A futuristic simulation of a Chinese Mars mission has opened in the Gobi Desert
Recently opened in Gansu province, and set among the orange backdrop of the Gobi Desert, C-Space Project Mars simulates a speculative Chinese-led mission to the red planet.
C-Space seems to be more in the realm of speculative science fiction, aimed at the imaginations of school groups and tourists.
Reuters visited the site of the project, which currently occupies a plot about the size of a football field. The developers have lofty goals, to the tune of a multibillion-yuan investment, with the plan of it occupying 26 sq miles (67 sq km), Reuters reports.
See the full story here: https://qz.com/1597863/inside-chinas-mars-simulator-camp-in-the-gobi-desert/?fbclid=IwAR38xdDAXmEyIEoFdCqbwtkL07WdRks_Fe0a5jbs26CeGiW-7TNp9jfvrZk
Augmented reality game designed to attract next generation of techs
Studio apartment living room with a large comfortable sofa standing next to a coffee table. Panoramic windows. 3d rendering mock up
The game is called TMCSuperTech.
“We made the decision to create this game with Design Interactive for two primary reasons,” said Robert Braswell TMC executive director. “To promote awareness of the vocation among middle and high school students who make up the next generation of vehicle maintenance personnel and to help technicians prepare for the TMCSuperTech competition by providing a hands-on training experience for the skills challenges.”
Available on Android and Apple smartphones and tablets, Design Interactive’s gamified TMCSuperTech skills challenge uses AR technology to project a fictional city with a fleet of moving trucks. As the vehicles require service, they are brought into a virtual garage where the game will ask users playing the role of a technician to execute tasks inspired by TMCSuperTech events. Points are awarded for the time trucks are repaired and for the longer they remain in service.
TMC is seeking sponsors to help support the adoption of its next-generation-workforce-focused product —TMCSuperTech: The Game. There are four levels of sponsorships available. TMCSuperTech is an annual two-day event organized by TMC’s Professional Technician Development Committee. The premier skills competition for professional commercial vehicle technicians from all segments of the trucking industry will be held September 15-19, 2019, at the Raleigh Convention Center in conjunction with TMC’s Fall Meeting.
See the full story here: https://www.thetrucker.com/augmented-reality-game-designed-to-attract-next-generation-of-techs/
Top 25 Game Companies Generated $107 Billion Last Year
The top 25 public game companies, which represent almost 80 percent of the $134.9 billion worldwide gaming market, generated $107.3 billion in revenue in 2018. According to researcher Newzoo’s Global Games Market Report, this marks the first time that the top 25 companies have surpassed $100 billion in a single year. China’s Tencent ($19.7 billion) took the No. 1 spot for the sixth consecutive year, followed by Sony ($14.2 billion), Microsoft ($9.8 billion), and Apple ($9.5 billion). Collectively, the top 10 companies experienced 19 percent growth last year.
Apple and Google have consistently performed well in this market, due in large part to revenue generated from their app stores. “Google recently announced Stadia, the company’s cloud gaming platform that allows users to stream entire games via the Internet,” reports VentureBeat. The company also “announced the creation of Stadia Games and Entertainment, its own studio that will develop Stadia-exclusive games.”
See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/top-25-game-companies-generated-107-billion-last-year/
Verizon Media Opens 8 Studios Globally, Including 5G Studio in Los Angeles
Verizon Media, the telco’s content subsidiary formerly known as Oath, has been busy building out its network of video production facilities around the world: In the first few months of this year, Verizon Media opened or upgraded studios in New York, London, Paris, Singapore, Hong Kong, Brazil and Australia. In addition, it also launched a 5Gstudio in Los Angeles that is meant to pioneer new production technologies and media formats enabled by 5G connectivity.
The studios are being used by all of Verizon Media’s brands, including Yahoo, HuffPost, TechCrunch and AOL. A special focus of the Los Angeles studio space, which is being led by Verizon Media’s immersive content unit Ryot, is the evaluation of cutting-edge technologies, said head of Ryot Zeda Stone. “We have a full motion capture stage here,” he said, adding that the space was also equipped with a volumetric capture stage.
After first testing these technologies in Los Angeles, Verizon Media is then looking to customize them for the needs of its other studio spaces. For instance, it brought a simplified motion capture system to an existing studio space in Taiwan, where it is now used to produce content for one of Verizon Media’s YouTube channels.
In addition to equipment for motion and 3-D capture, the Verizon Media studio in Los Angeles is now also equipped with a full-blown 5G node, which enables Ryot to experiment with ultra-fast, low-latency wireless data transfers. “It is the only 5G studio in the world,” said Verizon Media general manager of news, entertainment & studios Alex Wallace. “No one knows where 5G is gonna take us, but we want to be at the forefront of it.”
