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Oculus Rift & Pacific Rim Band Together For First-Person Jaeger Piloting

Posted: 30 Jul 2014 07:00 AM PDT

Pacific Rim Jaeger Pilot Oculus Rift image

Con-goers to this weekend’s San Diego Comic Con got their chance to drift with a Jaeger from Pacific Rim thanks to Oculus Rift.

It's a mighty good time to be a Pacific Rim fan. Director of the giant robots fighting giant monsters action flick of last summer, Guillermo del Toro, recently announced that Pacific Rim 2 was in the works along with an animated series.

To top it all off like a cherry on top of a mecha/monster movie sundae, at this past weekend's San Diego Comic Con fans who visited the Legendary Pictures’ booth were given the chance to pilot one of the movie's mechs, called Jaegers, thanks to the virtual reality headset tech behind Oculus Rift.

The Jaeger Combat Simulator (awesomest name for a combat simulator ever) was created using the original film assets from Industrial Light & Magic and developed within Unreal Engine 4. With the headset on, the simulator lets players control the Gipsy Danger, the titular robot from Pacific Rim, and take on a kaiju (giant monster) named Knifehead.

Sadly, there's no direct video of what the Pacific Rim/Oculus Rift experience from Comic Con looked like. Only this short trailer from Legendary Pictures is all there is to tease us of what it must feel like to punch a colossal beast like a ragdoll, a sensation that hopefully one day we'll all get to enjoy.

No one from either Oculus Rift of Legendary Pictures have given further comment on when we might see an actual release of the Jaeger Combat Simulator outside its Comic Con showing. Reportedly, it was only a mere demo featuring the actors of the movie, and was more of a visual roller coaster ride than an actual game – but here’s hoping it gets expanded on and is eventually released.

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19 Geeky Meat Sculptures

Posted: 30 Jul 2014 06:00 AM PDT

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle

Life can be boring working at a grocery store, so those at Uwajimaya in Seattle pass the time and make things a bit more fun for their customers by making geeky meat sculptures.

So even if your mom always told to not play with your food, when you have creativity, talent and inspiration, it’s not all that bad. Food can be turned into some incredible art.

Beef USS Enterprise

Deathstar & R2D2

DeLorean from Back to the Future

Beef Dragon Ball Z

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle

Beef Snorlax

Homer Simpson

Beef Zombie

Sonic & Tails

Beef Dark Knight

Beef Green Lantern

Beef Waluigi & Wario

Beef Megaman

Charmander & Pokeballs

Beef Bulbasaur

Adventure Time

Pork Meowth

Beef Metroid

 

Pork Jigglypuff

 

This is the store’s website. 

For more on geeky food, check out these 15 delicious examples. If you’re not only into the geeky application of it, here are 11 ways to make a marriage proposal using food.

Budget phone Xiaomi Mi3 Sells Out In Five Seconds

Posted: 30 Jul 2014 05:00 AM PDT

mi3-sold-out

Note to self: never underestimate the importance of an attractive price tag, because it might just be the key to success, as Xiaomi’s Mi3 just proved.

Xiaomi (“the Apple of Asia”) keep expanding, and just released their Mi3 in Indian territory at an extremely aggressive price via FlipKart, the main retailer in the country. It didn’t take long for the Chinese company to sell out their product: the Mi3 lasted about five seconds in stock. We are not exactly sure how many devices were sold, but this is still quite a feat.

The way FlipKart works is by registering customers for the handset even before it goes up for sale, and they’ve already set a second date to start selling the Mi3 once again: August 5th at 2 PM. Customers get to register and get one until August 4th.

Hardware-wise, the device provides some great horsepower for its price, coming with a 5-inch display capable 1920 x 1080 pixels resolution with a quad-core Snapdragon 800 SoC on board. The Mi3 also has 2GB of RAM and 16GB storage with a 13MP camera for photos and videos and another 2MP front-facing camera for those who just love taking selfies.The device runs on Android 4.4.2 KitKat with Xiaomi's own UI.

