Remedy has been hard at work on some supposedly impressive facial animation technology for an upcoming project. According to Edge, the Helsinki studio is confident it can come closer to crossing the “uncanny valley” effect than others have done before.

The technology created by John Root — who was a lead animator at Midway, Epic Games, and id Software before moving to Remedy — builds upon motion capture by using it as a starting point for generating up to 0.5mm accurate scans of actors, a similar approach to how facial animation was done for Alan Wake. Root claims that from 64 facial poses, every human expression can be derived.

With those tools in hand animators can then easily edit facial expressions in real time, rather than having to rely on the actor’s performance capture. A future color mapping component is said to yet be included in the tech, which will simulate subdermal blood flow and adjusts the skin’s color when facial skin folds with expressions.

Speaking to Edge, Remedy CEO Matias “Mulla stondaa Alan Wake” Myllyrinne said that while L.A. Noire has set the bar for facial animation, Remedy is aiming to raise the bar even further. Can’t wait to see that tech implemented in CG hentai.

Remedy Claims New Tech Raises The Bar For Facial Animation [Edge][Image via Eurogamer]

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Remedy aims to surpass L.A. Noire's facial animation

Chubby DIY iPad cases aside, there aren’t too many options if you want to bring video wirelessly from a mobile device to a wall-mountable TV. The Moov from Olion is one of the few, but sadly it doesn’t really exist just yet. Don’t be thrown off by a name shared with a windshield-mounted GPS, this is a battery-packing case for iPhones. Slot one in and you get instant, wireless streaming of data to a WHDI-compatible receiver. Video resolution is fair at 1,024 x 768 while latency is said to be less than 1ms at up to 30-feet in range. That’s quick enough to get your Need for Speed on, as shown after the break, while the internal battery is said to provide enough juice for three hours of video streaming. Olion doesn’t have a shipment date or price in mind right now, still searching for partners of the manufacturing kind. If you have the requisite means of production maybe this could be a match made in silicon — and in love.

[Thanks, Aviram]

Continue reading Olion’s Moov caught on video beaming an iPhone to a TV using a little WHDI and a lot of magic

Olion’s Moov caught on video beaming an iPhone to a TV using a little WHDI and a lot of magic originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Apr 2011 11:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hacker George “Geohot” Hotz, the man who Sony accused of cracking the PlayStation 3 security, has settled with Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA). According to a statement issued by SCEA, Hotz has “consented to a permanent injunction” against the information published by Hotz. More

Put a powerful magnet against the side of your head and it can interfere with the neurons working underneath. The technique is being used to treat severe depression, but it can also produce some nifty party tricks. In this video, a magnet held to left side of New Scientist editor Roger Highfield’s skull interrupts his ability to speak a nursery rhyme. But when Highfield sings the same rhyme, there’s no effect. That’s because the neurons that control speech and the neurons that control singing are in separate parts of the brain. The magnet disabled Highfield’s speech centers, but left his ability to sing untouched.

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How magnets affect the human brain

As recently as a year ago, Windows XP was the kingpin of PCs in the US with 43.1 percent market share. But that’s rapidly changing. StatCounter shows that while Mac OS X is creeping up slightly and Windows Vista continues its death march, Windows 7 is on the rise, steadily closing the gap with trusty ole’ XP. Last month, XP’s share sank to 32.17 percent, while Windows 7’s edged up to 30.84 percent, leaving the latter poised to overtake XP — something the much-maligned Vista never did. And if early numbers are to be believed, it’s already happened: StatCounter says that for the first week in April Windows 7’s share (among desktops, at least) totaled 31.71 percent, compared with XP’s 31.56. Either way, it seems Microsoft has convinced consumers that it’s finally safe to upgrade.

Windows 7 closes gap with XP, is poised to steal top market share this month originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Apr 2011 11:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Intel’s inability to crack the mobile market has been a growing blemish on their record, an increasingly sore spot that’s seen the processor giant sit out the biggest new product category since the laptop. Sure, there have been tablets with Intel inside, but they’ve been solidly second-rate battery suckers. So how will intel catch up? By throwing Moore’s law out the window, and upgrading its Atom processor at unprecedented speeds. More

Maryn McKenna—my favorite “Scary Disease Girl” and author of Superbug—will be taking questions during a live chat today at Scientific American’s Facebook page. The chat starts at 2:00 Eastern and lasts for a half-hour.

The chat is connected to a new article that Maryn wrote for Scientific American, which centers around some disturbing new trends in antibiotic resistance. You may have heard about the recently announced discovery of a pneumonia-causing bacteria, called Klebsiella pneumoniae, that had developed a resistance to a class of antibiotics called carbapenems. This is more than just another bacteria resistant to another antibiotic.

Carbapenems are the antibiotics of last resort. The end of the line before we literally run out of ways to treat bacterial disease. The fact that bacteria are growing resistant even to them would, alone, be concerning. But the type of bacteria involved also matters. A lot. Klebsiella pneumoniae is a gram-negative bacteria.

That designation, which borrows the name of a Danish 19th-century scientist, superficially indicates the response to a stain that illuminates the cell membrane. What it connotes is much more complex. Gram-negative bacteria are promiscuous: they easily exchange bits of DNA, so that a resistance gene that arises in Klebsiella, for example, quickly migrates to E. coli, Acinetobacter and other gram-negative species. (In contrast, resistance genes in gram-positives are more likely to cluster within species.)

Gram-negative germs are also harder to kill with antibiotics because they have a double-layered membrane that even powerful drugs struggle to penetrate and possess certain internal cellular defenses as well. In addition, fewer options exist for treating them. Pharmaceutical firms are making few new antibiotics of any type these days. Against the protean, stubborn gram-negatives, they have no new compounds in the pipeline at all. All told, this unlucky confluence of elements could easily export disaster from medical centers to the wider community.

Scientific American: The Enemy Within

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Chat with Maryn McKenna about antibiotic resistance today

What!?! Since when?

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A Is For FAIL

Wouldn’t it be great if iOS fully backed up your data, and did so wirelessly and automatically, without requiring you to plug in and sync? As with many features iOS is lacking by default, you can achieve this goal by jailbreaking. Here’s how to set up a fully automated, wireless backup on your jailbroken iDevice. More

Is your phone manufacturer’s Android ROM not treating you quite the way it should? Worry not, Cyanogen’s got your back as usual and has just released the final v7.0 of the CyanogenMod, now based on Android 2.3.3. There's an extensive list of supported Android handsets, which is now also augmented with a couple of tablets: the B&N Nook Color and the Viewsonic G Tablet. As usual with custom ROMs, we advise reading up and making sure you know what you’re doing before you do it, but if you’re already up to speed on the latest in homebrewed Android, this is the moment you’ve been eagerly waiting for. Full details of the changes made in version 7 plus instructions on how to get it set up on your Android device can be found below.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

CyanogenMod 7.0 is now final, ready for your consumption originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Apr 2011 04:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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