physics
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MIT's relativistic OpenRelativity toolkit now freely available
MIT Game Lab's OpenRelativity toolset, which powered its psychedelic first-person collection game/physics demonstration A Slower Speed of Light, is now available for free through Github. The toolkit works in both free and paid versions of Unity. OpenRelativity allows for the real-time simulation of principles such as time dilation, Lorentz transformation and relativistic Doppler shift by allowing the designer to augment the ways in which light behaves. As it turns out, light moving at the speed it normally does is pretty dang essential to our world not transforming into a disorienting funhouse where cause and effect are meaningless. Who could have guessed?
Massively Exclusive: How WildStar has the power to move you
Movement does not normally seem like a complicated topic in MMOs. You press forward; your character goes forward. Backward? Same deal. You can turn, and you can strafe, and you can turn and strafe and run forward if you're some kind of rebel or you want to give yourself motion sickness. But WildStar makes movement a bigger deal than normal because with a greater emphasis on action comes a greater emphasis on moving out of the path of danger. The latest official video covers all the basics of movement, from dashing to sprinting to pining for the presumably nonexistent quadruple jump. But we had a chance to sit down with lead combat systems designer Chris Lynch and lead class designer Hugh Shelton to talk about more of the specifics, starting with the obvious question: What beast must we slay to unlock the all-powerful quadruple jump? Wait, that wasn't it. It was about chaining movement tricks together in an endless cycle of airborne dashes.
Physics teacher adopts Google Glass, gives students a glance at CERN (video)
When Google asked what we'd do if we had Glass, it was no doubt hoping we'd produce some world-changing ideas. We now know at least a few exist, courtesy of physics teacher Andrew Vanden Heuvel. He's long been hoping to use the wearable tech for remote teaching and one-on-one sessions, and the Glass Explorer program has given him the chance to do just that. His first stop? None other than CERN. Courtesy of a trip for Google's new Explorer Story video series, Vanden Heuvel is the first person to teach a science course while inside the Large Hadron Collider tunnel, streaming his perspective to students thousands of miles away. While we don't know if other Explorer Stories will be quite as inspiring, we'll admit to being slightly jealous -- where was Glass when we were kids? [Thanks, Peter]
These PhysX (fluid simulations) are making us thirsty
While we're not exactly prepared to call this stuff water, per se, the fluid dynamics on display in the latest PhysX demonstration are quite impressive nonetheless. In fact, the viscous sloshing is so realistic that we're pretty desperate for a blue-coconut slushie at this point, though preferably one that hasn't washed upon the thighs of a weird humanoid muskrat creature.This video, as well as the two tucked after the break, were produced to demonstrate the principles outlined in a "Position Based Fluids," a paper recently published by Nvidia employees Miles Macklin and Matthias Muller. In laymen's terms, the duo have devised a less system-intensive way to render "incompressible" liquids, which is the key to ensuring realistic goo.The document contains numerous formulas and is very concerned with concepts like "tensile instability" and "vorticity confinement and viscosity," but it also features a lot of bunny rabbits, which helped our comprehension levels a great deal.
Surgeon Simulator 2013 transplanted to Steam tomorrow
Surgeon Simulator 2013 will be available for download on Steam tomorrow, April 19. It started out as a cheeky (and wince-inducing) game jam project by four developers made in just two days, and was later approved as a full release by Steam's Greenlight program. You can still play the original jam result online for free, but the full release includes more surgery scenarios, including an operation in the back of a moving ambulance. The physics have been improved, too, and the developers say it'll work on Windows, Mac or Linux on day one.Upon its launch on Steam, the game will cost $9.99 - way cheaper and less grueling than years of medical school.
