Previous "Iwata Asks" interviews have brought up several previous 3D prototypes from Nintendo, including GBA and GameCube-based versions. During his talk about the 3DS's development, hardware producer Hideki Konno revealed another prototype, designed before the 3DS was even a glimmer in Nintendo's collective eye.
Nintendo wired up a glasses-free 3D display to a Wii, and set it up on a cart to wheel around the company for demonstrations. And then, because it wasn't hacky or impractical enough, the team hooked a proof-of-concept version of the 3D depth slider to a Nunchuk -- with hot glue.
Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie wants to show you the haunting bridge his team has built over the uncanny valley. Employing Kinect hardware and custom PC software, the research team at Microsoft has created an unnervingly realistic new avatar that can handle text-to-speech when combined with a script and can recognize the words in any order.
"This is a way to create a synthetic model of people that will be acceptable to them when they would look at them on a television or in an Avatar Kinect kind of scenario," Mundie told USA Today in a video interview. "There's no reason that we couldn't do that in real time by feeding the information that we get from a Kinect sensor, including its audio input and its 3D modeling, spacial representation, and couple that to the body and the gesture recognition in order to create a full body avatar, that has photo realistic features and full facial animation," he added.
This impressive (if not somewhat terrifying) demo is still very much in the prototype phase, however, and Mundie said it would be "some time before we see it show up in products." We're just hoping those first "products" aren't T-1000s.
Last week, Activision uploaded a teaser site featuring the tagline "Murder Your Maker," which we hypothesized was hinting at the reveal of a new installment in the Prototype series during the Spike VGAs. A brief video which was recently added to the site appears to confirm our suspicions.
Earlier this week, a mysterious Spike VGA 2010 site asked its visitors to consider the secret meanings of two mysterious and secret words: "MURDER" and "LOOK CLOSER." Today, a new teaser site offers a few more clues. The page, titled "Murder Your Maker," features the image seen above: A bald man, staring at a wall covered in maps, newspaper clippings and delicious strands of black licorice. Or, wait. String. Yeah, that's definitely string.
The "Murder Your Maker" tagline has led some theorists to believe we're looking at a teaser for a sequel to last year's super violent, open-world title, Prototype. Alex Mercer certainly has some daddy issues, but our money is on that new God of War game, where Kratos is literally tasked with killing God.
Oh, Activision runs the website? Well, in that case ... does "Bloodhunt" sound about right?
Grumbling over the prospect of spending $150 on a Kinect sensor? At least you didn't have to drop $30,000 to get your Sonic Free Riders on. The NYT reports that the first Kinect prototype cost Microsoft that much to build -- which kind of makes the fact that Microsoft was able to get that technology into a $150 box (on each sale of which, the Times' Ashlee Vance notes, MS will profit) a bit more impressive.
The article provides a tidbit of new information about how the device recognizes people. In the case of identical, identically-dressed twins, the Kinect's software will evidently distinguish between the two by asking each to identify him or herself. "'If it can't disambiguate, we say, 'Please tell us if you are A or B,'" Xbox director of incubation Alex Kipman said. "Then, you end up with the equivalent of a different bar code." You'll be able to turn your family into bar codes on November 4.
According to industry vet Jake Kazdal, immediately following the completion of Rez, a small group of developers at United Game Artists worked on a prototype for Rez 2. Kazdal -- a man who's worked everywhere from Nintendo to Irem to Sega, and is currently developing Skulls of the Shogun -- also explained on the latest 8-4 Play podcast that another game he worked on, Steven Spielberg's now mythic "Project LMNO," has been canceled. EA confirmed as much, telling Joystiq this afternoon, "While EA maintains its relationship with Steven Spielberg, we ceased development of LMNO."
We pushed EA for clarification about the status of any projects in development with Spielberg and were told again, "EA maintains its relationship with Steven Spielberg. EA has ceased development of LMNO. EA continually monitors development resources and adjusts resources as appropriate. No new title announcements."
Reports began circulation this morning about major layoffs at a handful of Activision-owned development studios, affecting as much as half of Radical Entertainment's staff (Prototype), an undisclosed amount of Neversoft employees (Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk), and the entirety of Luxoflux (Tranformers). An Activision rep confirmed the layoffs to us this afternoon, not giving specific numbers, but solidifying the closure of Luxoflux in entirety.
The full company statement reads: "Activision Publishing continually evaluates its resources to ensure that they are properly matched against its product slate and strategic goals. In 2010, the company's SKU count will be smaller than in 2009 driven in part, by a decrease in the number of music-based games we will be releasing. As we discussed on our earnings conference call yesterday, we are directing our resources against the largest and most profitable business segments, and as part of this initiative, we are realigning our resources to better reflect our slate and the market opportunities. At the same time, we are increasing our digital/online capabilities as we expect that digital/online will continue to become a more meaningful part of our business model in the years ahead."
The image above could serve as kind of robotic Rorschach test. What do you see? A cute little tripod help-o-bot, whose head is cocked curiously to the side, as though its studying its new master to better serve his or her robotic needs? Or is it a three-legged killing machine, who's observing his new master's weaknesses, which it plans to exploit with its now-charging eye lasers?
Sadly, the answer's not as provocative as either of those two choices -- its actually a photo of a Project Natal prototype, as nabbed by the Seattle Times. According to the report which includes the photograph, Natal units and iPhones are being produced in the same factory. We're terrified of the thought of these two consumer electronics cross-pollinating -- we're pretty sure that's how SkyNet got started.
[Via Siliconera]
The website for Eric Testroete, who recently made the rounds for his "big head mode" Halloween costume, shows work-in-progress screens of an unannounced Wii war game he animated for MLB Superstars developer Deep Fried Entertainment. The game uses an almost top-down, zoomed-out perspective, and appears to put the player (or players) in control of jeeps equipped with machine guns. As Kotaku notes, it looks rather like Konami's Jackal, prompting the site to speculate that it's a ReBirth made for Konami, like the recent Castlevania, Contra, and Gradius games. If true, it would be the first ReBirth title not to be developed by M2 in Japan. Of course, the American side of Konami is also working on refreshes of old Konami franchises in the form of Rocket Knight, so there is precedent.
