isotopes
Latest
EVE Fanfest 2013 day two: World of Darkness, Odyssey, and EVE Virtual Reality with the Oculus Rift
EVE Online's tenth anniversary Fanfest promised to be its biggest yet, with over 1,400 players packed into Iceland's Harpa convention centre to find out the latest on EVE Online, DUST 514, and World of Darkness. The first day focused mainly on DUST and its link with the EVE universe, but today the focus largely switched back to internet spaceships. There were plenty of roundtable discussions, and the CSM and Alliance panels were as awesome as ever, but it was the EVE Keynote that really blew the crowd away. The day got off to a good start with the highly anticipated World of Darkness talk. Most fans were probably expecting to see more airy game design ideas and another shiny trailer, but this year CCP just came out and put all its cards on the table. We saw that the game is still firmly in pre-production, with much of the previous work going into developing the engine and cool content creation tools and shaders. While I was initially disappointed at the lack of gameplay progress or shiny cinematics, I found this approach of being open and direct with fans very refreshing. As I told WoD art director Thomas Holt, honest beats shiny every time. Read on for a full run-down of the EVE reveals from the second day of EVE's tenth anniversary Fanfest, including in-depth details of the Odyssey expansion's features.
Radioactive Orchestra 2.0 takes the music live, makes sweet photonic melodies (video)
Sweden's Kollektivet Livet took a step towards demystifying the invisible energy around us last year through its Radioactive Orchestra, which turned isotopes into beats and beeps. To our relief, the Orchestra isn't content to record in the studio. Version 2.0 of the music project is all about going on tour, so to speak, through live instruments: in a first prototype, a photon detector translates every radiation hit from nearby materials into its own audio pulse. The invention results in an imprecise art based on distance, but aspiring cesium rock stars can tweak the sensitivity or transpose the notes to generate their own distinct tunes. Orchestra manager Georg Herlitz tells us that the initial setup you see here, played at TEDx Gotëborg, is just a "sneak peek" of both a finished instrument and more work to come. We might just line up for the eventual concerts if the performance video after the break (at the 11:00 mark) is any indication.