Laser scans objects in 3D from half a mile away, scientists just need reason to use it
3D scanning at a range of 0.62 miles? It just became possible, thanks to a laser camera developed by physicists at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. You can pretty much see how it works from the images above -- laser beams are bounced off the target and the duration of their return journey is measured precisely enough to detect millimeter depth changes even at extreme distances. Speaking of which, the researchers believe they could pump the range up to 10 miles with a bit of extra research, and even shrink the blaster down to make it "fully portable" in less than five years. Who knows, someday it might even work around corners. But there's a problem: skin doesn't reflect the beams properly, which means people can't be accurately scanned unless they also happen to be ringwraiths. As a result, the researchers seem slightly at loss as to what to do with the technology, with their best suggestions so far being watching the growth of foliage or tracking the movement of rocks. We'd try to think up some other ideas, were it not for the distracting and utterly irrelevant Nazgul v Wilhelm video embedded after the break.
Camelot Unchained talks physics
It's time to learn about Camelot Unchained's 13th foundational principle. That might sound awfully far down on the list, but the foundational principles -- this one happens to be physics -- are as important as you make them. In Camelot Unchained, physics supports an overarching goal of unique player experiences. The dev team wants things to happen to players that may have never happened to any other player. That comes from chaos, but the problem with chaos is that it leads to players feeling like they're at the mercy of a cruel and whimsical higher power, rather than existing within a set of defined and understandable rules. That's where things like physics come into the picture. Camelot Unchained's physics system will create predictable actions (like bits of walls falling to pieces when they're bombarded), give them consequences (like those bits falling on the ground and potentially on players who are between the bits and the ground), and set them loose in the world to interact with other predictable systems. The result? A set of interconnected systems that make your game experience way cooler without torturing players with invisible dice rolls. Head over to the dev blog to get the full read.
NVIDIA rolls out Apex and PhysX developer support for the PlayStation 4
Just because the PlayStation 4 centers around an AMD-based platform doesn't mean that NVIDIA is out of the picture. The graphics firm is updating the software developer kits for both its Apex dynamics framework and PhysX physics modeling system to address Sony's new console, even if they won't have the full hardware acceleration that comes with using NVIDIA's own chipsets. The introductions will mostly take some of the guesswork out of creating realistic-looking games -- theoretically, adding a larger number of collisions, destructible objects and subtler elements like cloth and hair modeling. Most of us won't see the fruits of the updated SDKs until at least this holiday, but programmers looking for more plausible PS4 game worlds can hit the source links.
Large Hadron Collider stops for two years of tune-ups, goes out on a high note (video)
We've long known that the Large Hadron Collider would need to take a break, but that doesn't take the edge off of the moment itself: as of Valentine's Day, the particle accelerator has conducted its last test for the next two years. The giant research ring will undergo sweeping repairs and upgrades that should should give it the superconducting connectors needed to hit the originally planned 14TeV of combined collision energy, versus the 8TeV it's been limited to almost since the beginning. CERN's machine arguably earned the downtime. After a rough start, it went on to produce rafts of collision data and healthy evidence of the elusive Higgs boson. If you're still down, think of the hiatus as doing us a favor -- it postpones any world-ending disasters until around 2015.
MIT demos new form of magnetism that could lead to quantum communication, storage
It's not often that researchers can verify a discovery that could change how we approach basic principles of technology, not just build on what we know. Nonetheless, MIT might have accomplished just such a feat in demonstrating a new state of magnetism. They've shown that a synthetically grown sample of herbertsmithite crystal (what you see above) behaves as a quantum spin liquid: a material where fractional quantum states produce a liquid-like flux in magnetic orientations, even if the material is solid. The behavior could let communications and storage take advantage of quantum entanglement, where particles can affect each other despite relatively long distances. MIT warns us that there's a wide gap between showing quantum spin liquids in action and developing a complete theory that makes them useful; we're not about to see Mass Effect's quantum entanglement communicator, if it's even possible. To us, realizing that there may be a wholly untapped resource is enough reward for now.
