Apple’s Music Event 2010: Death of the Click-Wheel

September 2nd, 2010

Another Apple announcement has come and gone, treated with the understated calm that we’ve come to expect from the technology giant. That’s bull, of course, asking Apple to announce something quietly is like asking that same thing of Brian Blessed. Of course, I’m going to propagate the hype myself now by blogging about it.

Incidently, I wrote about last year’s music event and made some semi-serious predictions for 2010.

Of course, the event began with Steve Jobs’ usual self-congratulatory ejaculation as he delights in just how well his products have sold, ignoring the criticism that the iPhone 4 had. Then he spends half an hour rolling around in piles of your money. YES! YOUR MONEY! YOU PATHETIC PRICK!

Ahem…

iPod Nano Sixth Generation

The sixth-generation iPod Nano is perhaps the biggest overhaul, mainly because it’s no longer a Nano — more a result of a horrific gene-splicing experiment between the Touch and the Shuffle. It’s inherited the Shuffle’s belt-clip and restores the square form factor that the third generation Nano had. Instead of the new Nano being a diminutive version of it’s Classic brother, it now sports a fetching touch-screen. This multi-touch (and no, I don’t know why you’d need multi-touch on an iPod Nano) and capacitive addition essentially does away entirely with the original iPod layout we’ve all come to know which, given that no new Classic announcements were given, marks the death of it’s former look. Instead of a click-wheel, the entire front of the device is a touch-screen, allowing navigation of the device. From the images I’ve seen, it does look like this screen is far too small and cramped to be comfortably used, although the newly redesigned interface for the Nano clearly has a touch-screen in mind. But the main reason I’ve not bought an iPod Touch already is the notorious fragility of touch-screens — I’m not convinced.

The iPod Touch has also had a minor touch-up, but nothing like the plastic surgery of the Nano. It’s slimmer, which by now is practically assumed of any newly released device, and has a screen supporting Apple’s randomly-named ‘Retina Display’. Another throwback to the iPhone 4 is the front facing camera (and the inclusion of a back-facing camera) to allow Apple’s new video-calling service FaceTime over Wi-Fi — given it has no 3G antenna band to get screwed up, this iPod might be less of a commercial balls-up than it’s cousin, iPhone.

iPod Touch with FaceTime

In perhaps the biggest U-turn since Clinton, Apple have reunited the iPod Shuffle with it’s buttons. The last iteration of the cheap and chirpy noisemaker removed almost all the physical buttons on the device itself, meaning it had to be controlled instead by the buttons on the tinny travesty of headphones that come in the box, and navigation was aided by an almost as tinny voice. Though the voice remains (which is fine given most Apple fanboys hear voices anyway, mainly telling them to buy more Apple products), the buttons are back.

In a display of balls-out ripoffery, Apple have taken several chapters out of MySpace and Spotify’s books and will introduce a music-oriented social-network feature into the next incarnation of iTunes, known as ‘Ping’. Essentially, this will broadcast your appreciation of ‘The Fast Food Rockers’ to your friends, leave you without any friends and persuade you to find solace in the purchase of an iPad. I kid, of course. The real point is that you see what your friends are listening to and then you (because life is one big futile attempt at gaining social acceptance) purchase the same songs to demonstrate just how like-minded you are with your mates — kerching for Apple. Like a bit of Tinchy Stryder do you? No, you don’t. Nobody does. Everybody just thinks they should.

Something happened to do with the Apple TV, but that’s irrelevant seeing as nobody bothers with them — not while we’ve got Sky+ at least. It’s smaller, obviously, and is just a media streamer for your computer to your TV but with it’s own film and TV rental service. Boring.