One are of focus will be to evaluate 5G’s role in making productions more nimble, and possibly replace the satellite truck still commonly used for TV coverage with a much smaller set-up, explained Stone. “How do we break down that production pipeline?” Ryot will also be doing real-time animation and motion capture with 5G, and envisioning a future when audiences with 5G phones can directly interact with that type of content.
All of this is happening as telcos are slowly starting to build up their network infrastructure to bring 5G to their consumers. Verizon announced earlier this year that it would bring 5G to 30 cities this year, but thus far only serves small sections of Chicago and Minneapolis with the technology.
“We are nowhere near where it’s going to be,” acknowledged Wallace. This also means that no one really knows which apps and services will ultimately be successful on the service, which she argued was another reason for experimenting with the technology early on. “I don’t think anyone predicted Facebook when 4G came around,” Wallace said.
See the full story here: https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/verizon-media-studios-5g-1203191919/?fbclid=IwAR0RcDXcbRYrIBmEQlG8vcDeTZt-qsbLG5q26-Y5nrWMn4NqQE_q3q1wy3Y
‘High Fidelity’ Shifts Focus Towards Non-VR Due to Slow Growth
Philip Rosedale, CEO of High Fidelity and founder of Second Life, announced at a High Fidelity community meeting recently that the company will be scaling back their VR efforts, focusing more on improving their PC and Mac performance. The company has also shut down all first-party user spaces and associated servers except for a single orientation room, which will be used for new users only.
High Fidelity is still allowing individual users to run their own spaces/servers, although refocusing efforts to flush out its desktop client and encourage user-generated spaces undoubtedly comes as a cost-savings maneuver by the company.
As first reported by New World Notes, Rosedale’s reasoning behind the move comes down to a pretty big linchpin: VR headsets sales. They simply aren’t getting into enough hands to make the company profitable in its current form.
“One thing to do, which all the companies have been doing, is better support for desktop users. Because any assessment of the rate of progress on HMDs is a sobering one; they’re not selling enough to create a general-purpose community that is both interesting and profitable,” Rosedale said at the meeting. “So, it’s really important to recognize, that through no fault of our collective selves, it’s not working. This model is not working right now. The flat world, that is an open building environment, is not compelling enough as it stands right now for the number of HMDs that are out there to get lift off. And so we’ve gotta think hard about that.”
High Fidelity was designed to be a platform anticipating the very broad use of VR across the Internet for things like this—public meetings, going to work, going to school— doing all kinds of different things.”
Rosedale says that while they’ve done their best to get that aspect of their business started, the company feels it’s making a mistake by taking an active role in the community by supporting first-party spaces. This, he says, comes down to the company’s inability to manage ban lists and moderate users.
“Let’s actually add all [users from NeosVR, Anyland, and Rec Room] together into one product. That company will not survive. There’s not enough revenue,” he said at the community meeting. “Everybody here that’s having such a good time: you guys need to pay us $10,000 a month for us to keep the company going indefinitely into the future, for us to basically be a positive cash-flow company, as we say here in The Valley. And everybody else in VR right now is faced by that.”
Fraunhofer demonstrates 5G virtual reality video streaming software
Known worldwide for its contributions to the MPEG format — the compression technology used in MP3 audio files and MP4 videos — Germany’s Fraunhofer has recently turned its attention to the next frontier in media: virtual reality. After unveiling affordable VR headset microdisplay hardware last year, the company is now showing off next-generation video compression software using the new MPEG-OMAF standard, the first VR specification enabling 360-degree videos to stream over 5G networks.
Based in “significant” part upon Fraunhofer video compression technologies, MPEG-OMAF breaks wraparound videos into grids of tiles encoded at multiple resolutions.
Unlike traditional videos, which stream from servers at one user-selected resolution, these VR videos dynamically use high-resolution tiles where the viewer is currently looking, and low-resolution tiles for parts that are out of sight. As the user’s head position changes, the headset or display device requests a different mix of streamed tiles optimized for the user’s current focus area.
This trick enables the entire 360-degree video to continue streaming while devoting maximum detail to whatever the user is viewing. It parallels the recent use of foveated rendering to maximize real-time 3D graphics for VR users, guaranteeing that head-moving viewers will always be able to see something through their peripheral vision, even if it’s lower in fidelity.
Fraunhofer is demonstrating the new technology using a combination of JavaScript, Apple’s Safari web browser, the WebGL API for rendering, and HEVC video support; a technical video is available here. Source code for the JavaScript player and instructions on creating standards-compliant content are available now on GitHub.
See the full story here;https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/17/fraunhofer-demonstrates-5g-virtual-reality-video-streaming-software/