The technology opens the door to real-time social interactions in a virtual environment. Continue reading →
Virtual reality avatars just got more personal. Now, they can imitate a computer user’s facial expressions when they laugh, smile or even frown and interact with other players’ avatars.
Researchers at the University of Southern California enlisted the help of the Oculus Rift headset for 3-D gaming to create sensors that can detect a person’s facial expressions and replicate them in virtual reality in almost real-time.
The system uses eight strain gauges embedded in the headset’s foam liner — to detect muscle movements — along with a 3-D mapping camera mounted on the headset that’s pointed at the lower half of the user’s face.
The user is required to repeat a small subset of training experiences during a calibration prior to initial use. This improves the tracking ability and provides greater accuracy when reading expressions, according to the project’s lead Hao Li. After the person’s face is fully mapped, the user can begin making expressions that will be transferred onto their VR avatar.
Watch the technology unfold in the video below. The headset’s clunky, but the technology opens the door to real-time social interactions in a virtual environment, which could be a real game changer.
“The resulting animations are visually on par with cutting-edge depth sensor-driven facial performance capture systems and hence, are suitable for social interactions in virtual worlds,” Li writes in the caption below his video.
The Oculus Rift headset is scheduled for release in early 2016, though the contraption enabling avatars to imitate users’ facial expressions is a work in progress.
Minecraft on consoles has reached an interesting turning point. With the advent of Battle Mode, console Minecraft is starting to diverge from PC Minecraft. Battle Mode is an entirely new feature, loosely meant to add cool multiplayer features like the ones that standalone PC servers provide. Meanwhile, the PC Combat Update still hasn’t showed up on consoles yet. So, which do we want next? More cool multiplayer features, or new blocks and new endgame content? Combat Update or Battle Mode?
Minecraft Console Update: More Battle Mode Or Combat Update?
Minecraft Battle Mode really came out of nowhere, but Mojang wanted to spice up the multiplayer element of console Minecraft, and spice it up they did. Battle Mode is just what the console editions needed and it’s the harbinger of more such things to come. Much of the life of Minecraft plays out on servers, maps and mods not available on the console editions – a competitive multiplayer mode at least helps to even out the disparity. With any luck, Battle Mode will be just the tip of the iceberg.
But still—PC Minecraft is getting farther ahead again. The Combat Update has been out since February and it brought major changes to the game… most notably a full revamp of how combat and mining work. It also fleshed out Minecraft’s endgame by dramatically expanding what players can do in the End, the dimension where the Ender Dragon resides. Now, PC Minecraft is already starting to get updates beyond the Combat Update. The next version, known as Frostburn, is bringing polar bears and lots of new monsters and village mechanics. It’s cool stuff.
The Combat Update will come to consoles eventually—but it seems pretty likely that the focus is on Battle Mode for now. That’s what the last few updates have addressed and what Microsoft has been talking about. More significantly, the Combat Update’s new features mostly involve endgame content, which most players will never see. The combat changes affect everyone, but they’ve been divisive. So it makes sense for Mojang and 4J Studios to prioritize cool new content that everyone can use.
Luckily, Microsoft seems to be making Minecraft development more of a priority for both PC and consoles. PC updates are speeding up and new features like Battle Mode are distinct from anything in the PC edition. It’s an exciting moment, but come on guys. We want our end cities.
Project Malmo from Microsoft wants to test how artificial intelligence will navigate the fictional environment of Minecraft.
In the pixelated cube world of “Minecraft,” players can create almost anything their hearts desire. Now, Microsoft is using the popular world-building game to build and test artificial intelligence in the fictional environment.
Microsoft has made a platform for artificial intelligence (A.I.) research using a modified version of “Minecraft” that will become available to the public following a limited release to select researchers. Project Malmo (formerly known as Project AIX) allows anyone from ambitious amateur coders to advanced computer scientists to build and test artificial intelligence in the “Minecraft” environment.
“We?re trying to put out the tools that will allow people to make progress on those really, really hard research questions,” Katja Hofmann, the project’s lead researcher, said in a Microsoft blog post announcing the release.
Project Malmo isn’t designed to build A.I. that solves specific problems. Instead, the research team hopes these tools will be used to develop a general artificial intelligence capable of “planning, reasoning, natural language, and learning,” Hofmann told Live Science in an email.
“Minecraft’s open-ended nature makes it particularly appealing for A.I. experimentation,” Hofmann said.
In the standard “Minecraft” game, players are free to move about, interact with the world and build all manner of unusual creations block by block. An active community around modifications to the game persists years after its original release, and the great potential for creativity has even earned the game a place in the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
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The new project places a machine in control of the blocky avatar in the same open world, with challenges similar to what humans may encounter in the real world. The A.I. will have to learn the basics of “Minecraft,” such as navigation, object interaction and creation, but there is potential for much more complex behavior, according to Microsoft. Human players have found “infinite variety in gameplay,” Hofmann said, and research A.I.s could be put in the same situations.
The newest version also adds support for chat interactions with the A.I. “player,” as well as the ability to overclock (speed up) the game, and therefore the pace of research, according to the developers.
Project Malmo is available on Github and will run on Linux, Mac OS and Windows. In the first few days following the release, close to 20,000 people viewed the project, Hofmann said. “If we are able to sustain a community of this scale, that would be hugely exciting,” she wrote. “Our hope is to inspire the next generation of A.I. researchers and A.I. research.”
Considering Minecraft is all about blocks, it really makes sense to own the game in a box.
Above: Minecraft: Wii U Edition’s box.