All in all, the Nano is the biggest change, which is usually the case at Apple’s September music event. I’ve always loved the Nano precisely because it’s a middle-ground between the cheap but relatively feature-less Shuffle and the complex, expensive Touch — now, the Nano is less intermediate and more horrendously choreographed mix’n'match. Nothing unexpected or unusual, Steve Jobs didn’t come out in a floral dress and announce his impending sex change. Nor did he emerge holding Bill Gates’ hand, vindicating years of rumours. Once the Nano hype has died down, the tech world will breathe a collective ‘meh’ at yesterday’s announcement and we can all get on with our lives.

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A New Way to Stalk Me

August 8th, 2010

Hello chaps and chapettes, I’ve already mentioned that I’m currently working an internship at CNET UK, seeing as I know how much you all hang on my every word as thought it were gospel (which, frankly, it is) you can appreciate that it is nigh-on impossible to blog and write. Given that I spend my day finding and writing up interesting technology news articles, it is both tiring and time consuming to do so on here; plus, attempting to write the same news again would either lead to borderline plagiarism (albeit of my own work but still) or an attempt to put a new spin on it so pitiful it’s hardly worth it.

Fear not, though, because my articles (that would otherwise come to form the content of blog posts) are available to read on the CNET UK website. What’s more, these articles are edited for the gramatical, spelling and factual errors that sometimes grace this blog (I’ve noticed several reading back but I’m going to leave them in to prove a point) so you can expect a higher quality – obviously, this means that my brash tone is also filtered but that’s only to be expected (I was unable, for example, to refer to the Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s boast about Android sales as a self-congratulatory blowjob).

As dedicated as all three of you are to me, I don’t expect you to trawl CNET tirelessly for what I’ve written so here’s an RSS feed link of my name put into the website’s search engine, plus it’s better than posting a link to each one in a bout of shameless self promotion.

It be here.

Enjoy.

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Self-Promotion 2: Still no shame!

July 28th, 2010

Hello, I don’t know if I have done any shameless self-promotion on here before, but knowing me it is quite likely.

Nonetheless, as I mentioned briefly in my last post, I am currently working at CNET UK as an intern.

Here’s a link to my first article to be put on the sight. Enjoy!

Snake Game Hidden in YouTube: Procrastiantion Squared!

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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

July 25th, 2010

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson is perhaps one of the best gothic horror novels in history, standing tall amongst the likes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but, for all it’s infamy and for all the adaptations, the novel itself isn’t as widely read as you might think; I take it from personal experience, as someone who is new to classic literature but has, of course, grown up with it’s legends. Until the reading, I had never heard of the character Mr. Utterson and believed that the entirety of the suprisingly short novel was narrated from the perspective of Jekyll/Hyde if anyone; as it happens, the novel’s protagonist is a lawyer who has Jekyll as a client and only part of the text is from the vantage point of the titular character(s), and even that’s in the form of a letter.

Jekyll and Hyde

I was suprised, when I found this novel, that it was only some 65 pages in length, to the point that many publishers print it alongside some of Stevenson’s other short stories and a wealth of annotations and background information, to pad out the book to sell more easily as a product.

This novel is as gripping as the other great gothic horrors, but perhaps isn’t as terrifying by modern standards; but this is, I increasingly feel, a symptom of Victorian literature: there’s very few horrors that took the imagination of those authors that hasn’t already been dreamt up, and doubled in horror, in 2010. Stevenson’s descriptions are vivid and tantalysing, and would’ve astounded the reader when it was published in 1886, but given we can basically replace our imaginations with TV, it’s hard to conjure up (based on Stevenson’s descriptions) an image as disturbing as one that can be simulated with a combination of CG and the fucked up mind of Tim Burton.

There’s an odd irony in the fact that, just as Dr. Jekyll (through his discovery) adopts a face and personality quite different yet still somehow, at it’s core, the same as his own, many stage and screen adaptations of Stevenson’s classic novel drop a great deal of the storyline, characters and subtleties of the original but maintain the core concept. To paraphrase (because it’s hard to hold open a book and type simultaneously) Dr. Jekyll “it seemed more express than the divided countenance I had become accustomed to call mine.” Rather than putting together a somewhat fragmented narrative as the novel does, jumping between Utterson being told a story by Enfield, Utterson’s own investigative narration, Lanyon’s letter and Jekyll’s closing statement of the case, directors often opt to follow (without narration) the chronological events of Jekyll and Hyde.

