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Heads-up displays come to paintball goggles

Recon Instruments , the Canadian wearables outfit purchased by Intel last year, has released a heads-up display for paintball enthusiasts. Much in the same way Recon partnered with Oakley to produce its Airwave sports goggles , the firm has teamed up with Empire Paintball to create the Empire EVS. The device uses the game guts as the Airwave — a technology known as Snow2 — albeit in a new mask that’s designed to withstand the rigors of paint-based conflict. According to the firm, the heads-up display will be able to show battle-critical information like ammo counts, field maps and teammate locations. The device itself is running a version of Android and is packing a 1GHz dual-core processor, Bluetooth 4.0, WiFI as well as GPS. The mask, meanwhile, comes with dual-pane lenses that prevent internal fogging and a lower skirt that encourages ball bouncing. We don’t know yet how much the device will set you back, and the company has also been a little tight-lipped about when we can expect shipments to begin. For the former, Oakley’s Airwave retails for around $649, while the Snow2 smart glass insert on its own is $399, so we’d guess $500 is a reasonable amount of cash to start saving.

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Heads-up displays come to paintball goggles

MSI’s flagship gaming laptop gets an eye-tracking upgrade

If you’re looking for a big, powerful gaming laptop, the MSI’s GT72 Dominator has always been a solid choice — but it’s never been really interesting . The Dominator is known for a strong build, powerful internals, good speakers and a superb keyboard, but it never offered anything unexpected. Now it does. Later this month, MSI will be updating the Dominator with a fancy new gimmick: an integrated eye-tracking camera. Technically, we’ve seen this machine before: MSI showed off a prototype eye-tracking Dominator in Taiwan last year . It… sort of worked. Eye-controlled gaming can be finicky if not implemented correctly. At the time, we had trouble controlling the Assassin’s Creed in-game camera by just looking at the screen, but logging into Windows with the camera was relatively easy. The technology has potential, even if it only has limited support at the moment. Now that it’s officially available, that support could be on its way. MSI says the GT72S Tobii will be available for purchase later this month, and will ship with a Tobii-enabled copy of Tom Clancy’s The Division.

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MSI’s flagship gaming laptop gets an eye-tracking upgrade

35,000 Dairy Cows Were Buried Alive By a Freak Blizzard in Texas

The day after Texas experienced weirdly warm temperatures and tornadoes on Christmas Day, a blizzard slammed across the western part of the state. A dozen people were killed by the storms, and now, another tragic death toll has been reported: More than 35, 000 dairy cows lost their lives. Read more…

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35,000 Dairy Cows Were Buried Alive By a Freak Blizzard in Texas

MGM and Universal commit to Dolby’s HDR imaging tech

Over the past year, Dolby’s worked hard to convince many of the major movie studios and streaming services that its HDR imaging technology is the one worth backing. Netflix, Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures are already on board, but today they’ve been joined by MGM Studios and Universal Pictures, after the studios confirmed they’ll deliver “new release and catalog titles” that have been mastered in Dolby Vision. High dynamic range (HDR), if you’re not already aware, transforms the way you see HD and 4K media. The technology doesn’t change the number of pixels your TV works with, it just makes them do more. Dolby Vision, for example, delivers increased brightness, better light-to-dark contrast and colors that the company says have been seen before on a TV. As with many new digital technologies, the uptake of HDR could be impacted by a battle over competing standards. The UHD Alliance is tackling the issue, though, and has issued specifications for what it considers to be a ‘premium’ 4K TV . Any set that meets the required resolution, color depth and brightness and black levels will be issued with a sticker that proves it can deliver the best possible experience from your Ultra HD Blu-rays or 4K streams from Netflix and Amazon. Dolby is also working to get TV makers on board, recently announcing that it will feature on Vizio’s latest range of 4K TVs. The company is also working with Roku to incorporate the technology into future 4K Roku TVs, regardless of who they’re made by. Source: Dolby

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MGM and Universal commit to Dolby’s HDR imaging tech

PlayStation Now just got 40-plus new PS3 games

Sony announced the addition of more than 40 PS3 games to its Now service, bringing the total number of available PS3 games to 300, 100 of which are PS3 exclusives . Additionally, Sony’s offering a pretty steep discount on the Now service itself for the holidays — $100 for a full year’s subscription . That’s more than half off what they normally charge. The discount offer runs through Monday, January 11th. [Image Credit: Getty]

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PlayStation Now just got 40-plus new PS3 games

