japanese – Page 2 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Disney’s projection tech turns actors’ faces into nightmare fuel

Disney is taking scary clown makeup to the next level. It’s using a new projection system to transform the appearance of actors during live performances, tracking facial expressions and “painting” them with light, rather than physical makeup. Called Makeup Lamps, the system was developed by a team at Disney Research, and it could potentially change the way stage makeup is used in future theater productions. Makeup Lamps tracks an actor’s movements without using the facial markers common in motion capture, then it displays any color or texture the actor wants by adjusting the lighting. It can make someone appear older by creating “wrinkles” on their face, for example, or it can paint their face in creepy clown makeup, à la Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight . And all of it is done in real-time. A similar technology was used earlier this year during Lady Gaga’s performance at the Superbowl. Nobumichi Asai, creative director of Japanese visual studio WOW, was brought in to create a red lightning bolt on Gaga’s face during her David Bowie tribute. The attention that performance received has helped the technology become more mainstream. Latency — the time between generating an image that matches the actor’s pose and when the image is displayed — is a big challenge to live augmentation, of course. Large amounts of it will cause the projection and the actor’s face to appear out of sync. Disney’s research team combated this problem by limiting the complexity of its algorithms and employing a method called Kalman filtering, which uses measurements over time to make predictions and minor adjustments. “We’ve seen astounding advances in recent years in capturing facial performances of actors and transferring those expressions to virtual characters, ” said Markus Gross, vice president at Disney Research. “Leveraging these technologies to augment the appearance of live actors is the next step and could result in amazing transformations before our eyes of stage actors in theaters or other venues.” Source: EurekAlert

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Disney’s projection tech turns actors’ faces into nightmare fuel

New ‘Spray-On’ Memory Could Turn Everyday Items Into Digital Storage Devices

Researchers at Duke University have developed “spray-on” digital memory using only an aerosol jet printer and nanoparticle inks. An anonymous reader quotes Duke Today: The device, which is analogous to a 4-bit flash drive, is the first fully-printed digital memory that would be suitable for practical use in simple electronics such as environmental sensors or RFID tags. And because it is jet-printed at relatively low temperatures, it could be used to build programmable electronic devices on bendable materials like paper, plastic or fabric… The new material, made of silica-coated copper nanowires encased in a polymer matrix, encodes information not in states of charge but instead in states of resistance. By applying a small voltage, it can be switched between a state of high resistance, which stops electric current, and a state of low resistance, which allows current to flow. And, unlike silicon, the nanowires and the polymer can be dissolved in methanol, creating a liquid that can be sprayed through the nozzle of a printer. Amazingly, its write speed is three microseconds, “rivaling the speed of flash drives.” The information can be re-written many times, and the stored data can last for up to 10 years. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New ‘Spray-On’ Memory Could Turn Everyday Items Into Digital Storage Devices

Do you want to play a game? Ransomware asks for high score instead of money

Rensenware’s warning screen asks for a high score, rather than the usual pay off, to decrypt your files. At this point, Ars readers have heard countless tales of computer users being forced to pay significant sums to unlock files encrypted with malicious ransomware . So we were a bit surprised when word started to trickle out about a new bit of ransomware that doesn’t ask for money. Instead, “Rensenware” forces players to get a high score in a difficult PC shoot-em-up to decrypt their files. As Malware Hunter Team noted yesterday , users on systems infected with Rensenware are faced with the usual ransomware-style warning that “your precious data like documents, musics, pictures, and some kinda project files” have been “encrypted with highly strong encryption algorithm.” The only way to break the encryption lock, according to the warning, is to “score 0.2 billion in LUNATIC level” on TH12 ~ Undefined Fantastic Object . That’s easier said than done, as this gameplay video of the “bullet hell” style Japanese shooter shows. Gameplay from TH12 ~ Undefined Fantastic Object on Lunatic difficulty. Players needed to get 200 million points to unlock the “Rensenware” malware. As you may have guessed from the specifics here, the Rensenware bug was created more in the spirit of fun than maliciousness. After Rensenware was publicized on Twitter, its creator, who goes by Tvple Eraser on Twitter and often posts in Korean, released an apology for releasing what he admitted was “a kind of highly-fatal malware.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Giant murderbots will fight for their countries in August