By all means read this novel, lit’s a rather unsettling examination of dual-personalities, half of which emerges from the legacy that the novel left, from the allegorical meaning behind the Jekyll/Hyde creature that emerges (Jekyll’s apparent struggle to know what to refer to himself as I found engaging), but also for the sheer enjoyment of the tale. I’ve often said that the lasting feature of gothic horror novels isn’t the imagery or the propensity of disturb, but more the psychological element, the reflection into one’s very soul and showing the harsh ugliness (and sometimes beauty) within.

P.S. Sorry for the short review, that new Sherlock Holmes series with the writers from Doctor Who starts soon. Oh, by the way, so that I can bend instead of break, my cardinal rule not to discuss personal matters, or anything not pertaining to the point, on this blog, I will only briefly mention that I got an internship at CNET UK and start on Wednesday.

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3DS Tech for the Big (Small) Screen?

July 23rd, 2010

3DS

One of the biggest criticisms of 3D, and one of the main reasons why it is yet to hit the big-time in home entertainment, is the clunky polarised spectacles that frequently make a screening of Toy Story 3 look like a librarian convention.

The Nintendo 3DS is the first commerically available product that attempts to use 3D technology, without condemning gamers to the same dowdy fate, and it’s success is yet to be decided. The technology behind (or should that be in front of) the 3DS’ three-dimensional screen is called a Parallax Barrier and, though it can allow the user to perceive a 3D image, it has massive limitations and would be hard-pressed to stand up to proper scrutiny (for a more in-depth look at Parallax Barriers, see Nintendo 3DS: How It Works). However, recent reports indicate that manufacturers, such as Sharp, Hitachi and Toshiba, are investigating ways of putting Parallax Barriers onto their latest range of 3D televisions.

Cinema’s have, by now, become used to dealing with 3D films; the sudden explosion of 3D films, with the use of more sophisticated technologies than the primitive red-cyan affair, last summer forced cinemas to adapt and, almost a year later, it has become commonplace. However, it was (arguably) easier for cinemas to sell 3D as, by and large, people come to the cinema with the explicit purpose of seeing a film, thus the environment was well-suited and the audience willing to accept the glasses. At home there is no such guarantee, and surveys indicate that people are far more likely to multi-task while watching a film or TV, making the latter almost like background noise. The inception of High-Definition TV has been an unsteady one, as people are, again, less likely to invest in something that they will only half-appreciate; at least here, the only issue is cost which has gradually come down and, combined with major sporting events, allowed a greater uptake. 3D, on the other hands, makes more physical demands. The only way to ensure a great enough uptake to warrant the investment from film studios is to eliminate the glasses, but is using parallax barriers really the right way to go about it?

Toshiba's offering

As we saw in a previous article on MediaKick, there are massive limitations to using this technology, which make the glasses almost seem bearable, the most prominent of which being the fact that a full 3D image is only acheivable if the viewer sits at a very precise angle and manages to remain perfectly still for the duration; making 3D at home a choice between neckstrain or eyestrain. Obviously, this fact has not gone unnoticed by the biggest consumer electronics companies in the world, and are attempting to reduce (if not remove altogether) the problem using what’s being dubbed ‘multi-parallax’. Essentially, multi-parallax (as the name suggests) uses several barriers (in Toshiba’s case, nine) to create nine “golden angles” at which the full 3D image can be perceived, over the Nintendo 3DS’ solitary angle.

