beyond an experiment, we suspect that Vuforia will be something it presses on for a while. As AR takes hold and begins to seep into the mainstream, Qualcomm has announced a new SDK for Digital...
Read more...
It's hard to believe that Nintendo was so, so incredibly far ahead of the curve on this one. While the Virtual Boy was a failure by practically every known metric, face-worn devices that look awfully similar to it are becoming all of the rage these days. Oculus just sold itself to Facebook for $2 billion, and plenty of other companies are racing to out devices of their own that look just as goofy. Plus, the 3DTV experiment just wrapped up. The results? People hate the idea of wearing glasses to enjoy content. So why is this different? It's tough to say, really, but GameFace is sure taking advantage of the momentum. The company is presently trotting out a working Virtual Reality headset that bests...
Read more...
It has been a while since we’ve had anything to report on the Sony/Digital Video Distribution front, but it looks like it’s almost a reality.According to sources the long-awaited feature is nearly available. For their part Sony is, of course, keeping quiet. This could be due to negotiations or the fact that the service may not be quite ready from a technical and/or infrastructure standpoint."We don't have anything new to announce at this time," Sony spokesman Patrick Seybold said in an e-mail.But a Sony marketing executive said in a blog post last week that news could come soon."Ultimately the goal of the PlayStation Network service will be to break through the overwhelming clutter of digital...
Read more...
What is Net Neutrality and why should everyone care? It's the basic concept that data should get from where it starts to where it's going without any discrimination based on the type of data or its content. But how does a non-neutral 'net impact you?In short, it limits your options to potentially be 'wowed' by new technologies and services before they can even get a foothold. For instance, Comcast has set up throttles for BitTorrent traffic that more or less kill BT traffic except in a few cases such as World Of Warcraft patchers. So companies that rely on BT to distribute legitimate video content might never make it to a consumer's PC, if they use Comcast. Of course...
Read more...
We've all heard of bits and bytes. Ever hear of a qubit? So it goes like this. Bits, as we traditionally know them, are either in a 1 or 0 state. Right, well, a qubit exists in a quantum state. So for example, it can be either 1 or 0 or both or somewhere in between. This is the crux of quantum computing. Sufficiently confused? What if we told you a quantum computer or a system built with a quantum computing 16 qubit engine could carry out 64,000 calculations simultaneously in parallel universes? Oh and a machine built with a hundreds of qubits processing engine could calculate more operations than there are atoms in the universe......
Read more...
Hello everyone! I hope you're all having a good weekend so far. I was gearing up for some benchmarking and writing, and thought I'd poke around the web for something fun before getting down to business. I stumbled across a couple of videos at YouTube that I just had to share. I'm probably showing my age a bit, but I don't care! I've always been a proud geek; not about to get shy now. :) Anyway, how many of you remember BitBoys Oy? They were working on the "Glaze3D" 3D accelerator which never materialized back in the days when 3dfx was on top. And more recently were acquired by ATI for their expertise in mobile graphics. Well, some of...
Read more...
The folks over at Ageia have informed us that they have just released their new RealityMark physics benchmark utility. Based on the highly popular CellFactor technology demo we utilized in our initial review of the Ageia PhysX card, the benchmark runs through a timedemo of sorts which is run both with and without the discrete PPU enabled. This provides the user with a very clear understanding of what performance gains the Ageia PhysX card is providing for their system. For those early adopters of PhysX cards which are still waiting for developers to utilize the power of their hardware, this benchmark is surely a necessary download. AGEIA RealityMarkTM is a new tool which demonstrates the...
Read more...
QUAD NVIDIA SLI TECHNOLOGY MAKES EXTREME HD GAMING A REALITY FOR THE DO-IT-YOURSELF CROWD SANTA CLARA, CA - AUGUST 9, 2006 - NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor technologies, has made extreme high-definition PC gaming a reality for everyone with the release of the new NVIDIA ForceWare 91.45 graphics driver with Quad NVIDIA SLI technology support. For the first time, users in the do-it yourself (DIY) segment have access to Quad SLI technology, which utilizes the power of four GPUs to make extreme high-definition gaming (XHD) - with resolutions of up to 2560 x1600 - a possibility for hardcore gamers and computer enthusiasts. Enthusiasts can...
Read more...
The crew at Phoronix is investigating the benefits of using SMP with the latest v1.2.1 patch for Quake 4 under Linux. They didn't have much luck though. Our experience in a Windows environment was much more positive, however. In CPU-bound situations, enabling SMP with Q4 under Windows resulted in some significant performance gains. "Released earlier today was the Quake 4 v1.2.1 point release patch. The major feature to come down the pipeline in Quake 4 v1.2.1 is Hyper-Threading Technology and dual-core support for the Linux binaries. With Quake 4 now supporting Hyper-Threading and dual-core processors, players should expect...
Read more...