Large Hadron Collider may have produced a previously undetected form of matter
Teams at the Large Hadron Collider must be developing a knack for producing tangible evidence of theoretical particles. After orchestrating 2 million collisions between lead nuclei and protons, like the sort you see above, the collider's Compact Muon Solenoid group and researchers at MIT suspect that stray, linked pairs of gluon particles in the mix were signs of color-glass condensate, a currently theory-only form of matter that sees gluons travel in liquid-like, quantum-entangled waves. The clues aren't definitive, but they were also caught unexpectedly as part of a more routine collision run; the team is curious enough that it's looking for more evidence during weeks of similar tests in January. Any conclusive proof of the condensate would have an impact both on how we understand particle production in collisions as well as the ways gluons and quarks are arranged inside protons. If so, the CMS and MIT teams may well answer a raft of questions about subatomic physics while further justifying CERN's giant underground rings.
Alt-week 11.17.12: freestyle brain scans, hovering moon base and robot dolphin replacements
Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days. This week we're all over the place. Sorry about that, but it's all for the greater good. We start things off right down at the quantum level, then head to the oceans, before a quick jaunt into space before landing back deep inside your mind. All in the name of science, of course. Science and hip-hop that is. This is alt-week.
Alt-week 11.10.12: the contagious smell of fear, finding Bigfoot, and the theory of everything
Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days. There are some questions that have puzzled the human race more or less since the dawn of time. Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? You know the sort of thing. While we might not have the answers to these just yet, thanks to science, we're getting there. In this week's instalment we discover that you can, in fact, smell fear. Meanwhile, one scientist pledges to launch an ambitious hunt for Bigfoot, and we get an early hint at what could be the start of an explanation for life, the universe and everything. This is alt-week.
'A Slower Speed of Light' is an open-source game on special relativity from MIT Game Lab
The behavior of light may seem static and uninteresting (it's bright and fast, we get it), but there's actually an incredible amount of science going on that we generally don't experience during our normal lives.A Slower Speed of Light, a new open-source game for PC and OSX from MIT Game Lab, explores the more intricate and interesting behaviors of light in a "relativistic game engine." As players collect objects, the speed of light is slowed and players are able to experience phenomena such as the Doppler effect, time dilation and the Lorentz transformation, among others.While the open-source aspects of this project are not yet available, the plan is to release the game's Unity3D-based engine as OpenRelativity sometime in 2013. For now, the game itself can be downloaded here. %Gallery-170585%
Rovio and CERN teaming up on education: hopefully the Angry Birds help us this time [update]
The last time CERN and an angry bird met, it didn't end so well: the Large Hadron Collider overheated after a feathered creature reportedly dropped its breakfast on outdoor machinery. Things should go much more smoothly this time around, with CERN and Rovio partnering on an educational initiative that will be unveiled in full at the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 12th. Although the two are shy on just what's entailed beyond the presence of some Angry Birds material at the event, the union will mark the start of Rovio's learning brand and likely represent more in the long run than another Angry Birds Space tie-in. We're mostly wondering if subatomic physics research will explain why we still can't three-star some levels in a physics-based game. Update: Rovio and CERN announced "Angry Birds Playground" this morning, which the company describes as, "a learning program for 3- to 8-year-olds based on the Finnish National Curriculum for kindergarten." In so many words, CERN and Rovio are partnering on an educational initiative aimed at young children which employs the iconic Angry Birds characters. It's unclear whether the initiative will spawn games or books or ... what exactly, but there you have it.
Portabliss: Bad Piggies (iOS)
This is Portabliss, a column about downloadable games that can be played on the go. Angry Birds is iOS gaming's juggernaut; even now, it regularly tops the App Store charts in both money earned and time played. Rovio, the Finnish company who created Angry Birds, put together dozens of mobile games before its first iOS release, and has seemingly hesitated to release anything else after it. The studio doesn't want to cannibalize its own success, so all we've seen from Rovio since Angry Birds' 2009 iOS release is a series of rebrands (including Angry Birds Rio and Angry Birds Space), and one licensed remake of a sandbox contraption game called Amazing Alex.Bad Piggies, then, is the first original title we've seen from Rovio in years, but even it doesn't go too far off the multibillion-dollar reservation. It's a game set in the Angry Birds universe, that follows the green pigs and their goal of grabbing eggs rather than the frustrated fowl trying to demolish them. But instead of unleashing furious destruction by catapult, Bad Piggies asks the player to create modular vehicles that will cart the pigs across a level, reaching a map piece goal at the end.