No doubt Sharp, Hitachi and Toshiba’s R&D departments will spend the next few months painstakingly experiementing to find out which “golden angles” are needed to ensure the viewer gets all the 3D goodness they can, but either way there is still this damning drawback on parallax barriers. Film buffs, who are always the first to take up a new home cinema technology but always to first to trash it, will marvel at the crisp graphics, but fume when their head slips slightly and the screen looks like the cameraman suddenly developed cataracts.

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Dracula Review

July 20th, 2010

Good evening, Blucher!

Apologies for my absence of late, I have had a number of things to deal with; fortunately I’ve got a lot of draft posts to complete and post so anticipate a lot of activity in the coming days, starting with this Dracula review……you know what, this font is really hard to read so I’m going to find something a bit more legible.

By the way, as ever I speak quite candidly of the events in the story. If you don’t want to know the ending, then enjoy my Twilight rant instead.

Vampires are a concept almost as old as the tired clichés in romantic literature that authors like Stephenie Meyer trot out regularly, so it’s hard to really know how one learns about them, though I suspect my generation’s first exposure to vampires may be here. Though the folklore has been around for centuries and there have been several vampire novels that predate, Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ stands as the best known and, by many, thought to be the original vampire story. As the modern exposure to vampires comes in the form of pre-teen novels like the ‘Twilight’ series and “gritty” American TV Dramas like ‘True Blood’, it’ll be hard to write this review without making some comparisons; but this is not a rant about how much I despise Twilight, I’ve already done that.

Cover

I feel, increasingly, like scary movies have spoilt me in what I expect from the horror genre, as I went into reading Dracula, I anticipated a continuous narrative of one horrific event trapped in Castle Dracula, a la ‘House of Wax’, which would serve a few jumps and a bit of gore but nothing genuinely chilling. I was quite wrong. The narrative of ‘Dracula’ is a collection of journal entries from the main protagonists and occasional newspaper clippings over several months. The titular Count Dracula is, in actuality, seldom seen past the first act, and so he becomes much more of a feared presence which lends the story a far more eerie and paranoid element; it’s a mark of good horror to invoke true fear rather than just the shock-factor of a bit of blood and human dismemberment.

A theme throughout the novel is skepticism, which I found quite engaging, personified through Dr. Seward’s reluctance to accept what has happened to Lucy (a female character whose infection by Count Dracula and eventual un-dead death serve to exemplify the vampire effect and provoke three of the main characters, all of whom were in love with Lucy, to action against this threat) as something unknown to modern science. Through the open-minded Van Helsing, Stoker delivers a kind of “treatise to the skeptic” on following evidence where it leads, even if the conclusion that is drawn goes against what one knows to be true. It’s not a criticism of science, it’s simply an imploration to scientists of the day to accept what evidence shows even if the conclusion that can be logically drawn from it contradicts known understanding; though this message’s significance today is debatable.

Yeah!

I had some gripes with ‘Dracula’, in particular that the latter 100 pages detail the preparations of the group to hunt Count Dracula down and then the actual travels of them as they head towards the Castle, hot on the heels of the now fleeing (yes, fleeing) Count. After a while the whole thing began to feel a bit ‘Scooby Doo’, all it needed was a detailed journal entry from Lord Godalming describing how they chased The Count through a hallway of doors that kept leading back on the same hallway and a talking dog. The ending is pretty disappointing and, though Stoker builds tension sensationally by describing the closing in on the Count on all sides whilst the sun is seconds from setting (at which point Dracula revives), there is little payout from this tension. There is a fight (of sorts) with a group of gypsies who are protecting the box in which Dracula lies “dead” during daylight, but they don’t really feel like much of a threat. They do, during the fight, manage to kill Quincey Morris, one of the protagonists, but largely Morris was an uninfluential character, who has such a swift death with so little emotive impact that I can’t help feeling that the character was written in as an afterthought whose only narrative purpose was to die. The death of Count Dracula is underwhelming, the demise of the titular character around whom the entire novel has centred feels like it should be somewhat more ceremonious, but details on the vampire affliction make this inconvenient. I suppose one of the biggest drawbacks of having a character who is completely incapacitated and vulnerable for half the time (during the day), and then near-invincible the next (the night), is that he can only be defeated in the vulnerable state which, if he’s unable to put up any resistance like Count Dracula, makes for a weak ending.

