Kyle Orland

Traditional, point-based motion capture (the kind brought to you by guys in black suits with reflective balls) has been great for developers that want to capture basic skeletal motion for their in-game characters. But for realistic facial work, even setups with hundreds of reflective dots leave developers with rough, blocky data that requires a lot of post-production work to even start approaching the uncanny valley.

Enter motion capture company Mova, whose Contour Reality Capture system uses an array of cameras to create 100,000 polygon facial models that are accurate to within a tenth of a millimeter — no special reflective balls required. At this year’s GDC, the company is trying to attract the game industry’s attention by unveiling examples of their facial modeling running in real-time on the popular Unreal Engine 3.

(full article)

It’s a point that comes up a lot in arguments about the cultural import of video games. "The medium is still young," defenders argue. "Games may not have reached total mainstream acceptance yet, but just give it some more time. You’ll see."

We hate to break it to you guys, but video games aren’t that young anymore. This month marks 40 years since Ralph Baer’s Brown Box effectively created the idea of interactive screen-based games (and the industry is even older if you count Willy Higinbotham’s 1958 experiment Tennis for Two).

This important milestone got us wondering: how do the first 40 years of gaming compare to the first 40 years of other forms of mass entertainment? Continue reading for a quick historical comparison:

(full article)

The whole point of backward compatibility for most PS3 owners is being able to get rid of that PS2 in the old entertainment center. Yet many PS3 owners have had to keep their PS2 units hooked up for a few reasons, namely:

1. Support for our old memory card saves.
2. Support for rumbling controllers.
3. Support for the Guitar Hero controller.

(full article)

We think it’s a given by this point that most regular Joystiq readers know that playing violent video games will not suddenly turn you into a violent killer, or even make you any more likely to commit a violent act ever in your life. Still, with media personalities like Dr. Phil and Jack Thompson out there baselessly implicating games in the recent Virginia Tech massacre, we felt younger game players might need something to defend their hobby to parents that don’t have the same familiarity with the medium.

Hence the following declaration, to be printed, signed and presented to any authority figure with the misguided fear that the games you love will lead to a life of violent crime. We hope this declaration will help start a conversation with the non-gamers in your life about why video games are so important to you and why they aren’t the bogeymen some in the media make them out to be.

(full article) 

When a Washington Post story mentioned that Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung Hui played Counter-Strike in high school, we were intrigued. When the nugget disappeared from an online version of the Post story, we were even more intrigued

To clarify the situation, we caught up with Washington Post Staff Writer David Cho, who was responsible for originally reporting the factoid.

(full article)

The internet speculation machine has been gearing up of late over a recent press release announcing that Japanese middleware provider eSol has been selected to provide its "’PrUSB/Host’ USB host stack" for use in the Wii. How to interpret this inscrutable piece of techspeak? Well, the release goes on to state that PrUSB/Host provides "optional Mass Storage class driver enables using USB flash memory, other mass storage device and digital camera as the external storage."

…

The only problem is, the Wii has always had this functionality, and Nintendo has always had the potential to make such a statement.

(full article) 

That’s right: two systems, two games, two microphones, one performance. Which game would be more lenient on our awful singing? Continue reading to find out.

(full article) 

Amid concerns that the European version of the PlayStation 3 will be less than fully backward compatible, Sony has unveiled a new web site listing old games that will work under the version 1.6 firmware, due to be released concurrently with the European launch on Thursday. Unfortunately, the site is organized in a rather user-unfriendly paged format that requires a lot of clicking around to get to the data you want. We did some extra legwork and copied the data into a couple of convenient Google Docs spreadsheets (PS1, PS2). We also crunched the numbers to see just how extensive the European PS3’s backward compatibility will be at launch.

(full article) 

I was rubbing the sleep from my eyes after waking up way too early for a Sunday morning when I got a call from my 13-year-old sister, Paige (pictured to the right). "How’s it going?" I asked. "Not good," she said.

(full article)

When we saw via Game|Life that some IGN forums goers had taken steel wool to a Blu-ray disc with no apparent damage, we thought, "we can do better than that." So we gathered up some convenient implements of destruction and saw how our free copy of Talladega Nights would stand up to a ballpoint pen, a pizza cutter and a butcher’s knife (unfortunately, the disc broke down before we could rub crunchy cereal all over it.) Check out the video below, and keep watching to the end for some pyrotechnic bonus footage.

(full article)