The San Diego Comic-Con 2008 kicks off (July 23rd Preview Night) and goes through (July 27th). For those of you who are familiar with this annual spectacle, you shouldn’t be too alarmed when encountering people from different states, countries, worlds, galaxies, or dimensions. For those of you who are not so familiar, get ready for an alternate reality of costumes, comics, & movies, not to mention the nightly rooftop parties where you may run into Batman (Christion Bale), Ironman (Robert Downey Jr.) or The Hulk (Ed Norton). The San Diego Comic-Con is the largest of its kind in the world and fills the capacity of the San Diego Convention Center with over 125,000 attendees, last year and growing.
Bert Simons amazes us with his very life like paper sculptures of himself and other lucky candidates. This Rotterdam, Netherlands native seems to have quite a hand at 3D imaging and rendering. The sculptures he creates could almost be the real clones of the people they represent.
This seems to be an interesting facet of art imitating life. While some of you video gamers have probably created characters with your picture applied to them, this process seems to work in reverse. Rather than creating art in the real world and bringing it to life on a computer Simons’ process works the other way around. Read the rest of this entry »
The most highly anticipated video game of the year is finally in stores worldwide today. That’s right, Rock Star Games has released the latest and greatest in the saga of criminal gaming behavior – Grand Theft Auto IV. It’s available for both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, and is now a Multiplayer game (up to 16 players - 15 game modes). The game is still rated M (Mature) and has reached a visual level of realism that you have never seen before in a video game. It runs on Rock Star’s game engine, R.A.G.E., which has many unprecedented characteristics such as real reflections in glass, cars, or water, more detailed road and building textures, and it uses Euphoria – an animation package created by Natural Motion, which uses Dynamic Motion Synthesis (DMS) technology. This is the most awesome breakthrough for GTA IV gamers – characters in the game are now animated in a way you have never seen in a video game before. They can hang off the back of vehicles or helicopters, step off and up onto curbs, and even react realistically when hit by gunfire – like if a character is shot in the leg, he will limp. The way a character walks even changes when the terrain does.
The success of GTA has always been attributed to the fact that this is an “open world” game – meaning the location is vast and can be explored in depth by the player. The location this time is Liberty City, and the main character, Niko Bellic, is an eastern European immigrant who has come to America in search of a better life…only to find out that Liberty City is not the place to pursue the American dream. GTA IV takes a stronger turn towards storytelling also, although the storyline is a lot less linear than before. It is possible to do more than one mission at a time, and some missions take place over several days – which brings up the cellphone. Yes, Niko uses his cell to receive calls and make calls to help set up his missions. He could be waiting for days for phone calls to move forward on a mission, and in the meantime, he can go on dates…or frequent strip clubs. So, if you love cappin’ fools, stealin’ rides, and hangin’ with ho’s…today is your lucky day.
If you’re anything like us then you grew up on low-fi graphic video games like Asteroids. This coffee table is a fitting tribute. The only thing missing are the coordinating spaceship coasters. Made of glass. As of right now it is a concept with plans for a limited production run later this year. Thanks to Zack and Kristy for the tip.
Uber genius Thomas Miller has developed a way to track the position and orientation of your head and blow your mind. We’re looking forward to a whole new category of video game. This technology mixed with the game Time Crisis and you won’t see us for weeks. It seems as though this nice guy has given the code away for free to the development community. Hopefully, one way or another, he’ll gets a grip of money for this amazing innovation. Thanks Steve for the heads up.
These photographs by Rosemarie Fiore are long exposures taken while playing video war games of the 80’s created by Atari, Centuri and Taito. The photographs were shot from video game screens while she played the games. By recording an entire game on one frame of film, she captured complex patterns not normally seen by the eye. More images from the series can be seen here.
The photos were printed at large scale. “Tempest 1″ (top) is 6 ft x 4 ft. The following images were printed slightly smaller. It would be beautiful to see this approach applied to video where trails of light persisted for a similar period of time and games were played back to back. Read the rest of this entry »
In a tribute to the classic video games of the 1980s, these scenes were constructed out of LEGOs. Above you can see a LEGO version of Duck Hunt. The image below shows Excite Bike (complete with rider running to crashed motorcycle). You can view all eleven images in the series here.