The passiveness of Dracula at his death is an interesting characterisation choice and one that is probably significant, were I more learned in the art of analysing literature I may notice it. But to me it seems to be at odds with his portrayal and indeed description throughout as a powerful, cunning creature who has survived centures, yet is no match for an old man and a knife. Perhaps Stoker intended the great fear and impression of power to feed the theme of paranoia throughout, as it turns out that for all the fear that the protagonists regard him with, he fails to live up to it when someone dares to challenge him regardless of reputation, as they do. Ooo, I’m analysing … fun.

VAMPIRE!

There are, as you’d expect from a book more than a century old and still well-known, plenty of film versions, though the first was a massive departure from the original story as Stoker’s widow refused the copyrights. The best-known adaptation has Christopher Lee as Count Dracula and Peter Cushing as Professor Van Helsing and was made in 1958; I haven’t yet seen it but I expect it’ll be hard to watch it without wondering how Van Helsing survived the destruction of the Death Star.

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The Fat Man’s eBay.

July 10th, 2010

Amazon Grocery

It was the great thinkers of our time 3OH!3 who once said “Tell your boyfriend if he says he’s got beef,
that I’m a vegetarian and I ain’t f****** scared of him” and never were truer words spoken. However, it may now be even easier for the aforementioned boyfriend to obtain his beef with which to threaten human-herbivores as Amazon have lifted the moratorium on their new grocery delivery service, still in beta, in the UK to compete with supermarkets.

Amazon has not, though, opened a warehouse of their own produce, and instead the service will simply be a middleman between retailers, suppliers (and people who have a festering old can of tuna stashed away) and the consumer. Much as you can buy practically any item on Amazon from other sellers, often at a lower price like the infamous 1 penny books, the grocery department will be the first to list items exclusively available from third party sellers. Though no official confirmation has been given, the online retailer’s normal procedure of delivering goods through the post will likely be used in this service also.

Obviously, home grocery delivery is relatively old hat as practically every big UK supermarket has it in some form, but this is the first attempt by an already established exclusively-online store to do so. Ocado is currently the only other web-only service of this type, albeit with only moderate success, while Tesco, Asda and Sainsburys (to name but a few) have been running these services parallel to their brick-and-mortar stores for years. The first attempt to make a service like this work was Webvan in 1999, which went bankrupt in 2001 (though resurrected by Amazon themselves last year, presumebly as a precursor for this) and was described by CNET as one of the greatest dotcom disasters in history, probably just after the dotcom bubble burst and the continuing existence of Fred.

Though this sounds disgustingly like a fat-man’s eBay, it’s actually an interesting (if a little bit odd) exploration of the concept of The Long Tail. A Web 2.0 model that describes the capacity for exclusively-online stores to stock less popular products (“niches”) as well as the bracket of the most popular products (“hits”) as webspace and bandwidth costs are, more or less, negligible, whereas brick-and-mortar stores have limited shelf-space so much inhibit themselves to the “hits”. It’ll be interesting to see what manner of rare, unusual or plain weird foods will become available on such a well known company’s website once it begins democratising the trade of groceries, have you ever tried sauerkraut?

Presumebly this is only the first step in a new laziness-paradigm, all we need now is a legion of domestic robots, mass-marketing of Steven Hawking’s infra-red ‘blink switch’ computer controls and some sort of food to mouth interface for the Disney classic Wall-E to become eerily prophetic.

That’s it, now go wash your hands – the postman’s here.

