Stadia is making headlines with its streaming game service but a pack is forming close behind. Sony has been in the game. Watch for entries from Sony, Microstation, Nividia, and Samsung Cloud gaming has been tried since 2003, by several companies. Since then, the internet has gotten a lot faster, and processors have too. The time may be right … Read more
Nobody said gamers would stop gaming. The detail is simply, like audiophiles used to have much higher end equipment than what anyone else could afford, or a high-end cell phone was different than a low end, technology being a great equalizer has made consoles, “good enough.” In the bad old days of the 80's when computer memory was still measured … Read more
Microsoft announced its plans to acquire GitHub last June. At the time the announcement inspired considerable gnashing of teeth. No surprise there. GitHub is a community of developers—free-spirited, open-source type of developers. We actually found it interesting that the revulsion was not so vehement. The announcement made us realize that GitHub is actually company. Yes, of course, it is a … Read more
Microsoft is aggressively increasing its in house game development work and is adding five new game development teams through acquisition and is also founding a new development studio called the Initiative, which will be based in Santa Monica and led by Darrell Gallagher. Gallagher told Dean Takahashi in a VentureBeat interview just about nothing other than that his job is to … Read more
PTC’s LiveWorx conference is all about the Internet of Things and AR. It has grown out of the PTC acquisition of ThingWorx and the subsequent remaking of the company to put it in the middle of digital lifecycle of products. In January 2018, PTC and Microsoft announced a strategic alliance around the HoloLens, which would encourage the development of … Read more
The PTC conference kicked off this year with a show of strength and confidence. The company announced three major alliances this year and they highlight three different areas of focus for the company. The company is teaming with: Ansys, is known for its simulation technology especially FEA. Ansys has developed technology they call Discovery Live, which enables lightning … Read more
Outward AR is an interesting approach Microsoft’s Beamatron was one of the fist AR projection systems in 2012 using a fixed location projector (video here). Valve spinoff, Cast AR, was the first in 2013 to try using a projector as part of an AR headset. Microsoft tried it again in 2014 with their RoomAlive project. The idea was to turn … Read more
At GDC, Nvidia and Microsoft made a joint announcement about the possibility of doing real time ray tracing, something the CG community has striven for since ray tracing was popularized by Turner Whitted in 1979. Whitted did it on big computers at Bell Labs, just before the PC was introduced. Since then, scores of papers and books have been written … Read more
Smelling and tasting next? VR resurgence into the consumer space has brought with it a host of wants. It is pretty clear that people want to have VR experiences and want them more realistic. One by one the challenges are being reduced if not totally eliminated. Resolution and FOV have been improved, screen door effect minimized, better apps and faster … Read more
FreeSynch on HDMI tears our tarring. Why should PC gamers have all the fun? Indeed. Just because you can get a beautiful, large screen 4K UHD monitor and drive it with a powerful GPU that is used in supercomputer, doesn’t mean folks who can’t afford that kind of rig, or people who want to sit back and game on a … Read more
Misconceptions about Microsoft’s recent update Microsoft’s update for Windows 10, the Spring Edition, is going to add new artificial intelligence capabilities which is it calling Windows ML. These capabilities will be open to developers allowing them to use pre-trained machine learning models in their apps for Windows-based devices such as PCs, workstations, and servers and including HoloLens and IoT edge … Read more
Back in the go-go years leading up to the Internet bubble. I developed an adage which proved to be faultless, and a dire predictor of a company’s fate—as the building goes up, the company comes down. However, today with well-established firms like Apple, Nvidia, the amazing Salesforce Benioff tower in down town SF, Amazon, Google, and now Microsoft, that adage … Read more