Lenovo says the Yoga 900s is the world’s thinnest convertible

It’s that time of year again: Lenovo whips out some impossibly thin and light laptop. Last CES it was a 1.7-pound notebook , and this year it’s the Yoga 900s, a half-inch-thick, 2.2-pound machine that Lenovo claims is the world’s thinnest convertible laptop. Indeed, I had a chance to handle it in person and it really is absurdly, impressively thin and light. (I know, we always say that. But still.) Before you get too excited, though, it appears that the 12-inch Yoga 900s is the spiritual successor to a machine that … we didn’t like very much. That would be last year’s Yoga 3 Pro , a super-slim model that ultimately got a lukewarm review on account of its sluggish performance and mediocre battery life. The new Yoga 900s is even thinner and lighter, but it too runs on Intel’s watered-down Core M processors, which makes me think the performance isn’t going to be better. Lenovo says the battery life will be longer (up to 10.5 hours), but that appears to be with a lower-resolution screen, not the QHD (2, 560 x 1, 440) option. One thing you’ll get here that you won’t on the Yoga 3 Pro: active pen support. That’s something you won’t even get on the recent Yoga 900 , Lenovo’s similar but higher-performing flagship machine. If you can do without the pen support, though, and don’t mind a little extra heft, you’ll get better performance from the current Yoga 900. Undeterred? The 900s lands in March for $1, 099 and up. That’s not the only impressively thin and light machine that Lenovo unveiled today. The company also took the wraps off a more mid-range notebook called the 710s, which keeps its weight (and price) down by forgoing a touchscreen. All told, the 13.3-inch system comes in at 2.6 pounds and half an inch thick. And though it tops out at a fairly middling 1080p screen resolution, it makes up for it with up to a sixth-gen Core i7 processor, Intel Iris graphics and a PCIe SSD. Expect that to ship in July (just in time for back-to-school season), priced from $799. I saved the least interesting for last. In addition to those two skinny laptops, Lenovo also announced the Ideapad 700, a beefier machine with either a 15- or 17.3-inch 1080p screen and up to a Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and optional discrete graphics (a 4GB NVIDIA X950M on the 15-incher and a 4GB X940M on the 17-inch version). Both are offered with up to 1TB in HDD or hybrid storage, or with a PCIe SSD (128GB or 256GB). As you’d expect for models this size, they’re not particularly light (5.1 and 5.9 pounds, respectively) and the battery life is relatively short: up to four hours. Look for those in June, starting at $799.

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Lenovo says the Yoga 900s is the world’s thinnest convertible

Intel, Warner sue over device that strips 4K copy protection

The media industry was more than a little alarmed when 4K bootlegs of Amazon and Netflix streams showed up this November. Weren’t these feeds supposed to be relatively safe from pirates? It’s no surprise, then, that they’re doing something about it. Intel (through its Digital Content Protection brand) and Warner Bros. are suing LegendSky for offering HDFury, a series of devices designed to strip HDCP copy protection from many sources, including streams. The two plaintiffs claim that HDFury violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention measures, making it all too easy to rip and share 4K video. They also allege that LegendSky is dishonest when it says it meets HDCP’s licensing requirements. LegendSky hasn’t said how it’s handling the lawsuit, although it may not have much success fighting back. As TorrentFreak notes, 4K stream rips started surfacing mere days after the first HDFury boxes started shipping. Even if Intel and Warner can’t draw a direct link between the two events, the timing certainly looks suspicious. And while HDCP is notorious for being a nuisance to legitimate viewers, it’s not very likely that people are buying HDFury solely to reclaim some convenience. As it stands, it wasn’t too hard to see this coming. With 4K Blu-ray movies on the way, Warner and other studios are no doubt eager to minimize the related piracy before it really takes off — streaming was just the tip of the iceberg. Source: TorrentFreak

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Intel, Warner sue over device that strips 4K copy protection

New WiFi standard offers more range for less power

The WiFi Alliance has finally approved the eagerly-anticipated 802.11ah WiFi standard and dubbed it “HaLow.” Approved devices will operate in the unlicensed 900MHz band, which has double the range of the current 2.4GHz standard, uses less power and provides better wall penetration. The standard is seen as a key for the internet of things and connected home devices, which haven’t exactly set the world on fire so far. The problem has been that gadgets like door sensors, connected bulbs and cameras need to have enough power to send data long distances to remote hubs or routers. However, the current WiFi standard doesn’t lend itself to long battery life and transmission distances. The WiFi Alliance said that HaLow will “broadly adopt existing WiFi protocols, ” like IP connectivity, meaning devices will have regular WiFi-grade security and interoperability. It added that many new products, like routers, will also operate in the regular 2.4 and 5GHz bands. That should open the floodgates to a lot of new 900Mhz-enabled devices in the near future, and not just smart toasters. The group said that the new standard “will enable a variety of new power-efficient use cases in the smart home, connected car … as well as industrial, retail, agriculture and smart city environments.” How about just a better WiFi connection from the spare room?

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New WiFi standard offers more range for less power

AMD’s new graphics architecture is called Polaris

The rumours were true: AMD’s new graphics architecture is called Polaris (it previously went under the codename Arctic Islands), it’s based on a 14nm FinFET process, and it’ll ship in “mid-2016.” Given that AMD’s GPUs—and indeed Nvidia’s—have been stuck at the larger 28nm process node for several years, the move to 14nm should bring huge improvements in power consumption and performance per watt. Details are thin on the ground—AMD has promised to go into much greater detail at a later date—but for now the company has confirmed that Polaris is the fourth generation of its Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. The current GCN architecture, GCN 1.2, is used by the likes of the Radeon R9 285 and R9 Fury. Improvements to the command processor, geometry processor, L2 cache, memory controller, multimedia cores, and display engine are promised in fourth-gen GCN, as well as to the all important compute units at the heart of the GPU. Polaris will support hardware 4K h.265 encoding and decoding at 60 FPS, DisplayPort 1.3, and, at long last, HDMI 2.0a. The latter was missing from AMD’s recent Fury and 300-series of GPUs, which instead featured HDMI 1.4a that limited 4K signals to 30 FPS at 60Hz, making them less than ideal for use in the living room with 4K TVs. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AMD’s new graphics architecture is called Polaris