Who’s ready for a robot rumble? Back in 2015, we told you about MegaBots , a team of American engineers building a piloted combat robot to battle Kuratas , a 13-foot mech built by Japanese company Suidobashi Heavy Industries. Two years later, it looks like the big fight is finally happening. The Giant Robot Duel will take place this August, MegaBots today announced. MegaBots’ creation, the Mk. III, is 16-feet tall and weighs 12 tons. The company has steadily worked on it for the past two years, documenting its progress on its YouTube channel . But, it’s only been seen in pieces so far. The fully assembled robot will be unveiled in an upcoming video. There’s no word yet on exactly when the big event will take place. MegaBots said that the original duel suffered a significant scheduling delay after the venue fell through, which is why the new location is a secret. Fans will learn more about the robots and their fight in the next few months, and they’ll have the chance to see the completed Mk. III in the San Francisco Bay Area in May. Then, they can watch the big fight on MegaBots’ and Suidobashi’s YouTube and Facebook channels. Source: MegaBots

Man receives someone else’s reprogrammed stem cells

The concept of using stem cells for transplants just became a truly practical reality: a Japanese man with age-related macular degeneration has received the first transplant of stem cells from another human donor. Doctors repurposed the donor’s skin cells by turning them into induced pluripotent stem cells (that is, forced into a state where they can become many kinds of cells) that then became retinal cells. If all goes according to plan with the multi-step procedure, these fresh cells will halt the degeneration and preserve the patient’s remaining eyesight. This isn’t the first time that human stem cells have been used. There was another macular degeneration treatment in 2014. However, the prior example revolved around taking samples from the patient’s own skin. That’s risky when they may be dealing with genetic flaws that could hinder the treatment. So long as the newest procedure proves a long-term success, it opens the door to plucking cells from healthier candidates. And importantly, there are plans for this to become relatively commonplace. Researcher Shinya Yamanaka is developing a stem cell bank that would give recipients immediate treatment, instead of having to wait months to cultivate cells from a matching candidate. This would only potentially address about 30 to 50 percent of the Japanese population, but that could be enough to improve the quality of life for many people. Source: Nature , NEJM

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Man receives someone else’s reprogrammed stem cells

PS4 Pro might have a ‘boost mode’ to improve frame rates (update)

Sony’s new PS4 Pro provides a noticeable visual upgrade to games that have been patched to take advantage of the console’s extra horsepower. But what about all the rest of your games that developers haven’t updated yet? Well, a thread over at the NeoGAF forum indicates those games may soon look better too, thanks to a new feature called “Boost Mode.” A posted Japanese screenshot from a PS4 Pro shows a description for Boost Mode reads: “Games that launched before the PS4 Pro (CUH-7000) can now have its in-game frame rates improved. If any unwanted reactions/gameplay effects occur, please turn this mode off.” It seems like this mode would help intense games that drop frames maintain a higher frame rate — but, it won’t magically let games that are locked at 30 FPS go above that limit. It’ll just keep things consistently higher. Similarly, it could let games with variable resolutions stick closer to 1080p more consistently. Sony just pushed out a beta version of the big 4.5 update it has planned for the PS4 to testers, so that appears to be where this screenshot came from. Of course, there are a lot of unknowns here right now, but we’ve reached out to Sony to see if it can clarify Boost Mode’s existence and how it works for us. Of course, since the 4.5 software that’s out in the wild is just a beta, it’s entirely possible this feature gets removed, but it’s good to see Sony may have a way for more games to take advantage of the PS4 Pro’s hardware. Update: A spokesperson has gotten back to us with the following information and confirmed Boost Mode is part of the beta firmware: “Boost Mode lets PS4 Pro run at a higher GPU and CPU clock speed for smoother gameplay on some PS4 games that were released before the launch of PS4 Pro (and has not been updated to support PS4 Pro). Games that have a variable frame rate may benefit from a higher frame rate, and load times may be shorter in some games too.” Source: NeoGAF

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PS4 Pro might have a ‘boost mode’ to improve frame rates (update)