Linden Lab reveals its next game, Patterns
Where does a company like Linden Lab go after Second Life? Obviously any other titles from the studio need to be creative and offer players a wide realm of personalized options... but Second Life is so open that it's difficult to follow up with something that's any more open to player creativity. Nevertheless, the company is certainly aiming for that with its upcoming new title, Patterns. And while the game looks at a glance like Minecraft with triangles, there's more to the concept than that. As explained in the trailer, Patterns is focused on an experience not dissimilar to Minecraft but with a heavier focus on creativity. The game will sport a real-time physics engine as demonstrated in the trailer, giving objects physical properties that come into play as they enter the world. While the game is still in very early development, you can get a sense of what's in the future by glancing at the trailer just past the break.
Notch still working on 0x10c, despite a few stops and starts
Speaking to Joystiq at PAX last weekend, Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson told us that while most of his days lately are taken up with "just discussing how to do stuff" ("and then Reddit," he added slyly), work continues on the 0x10c space game he announced a while ago. Oh, and in case you're still wondering how the title is pronounced, Notch calls it "ten-to-the-C.""I have the game world fleshed out, all the soft stuff, like the setting," he says. "And I have the emulator for the CPU, which is probably the most complex part of it, all written. I had a prototype for walking around and trying out all of the graphics styles, but that wasn't really fun. So I kind of took a break to recharge my batteries and deal with some personal stuff, and then I'll probably start over again when I get back to Sweden." Starting over again means he'll just rework the graphical engine on the game, and "rethink how the rendering is done, how the physics is done for the character."The team working on 0x10c did have a building interface in mind for players to design their own spaceships, and Notch said it was heavily based on the popular 3D Construction Kit. But the interface wasn't fun, he told us. "We had something kind of inspired by [the Kit], with cubes you could remove corners from to make angles, but it turned really annoying when you tried to build anything."And Notch also confirmed that the game, whenever it is ready, will be released to the public in the way Minecraft was, in various states as it's being built. Notch says he got the idea to release games that way from the old roguelike genre, of all places. "The first version they release is just you can walk around in the dungeon and that's it, that's the extent of what you can do. That's where I got it from." That release schedule, he said, works well for games that fall back on sandbox or user-generated content. "If you're making like The Walking Dead or something, because it's story driven," he said, then obviously a half-finished version won't work. "You're just going to ruin it for people in the other versions."
PAX Prime 2012: World of Warplanes
Tanks are old news. This is the time for warplanes -- World of Warplanes, in fact. Happily, we can talk about just that because we took some time at PAX and sat down with some Wargaming.net folks to take a look at the upcoming game.
Colour Bind comes to grips with gravity on PC, Mac, Linux 'soon'
When we first got our hands on Puppy Punch Productions' Colour Bind at GDC this year, it looked much like it does now, in full, ready-for-release form. That's the thing about Colour Bind – it's not a feat in visual representation, but the ideas behind its physics-puzzle gameplay are outstanding all on their own, and flashy graphics would only serve to detract from its finesse. Colour Bind – now officially announced for PC, Man and Linux this year – has the player control a small vehicle and its gravity, along with the gravity of the surrounding terrain, by enabling different colors. The puzzles themselves are tricky in two layers: first in figuring out what to do with the gravity and then in the actual execution, as developer Finn Morgan describes in the above introduction video. Colour Bind is set to launch "soon" and includes more than 50 levels, local co-op and a level editor compatible with Steam Workshop.%Gallery-162103%
