AirBeats / AirHarp creator demos his forthcoming Leap Motion music apps

When it comes to developing music apps, Leap Motion's naturalistic interface seems like a no-brainer. Sure it doesn't offer the sort of tactile feedback you get from an actual instrument, but it certainly beats the heck out of, say, a keyboard and mouse. Adam Somers is among the early developers looking to bring a little bit of music magic to the tiny peripheral, and he gave us a sneak peak of what he's working on at a Smule event in San Francisco earlier this week.

The simpler of the two apps is AirHarp. Still in early developer preview mode, the program is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a virtual harp. Hold your hand out and strings light up -- tap down and you can pluck them. Reach in a bit and you can strum with one or several fingers. More impressive is AirBeats, a virtual machine with two pads and a slew of sounds that lets you record tracks. Somers is hoping to have at least one of the apps out in time for Leap Motion's upcoming launch. You can check out demos after the break.

Source: Stanford

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By: Unknown On 9:13 PM

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Heavy Rain creator details the difficulties of game engines and what he hopes the future holds

2/11/2013 7:59PM by Ben Gilbert

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Heavy Rain development studio Quantic Dream is notorious for long development times. The studio's also notorious for critically-loved games with strong cinematic cores, and games that often look very different from the competition. Part of that is game design, but another major piece of the puzzle is the engines driving those games -- each game that Quantic Dream makes is built in a unique game engine, which is both very expensive and very time-consuming. The studio's founder and lead, David Cage, explained as much to us in an interview at DICE 2013.

"Quantic Dream is a very special company in the sense that we do a lot of things that wouldn't make any sense in any other company. We haven't done any sequels so far, we work on new IPs each time. And we pretty much develop a new engine each time we develop a new game."

But Cage doesn't harbor much love for that last part -- the game engine bit. He says that his studio opted out of the current console generation's game engine of choice (Unreal Engine 3) because, "we work with Sony, [and] we want to create the best technology for the hardware and see how far we can go." As a result, even Cage's latest work (Beyond: Two Souls) is crafted in a new engine -- the same one used to build the Kara demo we saw last March -- intended to show off the PlayStation 3's late-generation graphical and processing chops. Yes, even with the next PlayStation (codenamed "Orbis") waiting in the wings, his second-party Sony studio is still showing off the aging PS3's prowess. Beyond: Two Souls is more than just a showpiece, of course, with Quantic Dream employing actress Ellen Page to motion performance-capture the game's main character, and the same emphasis on storytelling the studio's practiced previously. Still, Cage hopes for a future where technology isn't something he and his studio need be concerned with.

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"I just hope that we'll really see a technology covering all the needs of all the studios, which means -- just like in cinema -- no matter what is the film you make, there is a technology so you can film this. Whether you make an action blockbuster, or a comedy, or a drama, you've got the right camera and all the right technology to do it. In games it's not the same yet, and I would like to see technologies dealing with cameras the way we do, dealing with bouquet, dealing with performance capture, with lighting, with all this stuff the way we do. And when it happens, we'll stop developing tech and we'll just focus on content."

Cage gave a talk at DICE 2013 titled, "The Peter Pan Syndrome: The Industry That Refused to Grow Up," which focused on the evolution of games and his perception that many current games are little more than derivations of previous work. We've dropped the full talk below, and collected all the DICE 2013 speeches right here.

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By: Unknown On 8:22 AM

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Coming soon: A new, open laptop from the creator of Chumby

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Katherine Noyes has been an ardent geek ever since she first conquered Pyramid of Doom on an ancient TRS-80. Today she covers business and tech in all its forms, with an emphasis on Linux and open source software.
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Open source software has become an increasingly widespread part of the computing world thanks to the ever-growing popularity of Linux, Firefox, LibreOffice, and other prominent examples. Fully open hardware, however, is still much less common.

Just a few weeks ago we saw the emergence of the Raspberry Pi-style A13-OLinuXino, but over the weekend another interesting contender came to light: a new, open laptop from the creator of the Chumby Internet device.

“We are building an open laptop, with some wacky features in it for hackers like me,” wrote renowned Xbox hacker and Chumby creator Andrew “Bunnie” Huang in a blog post on Sunday.

“The hardware and its sub-components are picked so as to make this the most practically open hardware laptop I could create using state of the art technology,” Huang added. “You can download, without NDA, the datasheets for all the components, and key peripheral options are available so it’s possible to build a complete firmware from source with no opaque blobs.”

Huang may launch a Kickstarter campaign to offer the resulting ARM-based device up to the public, he said. In the meantime, here's a rundown of how it's shaping up.

Raspberry Pi compatibility

Currently code-named “Novena,” the new DIY device uses a Freescale i.MX6 ARM Cortex-A9 quad-core processor running at 1.2 GHz and a Vivante GC2000 OpenGL ES2.0 GPU.

A mini PCI-express slot, a resistive touchscreen controller, a three-axis accelerometer, 100 Mbit Ethernet, and a Raspberry Pi-compatible expansion header are also among the laptop's many intriguing features.

Perhaps best of all, however, is the openness of the device. Only a few features require a closed-source firmware blob, but the system is functional and bootable without, Huang notes.

The Novena's circuit board is pictured in the annotated diagram above. Source files for the current prototype are available on the Novena wiki.

'A low-volume laptop'

The project was launched in June, and prototype motherboards arrived last week, Huang says.

Next, he plans to spend a few months validating features and porting drivers and a Linux distribution.

It certainly sounds compelling, but be aware that the device's price may not be as low as some we've seen.

“I’m not looking to break any low-price records for this laptop—if you just want a cheap Linux laptop, you’re better off buying a netbook or EeePC,” Huang noted. “This is a low-volume, hand-crafted laptop made with uniquely open source components, so the pricing would be consistent with such crafted goods.”

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By: Dilusha On 3:56 PM

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