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Doctor Who: Now Cracks A Noble Heart

June 27th, 2010

Well now, that was an adventure. The final episode of Doctor Who’s fifth, or thirty-first if you’re fussy, series and the very first with Messieurs Smith and Gillan at the helm, if indeed a flying box can have a helm, has now finished broadcast and it would be an immense folly of me not to comment in earnest.

The Doctor: Matt Smith has inhabited the role and I have no way of criticising him for it. He’s a damn fine actor who has successfully given us The Doctor as we know him with enough new traits to make him distinguishable. Is he as good as Tennant? No, I’m afraid he’s not been quite as awesome as good old Ten, but the predecessor had three (point five) series’ to make his mark and Smith has only just ended his first (reportedly, out of five) so I still consider it early days. He’s a fantastic Doctor, but had a hard act to follow.

Amy Pond: Little bit disappointed with how this companion worked out. It seemed early on that Amy would be a new angle on a companion but, for most of the series, that was forgotten and instead other writers used her in the capacity of standard companion acting as the voice of the audience and her “issues” only came up when needed during Moffat episodes. For Amy’s part, they could’ve done more to seed her significance into other episodes rather than using it to beat you over the head every third episode.

Rory Williams: Again, a touch disappointing. Rory was, undoubtedly, intended as the comic relief throughout the series but he was, in that respect, far too similar to Mickey Smith. Both began as the clumsy source of annoyance who, as the series developed, grew into a hero. He had his moments, but he was too much of a cookie-cutter companion.

River Song: I’m simulataneously infuriated by and enjoying the ongoing tale of River Song. Given that she’s meeting The Doctor out of sync she is in a unique position to keep giving prophetic insight into the future of the show, and it’s pretty clear that she’s going to turn out to be wildly significant in Who-fandom in the coming years. I imagine Alex Kingston’s been paid a hefty sum to commit to the series long-term so that these hints can be explained and I’m glad, because she’s an immensely enjoyable character (sort of like a female Captain Jack) to watch.

Favourite Episode: Ooo, that’s tricky, but it’s probably either Victory of the Daleks or The Lodger. The former because of it’s historical references, continuity, geek factor and comedy, and the latter for it’s ball-scratching simplicty. The Dalek episode was part of the ongoing redevelopment of Doctor Who and so covered a lot of back-references, plus the relationship between The Doctor and Churchill (who had already met) was refreshing. The Lodger was a suprise considering it was the annual “cheap episode”, which have a history of sucking like a Henry Hoover on crack, and had a lot of appeal despite being a complete departure from the usual Who format with as much human drama, which would usually make me wince, as Sci-fi nerdgasm. I can’t continue without mentioning the fantastic Spitfire-Dalek Saucer dogfight in space, a completely ridiculous notion but fantastic all the same!

Worst Episode: I’m going to say The Beast Below which, on the surface, seemed like a chilling examination of nightmares but was actually a bit dull. It had a good story and morality tale, and I loved the introduction of Liz X and the twist at the end, but the threat of the baddie never really took given that they spent most of the story standing atop the whale and the smiler things never really seemed all that scary.

The Finale:

This entire series has felt like a massive build up, any stories with no references to the Cracks tended to be incredibly weak, and so you went into the last two episodes expecting a lot, and the penultimate episode “The Pandorica Opens”, at least, delivered. The appearance of so many aliens trapping The Doctor was a nice touch but, for both practical and time reasons, not one that would’ve been carried too far, given the intense amount of preparation that must’ve gone into the five minute sequence of trapping The Doctor in the Pandorica. Disappointingly, the entrapment in the Pandorica had to be resolved quickly, as an episode with The Doctor locked away would’ve been slow and tedious, but was done quite well using the viewer’s skewed perspective on time travel. Was there a better moment in that episode than the beaten up Doctor appearing with no warning from nowhere and, seemingly, dying. Although, giving The Doctor a Vortex Manipulator to jump around with helped the story along, but removed the impact of the TARDIS “exploding”.

