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.
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.
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.
So how does it work?
"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.
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.
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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If you are taking a picture yourself, you can fix this problem by using a flash, or by increasing the size of the aperture (f-stop), or by keeping the camera aperture open for a longer time assuming you have a largely static scene.
But if you do not control the picture, the problem becomes tough to fix. Fortunately, not all is lost. You will learn it is possible to use certain statistics of the image called the dark channel prior and bright channel prior to recover information from a single badly lit image.
When I was in grad school, I read every paper of some of my favorite researchers. Dr. Shree Nayar of Columbia University was on the top of that list. His papers on physics-based vision illuminated new concepts with clarity and elegance.
I was pleasantly surprised when he recently reached out to me via linkedin and informed me about his free lecture series titled "First Principles of Computer Vision." I went through several videos in the series. I wish I had access to these video lectures when I was in grad school.
You recommend you check them out. This is the kind of free material you should go and consume before you pay for courses.
When you are ready for a hands-on course experience with lots of practical examples, I recommend you take the Official AI courses by OpenCV.org. Click the button below to join the waitlist - the wait time is about two weeks. People on the waitlist get priority, and also a chance to buy the courses at a 20% discount when the enrollment opens.
I'm sure some of you are sick of working from home, hunched over tiny laptops. It's definitely a smart time to upgrade your work PC setup. Engadget already covered standing desks and our favorite WFH upgrades a while ago, but I've long had my eyes on an ultrawide monitor; something I could effortlessly combine Slack, web-browsing and more on while writing my words for this very site.
Fortunately, there's Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar, who's already dabbled in excessive 49-inch PC monitors. He's now tested out Dell's new UltraSharp 40, a 40-inch 5K2K (5,120 x 2,160) screen that's very much aimed at buttoned-down get-business-done types and not gamers in pursuit of low ms responses.
The UltraSharp 40 has enough ports for serious work, including DisplayPort 1.4, two HDMI 2.0 ports, and a Thunderbolt 3 USB-C connection with power delivery for laptops. There's also five USB Type A connections, a 3.5 millimeter audio jack and Ethernet. In a lot of ways, it's a PC hub with a screen, in a lot of ways... Just one that costs $2,100 (or $1,680 if you manage to find it on sale). Read on for Devindra's full review.
The teenage hacker who authorities accused of being the mastermind behind the infamous Twitter Bitcoin hack last year, has pleaded guilty to all 30 of the charges he faced. As part of the deal, he agreed to serve a three-year prison sentence at a juvenile facility. As he was 17 years old at the time of arrest, he was classified as a "youthful offender" under Florida law, which meant he avoided the minimum 10-year sentence that adults would have been handed. Continue reading.
Before things went boom on the landing pad, SpaceX's last high-altitude flight test was pretty incredible. Now the company has released a high-quality video that ends just after its vehicle touches down in one piece. Continue reading.
They'll receive benefits like pension pay and holiday time.
Starting today, Uber will classify all of its UK-based drivers as workers. While not full employees of the company, more than 70,000 drivers will now have access to benefits like a minimum wage, holiday pay and a pension. In a filing with the SEC, Uber said it would enroll eligible drivers in a plan where the company will contribute approximately three percent of their pay toward their pension. It will also provide all drivers with paid holiday time at a rate of 12.07 percent of their earnings. Continue reading.
Intel has finally given us more information about its next family of desktop CPUs, codenamed Rocket Lake S. The fastest offering will be the Core i9-11900K, an 8-core chip that reaches up to 5.3GHz on a single core. Notably, that's two fewer cores than last year's 10900K. Devindra Hardawar explains what performance Intel has been able to wring out of its aging 14nm process, and how that compares to the competition from AMD for gamers and professionals. Continue reading.
This high-tech blend of acoustic and electric is unique and expensive.
We've been playing Fender's next-gen Acoustasonic guitar, which attempts to offer acoustic sounds in a very electric-looking package. And what a premium package it is, with an ocean turquoise finish and solid materials. Managing Editor Terrence O'Brien gets musical again, and he's almost won over. Oh, and it's $2,000. Continue reading.
While there have been plenty of games that dance around the themes and gameplay dynamics of Dungeons and Dragons, its creators, Wizards of the Coast, have never published a video game. The company will, though, this June, with Dark Alliance launching on Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, PS5 and Steam. It will offer free upgrades from PS4 and Xbox One to new-generation consoles, too. Each of the four characters on offer (fighter, rogue, barbarian and ranger) has its own playstyle and custom abilities, and you'll unlock more skills and better gear as you progress. And, in true D&D style, you can play co-op with up to three of your friends. Continue reading.
