Console-Quality Games Coming to Smartphones, Other Devices

"Fathammer today announced the commercial launch and availability of the X-Forge 3D Game Engine, a development product for mobile devices. It provides game developers with the ability to deliver high-frame-rate, console-quality 3D games on a wide variety of wireless PDAs, smartphones and handheld game devices.

Games developed with X-Forge achieve real-time frame rates and impressive visual quality through optimizations for industry leading mobile technologies....

Two X-Forge Powered games will be included with the retail launch of the Sony Ericsson P800 Smartphone. Stunt Run is an original racing title developed by Vasara Games, the games division of Fathammer. Real physics, compelling track design and a variety of gameplay options provide a unique 3D driving experience for owners of the phone. Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment’s Men in Black II: Alien Pursuit places the player in the role of MIB agent hunting down aliens in a real 3D environment. A compelling story line with multiple levels and a variety of weapons immerses the player into a fun, easy to play game." [PDABuzz.com]

Cell phone trade-ups should kick into high gear next year as video games propel yet another industry forward. Over at MSNBC, Michael Rogers sings the praises of a new 3-D television display, but he thinks it will be years before we see this technology at the mainstream consumer level.

"The third technology that caught my eye in Seville was both the most innovative and least likely to show up in real life anytime soon. HoloVizio is a true 3-D television display from an Hungarian company called Holografika—a technology so cool you just want to see it happen. The 3-D display looks like a normal twenty-five inch television monitor, except the changing images on screen—a human skull, a rib cage, a prototype automobile—appear to be truly 3-D, hanging in space behind the glass. As you move your head in front of the screen, the forward parts of the image block the pieces in the back. And unlike previous 3-D television technologies, you don’t have to wear funny goggles....

Only after years of professional use will the price of such hardware decline enough to be a consumer product. And even then, content providers will have to agree to produce their material in the new format. So when will we have 3-D television in the living room?... In short: as a consumer product, this is far, far in the future. But maybe that’s just as well. After all, most of us are still saving up for high-definition television."

This may be true, but the gaming industry will speed up implementation and adoption. In fact, I think it was one of the technologies I would have liked to have seen more of in the movie Minority Report. Where were the video gamers? I think there was one example at the club, but I don't remember seeing anyone playing on the train. If Tom Cruise could shift and interact with information in thin air, surely there were "holographic decks" where players acted out Doom, Tomb Raider, and The Sims as fully immersive games. And heck, the 3D rendering engine in The Matrix must truly be something to behold!

Cops Shoot the Bull After Odd Incident

"A mysterious wandering black bull, weighing 800 pounds and wearing a pair of horns that made officers understandably nervous, was spotted in New Lenox Sunday night and had made its way to Orland Park by Monday, when it was stopped shortly after midnight.

Police tried in vain to corral the animal using four-wheel-drive vehicles for three hours. But they had no success being amateur matadors, and ended up resorting to force when the animal started wandering around the major intersection of 159th Street and LaGrange Road....

Police had not wanted to kill the animal, Doll said. They spent hours researching alternatives....

No one's sure where the bull came from, though police are trying to track down information from his ear tag.

New Lenox residents near Williams Road and U.S. 30 spotted him about 4:30 p.m. Sunday, New Lenox Police Chief Walter Kaszubski said....

Ott said he couldn't see where the bull went, but said he could track the beast for a while through the most suburban of methods — by watching his neighbors' automatic back porch lights wink on, one after another, as the animal crossed through back yards. It was moving fast.

'This bull was trucking,' Ott said." [Daily Southtown]

We've been hearing coyotes at night out by us, but I hadn't heard anything about a bull. It must have gone through my suburb on the way from New Lenox to Orland Park. Thank heavens this didn't happen over Halloween.

RSS File Can Help Keep Your Surfing Up to Date

"An RSS file is simply a text file located on a Web server and is openly readable by any app that knows its location. It contains a sophisticated database that summarizes a Web site's content.

Usually, the file is created and maintained by the same software that a Web master uses to create the site; every time a news item is posted, a new entry is added to the RSS file containing the item's headline, a summary and a link to the item itself, though RSS is a flexible standard and can track far more information.

"Cool, Andy," you're saying "but what does this mean to me, the end-user?"

It means that if your favorite Web site supports RSS--look for a little orange "RSS" or "XML" box on the page, which contains a link to the RSS file--you don't have to read through it manually to look for new items of interest. Software can do that for you, by parsing its RSS file. New apps known as "news aggregators" can act sort of like a TiVo for the Web....

RSS is a tremendous big win for everyone. Users will spend less time browsing sites and more time reading them. And it steers traffic to Web sites. A middle-school teacher can't afford the time to keep the school's site updated with all the latest news about space, but the site can always point to Space.com's most recent headlines and stories thanks to RSS." [Chicago Sun-Times, via Scripting News]

This is a good introductory article for the techie at your library, not the director, librarians, or support staff. It's too bad someone at the Sun-Times didn't read the article ahead of time and use the occasion to announce the implementation of an RSS feed for the paper. Still, we edge ever closer....

"PodNews 3 is an aggregator for Apple's iPod." [Scripting News]

There has to be a way to make the Archos Multimedia Jukebox run an aggregator. Next step in the evolution, please - wireless + news (including video and audio that I can choose to save onto my device for a micropayment fee).