NVIDIA's GRID cloud gaming service gets 1080p 60 FPS streaming

NVIDIA just flipped on a major upgrade for its GRID cloud gaming service: Full 1080p support at a blistering 60 frames per second. That's the same resolution and frame rate as many games running on the Xbox One and PS4, and it's pretty much the gold standard for PC gamers. And most importantly for NVIDIA, the update makes it the first company to offer game streaming at such a high resolution over the internet. To take advantage of the new streaming feature, you'll need to grab one of the company's SHIELD gaming devices (either the original handheld console or its gaming tablet), sign up for the SHIELD Hub beta group and have at least a 30 Mbps internet connection. We'd imagine it'll likely be a compelling draw for the company's upcoming SHIELD Android set-top box.

So far, NVIDIA is offering around 35 games for free streaming over GRID, including Ultra Street Fighter 4 and Batman: Arkham Origins. Come June, it'll also debut a premium option (no, we don't have pricing details yet).

While you can get 1080p/60p game streaming within your local network in a variety of ways -- including Nvidia's own GeForce Experience offering on PCs and Valve's Steam platform -- offering it remotely over the internet will be the holy grail for plenty of game companies. At this point, Valve's got a major head start -- and it's still making progress. The company also announced today that it's opening up two new GRID data centers in the southwestern US and Central Europe. It's currently running six data centers around the world, offering GRID to gamers in 20 countries.

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Article: This Crazy Camera Rig Takes Wildly Realistic 3D Pictures

Welcome to the (almost) holodeck We've all seen basic 3D pictures before. There are those distorted picture-globes you can take with your phone, or Google's Street View photospheres. They're impressive in their own way, but they're just 2D images arranged in a slightly 3D-ish manner. Pretty, but ...

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Microsoft shows off Windows Holographic running Windows 10 apps

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2015/04/29/windows-holographic-windows-10-apps-hololens/

When Microsoft debuted its Windows Holographic software and HoloLens headset a few months back, Windows 10 apps were mentioned as a possibility. Well, at Build 2015 today, the folks in Redmond offered a look at Windows 10 Universal apps in holographic action. During the onstage demo, apps could be placed on walls or set to float in space, and resized based on the user's needs -- something we'd only seen in videos up to this point. Of course, this means that users in different locations can collaborate on 3D models without having to be in the same room. Any Windows 10 app can be used as a hologram with the headset, so getting work done at a place other than your desk will soon be a possibility.

With those apps in play, you can overlay a hologram on top of a physical object and make tweaks without heading back to the keyboard. Just like the real and virtual robots we saw onstage, you wrangle simple changes, like the color of an LED, with gestures and the projected UI. Microsoft partnered with Case Western Reserve University to develop medical solutions for the platform, and those were shown off, too. Up-close examinations of the nervous and skeletal systems are now possible without the use of cadavers, and each of the body's systems can be displayed as a separate model in seconds. For architects, Windows Holographic brings the ability to walk through buildings without leaving the office, or through those projects that are still just blueprints. Of course, we'll have to wait and see what the final version looks like, but Microsoft's vision for how we'll work in the near-future is pretty enticing.

Filed under: Misc, Microsoft

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3 atom-thick transistor promises ultra-thin electronics

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2015/04/29/3-atom-thick-transistor-promises-ultra-thin-electronics/

Researchers from Cornell University announced a breakthrough in transistor technology in the latest issue of the journal, Nature. The team has reportedly developed a novel and highly efficient method of producing an experimental material known as transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD). TMD is an exceedingly thin (but highly conductive) film, which makes it useful in many high-tech applications -- everything from solar cells to flexible, wearable gadgets -- but also makes it a huge pain to produce in appreciable quantities. That is, until now.

"Our work pushes TMDs to the technologically relevant scale, showing the promise of making devices on that scale," Saien Xie, one of the paper's lead authors. TMD, like the similarly touted wonder-material graphene, could help extend Moore's Law by providing a stable and compact substrate onto which engineers can pack an ever-increasing number of circuits. However, since it's only three atoms thick, TMD production typically suffers from a high rate of breakage and failure. The new method from Cornell, which mixes diethylsulfide and a metal hexacarbonyl compound atop a silicon wafer and then bakes them for 26 hours in hydrogen gas, has proven far more successful.

Out of a batch of 200 such wafers created for the study, only two failed -- that's a 99 percent success rate. With these results in hand, the research team hopes to streamline the manufacturing process as well as improve the consistency of the resulting film. The technology is still at least a few years away from being commercially viable but when it is, we could see it usher in a new era of paper-thin, super-powerful electronics.

Filed under: Science

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Via: The Verge

Source: Nature

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Get your Windows 10 preview for Raspberry Pi 2 while it's hot

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2015/04/30/windows-10-preview-raspberry-pi-2/

Day one of Microsoft's Build 2015 conference is in the books, but that doesn't mean the news has stopped. The Windows 10 IoT Core Insider developer preview (phew!) has launched for small devices including the Raspberry Pi 2. Redmond admits that it's still pretty rough around the edges, but it's hoping that the maker community can provide feedback for how the platform's turning out along the road to a full release. What's more, the software giant is partnering with Arduino for a series of "Arduino Certified" products to bring the ubiquitous DIY boards into the Windows family and take advantage of all that the software has to offer. For example, cloud computing, a familiar user interface, image processing and a ton more. It follows the theme of bringing everything under one roof that Nadella and Co. have been so vocal about lately, and should hopefully help tinkerers develop some pr! etty pow erful stuff in their garage.

The Windows IoT shell is a Universal app like any other on Win10. That's all your RPi will do :D pic.twitter.com/GwVkUxUCPA

- Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) April 30, 2015

This is what your Raspberry Pi 2 running Windows 10 will boot up to (you can run the x86 version on your desktop): pic.twitter.com/td1qonbdhX

- Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) April 30, 2015

Filed under: Desktops, Microsoft

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Source: Windows Blog, Steve Troughton-Smith (Twitter) (1), (2)

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