There were obvious moments of science-fiction shruggery, again diluting the impact of Amy’s “death” using some bullshit explanation of the Pandorica being able to prevent death so the prisoner couldn’t escape, the Pandorica was that secure (though the Sonic was able to open it with relative ease), or the idea that The Pandorica light held a “restoration field”. As well as the ultimate closer of the episode where, after spending an emotive ten minutes explaining how the resetting of the universe came at the cost of his non-existence, The Doctor was able to be “remembered” back sat with me as the biggest cop-out imaginable. Ultimately, the story became a massive set up resolved by a reset button so big it could be seen from another galaxy, if they existed in that universe, and a massive retcon always feels like a cop-out. Then again, Doctor Who has a history of leaving things ambiguous (by which I mean the writers got a bit lazy and gave up), for example they’ve still never explained Colin Baker; what the hell was he?

Overall, a fun story with ongoing significance. The arc over this series appears relatively wrapped up but an ultimate arc, perhaps over the course of The Eleventh Doctor’s life, has been hinted at. We still need to learn the cause of the TARDIS explosion and the owner of the chain-smoker voice that echoed through the TARDIS. I also found it interesting that, once again, The Doctor is called into action, presumebly hinting at the Christmas Special. On one hand, it gives The Doctor a direction, of sorts, where instead of simply knocking around the universe and running into this stuff, he’s actively called to it, but on the other it gives The Doctor a musty, ninteen-seventies detective agency vibe which I dislike.

Of course, it doesn’t end here. Blood of the Cybermen is now available to download on the BBC Website.

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Nintendo 3DS – How it works

June 21st, 2010

Nintendo 3DS - How it works.

In the past 12 months, 3D has become the new black in cinema with every major studio releasing at least one three-dimensional film. But for all our CG technology and on-screen wizardry, we’re still forced to cling to our lenticular goggles to see it with, take them off and you’re left with a movie that looks like the cameraman had the tremors. For a while that was also true in the relatively new arena of 3D gaming, luckily for most gamers appearing geeky was nothing new, but now (as MediaKick’s superb and very prolific E3 coverage has revealed) with the announcement of Nintendo’s 3DS device, providing a 3D gaming experience without having to look like Austin Powers seems to be the start of a whole new triple-dimensional revolution.

Providing a 3D image, or (to be insufferably pedantic) autosteroscopy, traditionally used specially adapted glasses which, most commonly through the use of colour filtering on anaglyph (red and cyan) images but more recentely through polarised lenses, block out one image of a 3D film, shot with two very similar but ever so slightly different angles, for each eye. As each eye receives a slightly different image, the brain attempts to marry the two angles into a comprehensible image and the effect is the appearance of depth.

How 3D (basically) works

However, this system has always depended on the ability to isolate one particular angle for one particular eye, relying on the glasses to do so. This is a perfectly fine trade-off for cinemas, where you go for the specific purpose of watching a movie and are in a suitably adapted environment to do so, but serious questions have been raised to the quality of 3D films in the home and how much people, who may only casually watch films, will want or use the 3D technology. For example, the increasing number of people who use the internet and watch TV or movies simultaneously suggests that, as 3D technology relies on peoples eyes remaining focused on the images, and behind filtering lenses, it would not be as successful or appealing as it has been in the cinema.

The same can be said for gaming, though it’s much harder to be multi-tasking whilst playing a video game (especially if you’re a man), the growth of so-called “casual games”, as you commonly see for the Nintendo Wii, making video games, as the name suggests, a casual pastime, ridding the world of these headache inducing specs seems like a good idea; the Nintendo 3DS is the first serious attempt at making that happen, by utilising ‘parallax barrier technology’. Parallax Barriers come in the form of a thin and (apparentely) transparent layer that is fitted in front of an LCD screen that is fitted with thin “slits” that filter out an angle to each side so that one eye sees only one angle and the 3D image is perceived. A massive drawback of this is that the full effect is only visible from a very precise angle with an extremely low margin of error, requiring anyone attempting to see a film in 3D to sit as though they are experiencing some manner of rectal insertion. With the growth of games, also announced at E3, to use movement controls, such as Microsoft’s Kinect, this is a totally opposite paradigm to the one sharply taking effect.

