Lifeboat Foundation

Parents who limit their kids’ screen time, it seems, may be doing them a service: a new study has found that babies who spend a lot of time looking at iPads and other screens experience developmental delays.

Published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association of Pediatrics, this new research out of Japan suggests that watching screens may limit infants’ practicing of real-life motor skills that they glean from mimicking the people near them.

In a questionnaire, the parents of the more than 7,000 kids surveyed were asked a simple question: “On a typical day, how many hours do you allow your children to watch TV, DVDs, video games, internet games (including mobile phones and tablets), etc?”

Only five bots will be made and are priced at $2.5 million a piece.

Japanese company Tsubame pulls this straight from science fiction and makes Transformer-like mecha robots. The first, dubbed Archax, has a cockpit where a human can sit to pilot the bot and, at the touch of a button, can even take a different form. Although not with the finesse, the Autobots manage with animation in the movie franchise.

Continue reading “Archax, the 15 foot tall mecha that can be piloted by a human” »

A film that has spawned a thousand imitations but never been bettered — Mamoru Oshii’s legendary anime film GHOST IN THE SHELL returns in a stunning new edition remastered by Oshii himself. Set in a re-imagined Hong Kong at a time when cyberspace is expanding into human reality, the story follows top cyberwarrior Major Motoko Kusanagi as she hovers on the border of total immersion in the digital world.

The latest advancements in AI for gaming are in the spotlight today at Gamescom, the world’s largest gaming conference, as NVIDIA introduced a host of technologies, starting with DLSS 3.5, the next step forward of its breakthrough AI neural rendering technology.

DLSS 3.5, NVIDIA’s latest innovation in AI-powered graphics is an image quality upgrade incorporated into the fall’s hottest ray-traced titles, from Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty to Alan Wake 2 to Portal with RTX.

Continue reading “NVIDIA Debuts AI-Enhanced Real-Time Ray Tracing for Games and Apps With New DLSS 3.5” »

An experimental video shows what video games could feel like if characters were aware of and responsive to themselves and their surroundings.

YouTuber Foxmaster took on the classic game “Tomb Raider” in its original version. Using various AI tools for machine vision, localization, object recognition, animation, text, and speech, he breathed digital life into the game character, or more specifically, a Lara Croft bot that controls its own character.

Continue reading “AI makes Lara Croft ‘self-aware’ in Tomb Raider, a glimpse into the future of video games” »

Jordi van den Bussche has been posting gaming content on YouTube for over a decade. He’s now announced he’ll be stepping away from the camera, thanks to an AI replacement. Some viewers are skeptical about the change, but the YouTuber is confident it will bring success.

A YouTuber has launched his own AI replacement, which will now be starring in and producing videos on his behalf. It’s caused quite a stir among viewers who are debating whether they’re fans of the drastic change.

Jordi van den Bussche, a gaming creator based in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, has been posting on YouTube under the moniker “Kwebbelkop” since 2011 and has so far amassed a following of 15.1 million subscribers.

The central problem quantum state engineering is trying to solve, says Ryan Glasser is “what do I need to do to get my quantum system to be in the state I desire?” Researchers hope ManQala, a version of the ancient game mancala, has answers. (Credit: Tobias Tullius/Unsplash)

The game mancala may have originated as far back as 6,000 BCE in Jordan and is played around the world to this day. It consists of stones that players move between a series of small pits on a wooden game board. The point of the game is to get all the stones into the last pit at the end of the board.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll.
Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/08/07/ama-august-2023/

Welcome to the August 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number — based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good — and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Continue reading “Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | August 2023” »

Developed by Pixar, Universal Scene Description (USD) is the first open-source software that can robustly and scalably interchange 3D scenes that may be composed of many different assets, sources, and animations, while fostering highly collaborative workflows.

At Pixar, engineers work hand in hand with artists to create innovative technologies, tools, and pipelines that make our films. In this clip from Toy Story 4, millions of models, textures, lights, and colors are possible because of the power of USD architecture.

Continue reading “Pixar Animation Studios” »