Via Geeky Gadgets

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HitchBOT: The Robotic Hitchhiker’s Guide to Canada

Posted: 29 Jul 2014 01:57 PM PDT

HitchBOT Hitchhiking Robot

In recent years, robots have assumed different roles, sometimes replacing humans for complicated tasks, other times complementing them. HitchBOT is about to take from us one of the life’s pleasures by becoming the world’s first hitchhiking robot.

On July 27, HitchBOT will leave Nova Scotia and head to Victoria. David Harris Smith, the assistant professor at Hamilton’s McMaster University who created HitchBOT thought that making a hitchhiking robot wouldn’t be such a bad idea. We all know that hitchhiking can be dangerous at times, but Smith is willing to take this risk.

This little hitchhiker was made using pool noodles, an old bucket, Wellington boots, rubber gloves, solar panels, and a miniature computer for a brain. Apart from the computerized brain, all the other things are rather common: “It’s made of things you might be pitching out of your garage on a Saturday morning to sell to your neighbors.”

His goal, as explained by Smith, is to collect stories from along the road, and share them with the rest of the world: “HitchBOT is traveling across the country, and it’s collecting stories as it goes, too. So it will ask if they have a story that they’d like to tell about traveling or hitchhiking. We would love for hitchBOT to have some adventures. Of course, I’ve hitchhiked across the country several times and for young people it used to be almost a rite of passage.”

Smith claims that HitchBOT will help us get used to being surrounded by robots at all times, something that surely won’t take long to happen: “As we move into a world where we are going to be interacting with robots on a regular basis and we’re going to find ourselves in areas of our social life, assisting our [aging] parents, for instance … These robots, in their design, they need to be respectful of social customs, of cultural attitudes etcetera.”

Much like humans, HitchBOT needs to be protected while traveling, so Smith encourages drivers who’ll take the hitchhiking robot for a ride to buckle up his seat belt: “We wanted people to intuitively be able to understand, ‘Oh yes, I can buckle this thing in to my car seat,’ because, you know, safety first. We want it to be secure in the car.”

As if the project wasn’t already amazing, Smith programmed HitchBOT to share his journey on social media: “It’ll be sort of like having an out-of-control teenager in your car, taking pictures of you and posting them to Facebook.”

In an interview with CBC Radio’s Information Morning, Smith deterred anyone thinking of stealing HitchBOT: “I think anyone who steals it, might have some second thoughts … look at how annoying it is. You may have an interesting conversation piece, but you've really subtracted all the fun out of the project.”

He’s definitely right about that last part!

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EA to Offer Unlimited Access on Xbox One for $5 a Month

Posted: 29 Jul 2014 01:19 PM PDT

EA Access

In an attempt to gain some of its lost fans, Electronic Arts announced that it will provide unlimited access for its games on Xbox One for a monthly subscription of only $4.99.

Anything that’s unlimited (and cheap) is great! Unfortunately, where I live (Romania), few things are unlimited, two notable examples being the air that we breathe (even though I would have a thing or two to say about its quality), and mobile telephony plans (the differences being quite steep between the carriers – the cheapest costs about $7 and the most expensive around $40 or more). In this context, EA’s unlimited plan couldn’t be a bad thing, now could it?

Well, for starters, EA Access, as this plan is called, is currently in a beta phase, and only four games (namely FIFA 14, Madden NFL 25, Peggle 2, and Battlefield 4) are available, with more to be added probably when the plan gets officially launched.

There are also some upsides to subscribing to this plan. First of all, EA Access users will not only have access to the game developer’s latest titles, but also to games that haven’t been launched yet. These are offered to the subscribers as a reward for being loyal to the company (now this is a great example of relationship marketing). Don’t assume that users will be offered early access to these titles a few weeks or months in advance. In fact, they will only be able to play the games up to 7 days earlier than the rest of the world. Best of all, saves will carry over, so gamers won’t have to start over after purchasing the game or accessing it through EA’s unlimited plan.

On top of that, users will get a 10% permanent discount on any EA digital purchases they make. Personally, I don’t see why anyone who can play any of EA’s games for such a modest price would pay to own a digital copy of the titles. The discount also applies to the early access titles.

Depending on what titles will be added later, EA Access might appeal to more than people who are into sports games. Electronic Arts has also been quite secretive about the launch date of this service, only saying that it will be available in the US and Europe “soon.”

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