DynamicLighting
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Audi announces A2 electric concept car, uses lasers to ensure safety of future humans
Lasers make everything better, including (but not limited to): microphones, kidneys and Audi's electric A2 concept. This newest flight of fancy uses a laser diode as the rear fog lamp, which projects a red triangle onto the road to let other drivers know you're there. The German car-maker has tricked out the rest of the EV's lighting system as well by implementing matrix beam technology using LEDs and microreflectors -- giving it high resolution, non-glaring beams and intelligent tail lights that change in intensity based on weather conditions. Claiming other state-of-the-art features like gesture controls instead of keys, and brake lights that glow brighter the harder you press, it sounds like this would be a pretty sweet ride -- if it ever makes it to market. No word on the other, insignificant details (ya know, like what actually powers the thing) but there's plenty more about the car's lighting system in the PR after the break.
NVIDIA's quad-core Kal-El used to demo next-gen mobile graphics, blow minds (video)
You might think yourself too grown-up to be wowed by shiny, glittery things, but we doubt many will be able to watch NVIDIA's new Glow Ball tech demo without a smidgen of childlike glee. Built to run on the company's quad-core Kal-El processor, it shows us the first example of true dynamic lighting on mobile devices and also throws in some impressive physics calculations like fully modeled cloth motion. Instead of the pre-canned, static lights that we see on mobile games today, NVIDIA's new hardware will make it possible to create lighting that moves, fluctuates in intensity, and responds realistically to its environment -- all rendered in real time. The titular glow ball can be skinned with different textures, each one allowing a different amount and hue of illumination to escape to surrounding objects, and is directed around the screen using the accelerometer in your tablet or smartphone. NVIDIA demoed the new goodness on a Honeycomb slate with 1280 x 800 resolution and the frame rates remained smooth throughout. In order to emphasize the generational leap that we can expect with Kal-El, the company switched off two of the four cores momentarily, which plunged performance down to less than 10fps. That means the simulations we're watching require a full quartet of processing cores on top of the 12-core GPU NVIDIA has in Kal-El. Mind-boggling stuff. Glow Ball will be available as a game on Android tablets once this crazy new chip makes its way into retail devices -- which are still expected in the latter half of this year, August if everything goes perfectly to plan. One final note if you're still feeling jaded: NVIDIA promises the production chip will be 25 to 30 percent faster than the one on display today. Full video demo follows after the break.
Joystiq interview: Dementium's Renegade Kid
You may not recognize the name Renegade Kid, but chances are you're familiar with some of the more than twenty titles this tiny three-person development team in Austin has jointly had a hand in creating, including games such as XS Games' The Red Star, Aspyr's Stubbs the Zombie, and Namco's Sigma Star Saga. Now working as an independent developer under the Gamecock umbrella, Renegade Kid will soon launch its first title this Halloween with Dementium: The Ward, a first-person survival horror game for the Nintendo DS.We recently had a chance to gab some time with two members of Renegade Kid, co-owner and creative director Jools Watsham and fellow co-owner and art director Gregg Hargrove, and we spoke to them about what it's like to work under their Gamecock overlords (did I say overlords? I meant protectors), as well as as just how crazy they must be to attempt a game as ambitious as Dementium on the DS as their freshman effort. Read on.%Gallery-3636%