Flying Cretaceous Monster Ate Dinosaurs For Breakfast

It’s been said that the pterosaur, which can only be described as a bird-reptile-dinosaur- esque -thing, was the largest flying animal. This giant beast—which roamed the Earth during the Cretaceous period roughly 66.5 million years ago—was a reptile but not actually a dinosaur. Despite being winged, it wasn’t bird, … Read more…

Google Translate Is About To Get a Lot Better, Thanks To Its Machine Learning Push

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is offering a big new update that should affect anyone who’s ever used Google’s translation services. From a report on CNBC: The new version will be rolling out in 2017 via Google Cloud, Pichai said. “We have improved our translation ability more in one single year than all our improvements over the last 10 years combined, ” Pichai told investors in a quarterly call, after parent company Alphabet reported mixed results. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo mini NES modders figure out how to add new games

There was no doubt Nintendo’s miniature NES Classic Edition was going to be a hit , especially around the holiday season. The affordable retro console hit all the right nostalgic notes, but there’s a consensus Nintendo missed a trick by omitting any way to add new games to the system beyond the 30 preinstalled titles. Also, it shouldn’t be that hard — the mini NES is just an emulator in a pretty package, after all. Well, leave it up to the internet to do what Nintendo wouldn’t. The modding community has successfully cooked up ways to load additional games onto the system, and all you need is a PC and a micro-USB cable. Though no specialist equipment is required, a certain amount of technical knowhow is recommended. A post on the NESClassicmods subreddit links to an English translation of a method discovered by a Russian hacker (a Japanese modder has also published a guide) if you’re confident enough to give it a try. But be warned, you could irreparably fry the little console if anything goes wrong. The step-by-step is a little complex, but if you’re interested, you first need to have created a save file in Super Mario Bros. Then you have to hook the console up to a PC and boot it into special “FEL” mode while running an interfacing tool on your computer. You then have to copy data off the mini NES, unpack it, modify it, add any game ROMs you’ve downloaded — most of which are illegal if you don’t own the original cartridge, just FYI — before zipping it all back up again and overwriting the data on the console with this new package. The added games should then be listed in the regular UI if everything went to plan. It’s not the simplest of hacks and as it’s early days, there’s no definitive list of what ROMs will work (or not) when side-loaded onto the NES Classic Edition. But apparently, storage isn’t an issue, with the bravest of souls reporting smooth sailing after adding tens of extra titles to the little box. While the modding community is adding longevity to the NES Classic Edition, perhaps even persuading more people to give the hardware a look, Nintendo might have something to say about these hacking efforts. The company is notorious for taking issue with anything outside of its control, whether that be using its hardware in unintended ways or fan-made homages to classic characters . Via: Ars Technica Source: Reddit (NESClassicmods)

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Nintendo mini NES modders figure out how to add new games

Linux Kernel 4.9 Officially Released

“As expected, today, December 11, 2016, Linus Torvalds unleashed the final release of the highly anticipated Linux 4.9 kernel, ” reports Softpedia. prisoninmate shares their article: Linux kernel 4.9 entered development in mid-October, on the 15th, when Linus Torvalds decided to cut the merge window short by a day just to keep people on their toes, but also to prevent them from sending last-minute pull requests that might cause issues like it happened with the release of Linux kernel 4.8, which landed just two weeks before first RC of Linux 4.9 hit the streets… There are many great new features implemented in Linux kernel 4.9, but by far the most exciting one is the experimental support for older AMD Radeon graphics cards from the Southern Islands/GCN 1.0 family, which was injected to the open-source AMDGPU graphics driver… There are also various interesting improvements for modern AMD Radeon GPUs, such as virtual display support and better reset support, both of which are implemented in the AMDGPU driver. For Intel GPU users, there’s DMA-BUF implicit fencing, and some Intel Atom processors got a P-State performance boost. Intel Skylake improvements are also present in Linux kernel 4.9. There’s also dynamic thread-tracing, according to Linux Today. (And hopefully they fixed the “buggy crap” that made it into Linux 4.8.) LWN.net calls this “by far the busiest cycle in the history of the kernel project.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Kernel 4.9 Officially Released