How a Parallax Barrier (basically) works

The recentely announced Nintendo 3DS uses the same parallax barrier on it’s upper screen to produce a three-dimensional image to the player, and carries all the limitations of the technology, though it does away with the glasses. From observation, no clear effort has been made by Nintendo to combat the disadvantages of using parallax barriers, with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata insisting that the screen angle is perfectly suited for the way the average gamer would hold the device naturally, though this only mitigates the problem somewhat and the limitations are still very evidence. Although, a number of potential solutions, shown off by developers at E3 could be seen on later models of the 3DS; such as utilising the camera, face recognition algorithms and an automatically adjustable screen to constantly move the 3D screen to the correct angle as the player’s head (and thus angle of vision) moves.

It seems that 3D technology is continuing to develop just as any massively new innovation would, it has some limitations but looks very promising. Nintendo has jumped the gun a tad and released the 3DS almost, it seems, as an experiment and a “field test” would do wonders for accelerating the development and understanding of how 3D technology in gaming will be used. But for now, at least, the gamer is stuck with the glasses, unless they want to entirely boycott the upcoming motion-wars between Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.

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The Pandorica Opens

June 20th, 2010

Ok, that had to be the most epic, awesome and utterly confusing episode of Doctor Who ever. As such, I locked myself away in quiet contemplation to consider what had happened and what might happen next week, though I have no spoilers to give so fear not.

Now, it has to be said that the RTD era became formulaic towards it’s conclusion, every penultimate episode would see a massive set up that would often fail to deliver in the finale; subsiding some of the story and action to the emotional drama with the revolving-doors companions. The poignant difference during the reign of Moffat is that the set up has been the series as a whole, and because of that the final story of this series would, to satisfy the legions of fanboys, have to deliver. Well.

Last night, what we saw was the mother of all cliffhangers wrapped in a sticky covering of fanwank. The appearance of the most popular, scary or otherwise memorable enemies, pitting Dalek next to Cyberman, Sontaran next to Weevil, Uvodni next to Sycorax, was the highlight of the episode, and creating a scene that looked like an Easter Egg sale at Lidl. The Pandorica was another great mystery, I (for once) had absolutely no idea what would be inside, though considering the sheer nerdgasm the past 40 minutes had been I was expecting the Eighth Doctor to stumble out to finally explain why he suddenly went bald and developed a leather fetish. As far as I understand it, the most intelligent life forms in the universe (who just happen to be The Doctor’s greatest foes, go figure) realised that the imminent explosion of the TARDIS that, they believe, could only be caused by it’s pilot (The good Doctor) can be prevented if they lock The Doctor away in the Pandorica so lured him to it. Nevertheless, the TARDIS (with River Song in it) still explodes and causes the Cracks that we’ve seen all series, which (I expect) means that the aliens will realise that it happens anyway and then let The Doctor out to fix it; if that happens it’ll be a bit of anticlimax. The autons, as part of the trap, appear to have recreated Roman soldiers and planted them in 102AD which, for some reason, includes a duplicate of Rory embued with the same memories and unaware of the plan or the fact that he was made out of plastic, who shoots Amy.

So, The Doctor is trapped in the Pandorica, Amy is dead, Rory’s an Auton, the TARDIS has exploded and River Song was inside. The latter, at least, is tricky because we’ve already seen River later on in her life telling The Doctor to look forward to this adventure. The questions we need answered is what caused the TARDIS explosion (and whose voice echoed through the TARDIS declaring that ‘Silence will fall’) and who River Song killed (”the best man [she's] ever known”), though the latter is quite clearly The Doctor and may not, necessarily, have to be explained next week.

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