polygons
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Square Enix sharpens up Final Fantasy 14's charmingly blocky grapes
The low-poly fruit became a meme when the Endwalker expansion arrived in November.
Microsoft has a trick for making holograms from live video
We've seen Microsoft's HoloLens do an awful lot of different things so far, but Halo, Minecraft and even medical applications are just scratching the surface of what the augmented reality headset is capable of. In a new research paper, Redmond outlines how it plans to grab live video that'd work as fodder for the device's holographic capabilities. Perhaps most importantly these holographic video feeds would be streamable over the internet, as Road to VR points out. By taking advantage of some 106 RGB and infrared cameras and a green screen, Microsoft says that it's able to capture, compress and recreate pretty lifelike results.
Lo Res Project builds abstract low-poly models of luxury cars and other trinkets
Triangles. Their scarcity has been the bane of gamers since the dawn of time (circa 1993) and every single leap forward in graphical performance has been tied to increasing polygon counts and smoothing out curvatures. Color us amused, then, to see someone going in the opposite direction for art's sake. The Lo Res Project from United Nude scans in 3D models of everyday objects -- like a Lamborghini Countach, we've all got one of those, right -- before scaling down the complexity of the resulting data to achieve radical-looking angular representations of the original as above. The best part, however, is that if they're really happy with their digital outcome, the designers go and build the damn thing in the real, living, breathing world. Some might describe it as sophistication through simplification, but we just see it as one of the truly geekiest ways to decorate your abode. Hit the source for a picture gallery.
Samsung's Galaxy S has four times the polygon power of Snapdragon
When we got some hands-on time with the recently announced Samsung Galaxy S, it was painfully apparent that the thing has some serious power under the hood. Now we have a better idea of just how much power, with reports indicating that it has the graphics oomph (thanks to its PowerVR SGX540 GPU) to push 90 million triangles per second. Compare that to the Snapdragon platform, which manages 22 million polygons, and the iPhone 3GS's 28 million from the earlier SGX535, and you get a feel for the muscle lurking behind that gorgeous Super AMOLED screen. Of course, polygon counts aren't everything when it comes to graphical power these days, and 300 million triangles won't help you if your handset gets laggy after you install every single Bejeweled clone in the Android Market, but forgive us if we're a little excited about the rapidly brewing mobile GPU war. [Thanks, Robert]
CUBE video takes games to "a whole new dimension"
If you're anything like us, you've been breathlessly following the development of CUBE for more than a decade now. Designed for the now-aging Monotech Game Unit, early press for the game boasted that it would "take you to a whole new dimension in computer games" and make "calculators look like a cotton gin." Then the PR went into Duke Nukem Forever levels of silence throughout the game's long development cycle. That is, until now. The new trailer for the game (embedded below the jump) shows the developers' bold decision not to update the game engine after all these years, sticking with a stark, minimalist look that distills the gameplay into its pure essence. Sure, the simple, textureless shapes on stark, single colored background might not stand up to the likes of Gears of War, but who needs fancy graphics when using the control switch to guide the "defender of the poly-verse" around the things which it can not go through looks like so much fun. The trailer even features some brief footage of the long-rumored "level red" and the battle with the dreaded cone (yes, he does exist!). We've been looking forward to this game for so long that, frankly, we were a little worried it wouldn't live up to our expectations once it finally showed up. Now that we've seen it in action, though, we can say with relative certainty that CUBE will be a contender for game of the year honors, no matter what year it eventually comes out.
