These are the games that kept us sane for the past year |
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Today is St. Patrick's Day, and since the ongoing pandemic makes it sketchy to head out to your local pub for a pint, we wanted to share some thoughts on our other favorite way to stay entertained: Video games. We asked DT employees about the games that helped them through the past year, and we got some unexpectedly heartwarming responses. |
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It admittedly feels a little wrong to call the past 12 months a "good year" for video games considering that it was such an awful one in so many other, much more important respects. Regardless, video games did rise to the occasion in an important way that's worth celebrating. When isolation pushed us away from our friends and families, video games were there to bridge those physical gaps. When we were simply lost for what to do inside our apartments, games stepped in to fill the silence.
It's not just that video games helped kill time; they taught us how to become comfortable in digital spaces. Animal Crossing: New Horizons served as a tutorial for the rest of the pandemic as players used it to create makeshift birthday parties, weddings, and campaign rallies. Among Us offered a kind of entertainment that proved to be a suitable replacement for in-person board game nights. And, of course, Fortnite continued to raise the bar for what a metaverse can be with water cooler events like live concerts.
Everyone has a different story about what games helped them through the past 12 months of a tragic period of history. Here are just a few of the games that filled some of those gaps in our own lives. |
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If you've ever wandered around a virtual environment before, chances are pretty good that you've experienced some level of disorientation -- and perhaps even sickness. Virtual reality is known to give some users a unique form of motion sickness, often called cybersickness, that occurs when motion perceived by the inner ear doesn't match up with motion perceived by the user's eyes. But thanks to some clever coding, there might soon be a fix that eradicates cybersickness once and for all. |
"With this new system, when the user moves in the physical world, their motion is reflected in the virtual world," the creator, Jason McEwen explained to Digital Trends. "Their vestibular system, which senses their physical motion, matches what is experienced by their visual system. By ensuring these two systems remain in harmony, and not in conflict, Copernic360 eliminates the visual-vestibular conflict of standard 360-degree VR experiences."
Essentially, what it does is to use A.I. to morph images slightly in order to add movement. It's a bit like how animation "in-betweeners" draw extra frames between keyframes to make movement seem smoother. "The user is then able to move about in the reconstructed scene, and novel synthetic viewpoints are then rendered on the fly and served to the user depending on their position in the scene," McEwen continued. |
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Samsung's not satisfied with only launching the new Galaxy S21, Galaxy S21+, and S21 Ultra during the first half of the year, and has announced the new Galaxy A52, Galaxy A52 5G, and Galaxy A72 to join them. However, unlike the expensive flagship S-series, the A-series phones are much cheaper -- but according to the company, they're still awesome. Here's the skinny on each of them:
Samsung Galaxy A72
The Galaxy A72 is the most expensive of the three at 450 euros, or about $550. It has a 6.7-inch Super AMOLED screen with a 90Hz refresh rate, a 64-megapixel main camera, a 12MP wide-angle camera, and an 8MP telephoto camera with a 3x optical zoom, plus a 5MP camera for macro duties. It's a 4G LTE phone with an unnamed octa-core processor (which we assume is a Samsung Exynos chip), up to 8GB of RAM, and either 128GB or 256GB of storage space. It also has a 5,000mAh battery, a MicroSD card slot, an in-display fingerprint sensor, and IP67 water resistance.
Samsung Galaxy A52
The Galaxy A52 is the cheapest at just 350 euros, or around $315, and looks to bean excellent value. It also has a 6.5-inch screen with a 90Hz refresh rate, plus it has the same processor, RAM, and internal storage options as the A72. The same 64MP main and 12MP wide-angle cameras are on board, but this time with a pair of 5MP cameras for macro and depth photography. It's also a 4G LTE phone, and has a 4,500mAh battery inside, along with the same IP67 water-resistance rating, MicroSD card slot, and in-display fingerprint sensor as the A72.
Samsung Galaxy A52 5G
Finally, the Galaxy A52 5G costs 430 euros, or about $510. It adds 5G connectivity, obviously, plus it increases the screen refresh rate to 120Hz on the same 6.5-inch Super AMOLED panel as the regular Galaxy A52, but is otherwise identical. All three phones share many features. It's great to see optical image stabilization (OIS) on all three main cameras, the OneUI 3 user interface over Android 11, Dolby Atmos support and more powerful speakers, and some clever software to deliver an emergency 30 minutes of battery life when you really need it. Samsung says to expect two days' use out of all the phones before needing a recharge.
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TIPS, TRICKS, & TECHNIQUES |
by Joseph Yaden and Steven Petite |
As the 21st century slides into cyberpunk dystopia, online privacy is (or should be) on everyone's mind, particularly given the Federal Communications Commission's 2017 ruling on net neutrality. Virtual private networks (VPNs) are an increasingly popular way to assert a bit more control over your traffic and protect your data from the prying eyes of nefarious hackers and greedy telecommunication monopolies alike. You can even set up VPNs for gaming consoles, like the Xbox One -- and you totally should. It's supereasy. Click below to see how it's done. |
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