Image Credit: Nintendo
Nintendo revealed today that Minecraft: Wii U Edition is now available as a retail release. It came out digitally last December. Minecraft is one of the biggest games in the world, having sold over 100 copies across all of its platforms (which is pretty much all of them, including PC, consoles, and mobile).
The boxed version comes with content that is downloadable for digital version, including the Super Mario Mash-Up Pack, which adds models and textures based on Nintendo’s famous series. It also comes with:
Battle & Beasts Skin Pack
Battle & Beasts 2 Skin Pack
Natural Texture Packs
City Texture Packs
Fantasy Texture Pack
Festive Mash-up
The retail version costs $30, same as the digital one.
The Wii U is nearing the end of its life. Its replacement, the mysterious NX, comes out in March 2017. The Wii U doesn’t have many more games on the horizon (even its most anticipated release, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, is also coming out for the NX), so this physical version of Minecraft for the struggling system comes at an opportune time.
The newly-launched Minecraft Battle mini game (free on consoles) is Mojang’s latest attempt to recapture some of the massive market that plays on independent servers on third-party maps. The Battle mini game is pretty simple—it’s a big free-for-all with up to eight players, where you try to kill, hide, and survive, hoping to be the last player standing.
The mini game takes place on a variety of familiar set pieces—an evil lair full of lava, a pirate cove, an ancient temple—and the game spawns weapons, armor, potions, and food in chests around the arena for players to find and fight over.
If this sounds a lot like The Hunger Games to you, then you’ve got the right idea—it’s pretty much exactly like that. The players start in positions around a center platform that is full of chests, usually the ones with the best gear, and then have to race to get there first and get equipped before the brief grace period ends.
Things get pretty savage from then on. If you don’t manage to find any equipment, you’re at the mercy of the better equipped players, who will hunt you down with flaming arrows, exploding potions, diamond swords, or some combination of the above. If you’re clever and quick, you can sometimes escape and find one of the more secretive chests, but just like in The Hunger Games, if you overextend and fail, you’re going to die.
If you’re terrible like me, you might try hiding and waiting for the other players to kill each other off first. That way, you can pick up the gear that gets left behind. Unfortunately, because all of the items that slain players are carrying get dropped on the ground, the best loot tends to accumulate in the hands of one or two players. I found that it only took a minute of match time, generally speaking, to get an idea of who the victor would be.
Winning in this arena relies on a lot of the same instincts that were necessary in older arena games like Quake or Unreal Tournament—it pays to know the map and know the timing on power-ups and items. The more familiar you are with the arena, the more successful you’ll be.
At the end of a match, you are presented with a scorecard that highlights players for their performance, along with fun statistics that tell you how badly you did. Players who die mid-match aren’t forced to languish on a “You Died” type screen, however — they’re allowed to fly around the map as bats and squeak obnoxiously at the players who are still fighting.
The Minecraft Battle mini game definitely has its moments, but the thing is, that Minecraft arenas have been around for years now. Independent arenas tend to have more players, more maps, more features, and more options. Though there is some appeal for console players here, this me-too effort needs to be a lot more compelling to draw players away from the popular and well-established network of PvP servers that already exist.
The main issue for players who aren’t already involved with Minecraft PvP is that the combat here is still incredibly clunky and non-intuitive. Melee combat at its most sophisticated consists of jumping and holding down your attack button and firing a bow is an exercise in frustration at the best of times. There are many people who appear to like Minecraft PvP, but when compared to almost any other competitive combat game, it falls short.
Right now the Minecraft Battle mini game only has a few maps, though it seems that Mojang intends to monetize the mode by selling map packs. It’s too early to comment on the value provided in any meaningful way, but the maps I played were definitely fun and well designed. At $2.99 for three more maps, the pack seems reasonable enough. Given that the Battle mini game is free, it’s definitely worth trying out.
Rob Guthrie is a lapsed academic who writes about history, video games, and weird internet things. Follow him @RobertWGuthrie for pithy Tweets and lukewarm takes.
I am a huge Minecraft fan. So great a fan, in fact, that before last Friday I hadn’t played in about a year. That’s because Minecraft is a bit like the Bat-Signal, and should be fired up only in times of greatest need. Usually it’s the need to escape from something without leaving my spare bedroom. That could be the sudden descent of family upon my abode, unprecedented mountains of laundry, Brexit—anything that I just can’t face right now.
Each time such a crisis arises, I start a new world. Great cities and blocky wonders have been lost to the Recycle Bin or in hardware upgrades, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m not interested in the finished project. Finishing means I’ll have to face up to the fact that my country just voted itself into political oblivion. No, the real escapism lies in the first few days and nights, when you’re alone and unequipped in an infinite, empty world.
Loading into a new world—after a few experiments with seeds, of course—is like the first sip of icy water on a blazing summer’s day. Everything around you is clear, simple and refreshing, both in the literal sense of the signature aesthetic and in the ritual I must perform.
The sacred Building Of The First Hut (or Digging Of The First Hole, depending on how long I’ve spent placidly wandering) is the first opportunity to collect my thoughts. My brain disconnects as my muscle memory carries me through the task of punching trees, getting wood, making a table, crafting a pick, gathering stone and cobbling it into an appalling hovel.
Architectural concerns are secondary. Later, depending on the magnitude of the real-world problem that forced me to seek refuge, huts become halls and fields turn to fortifications. Right now we’re looking at a 1:1 reimagining of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
It’s really about lasting the first few nights, though. Minecraft sparked the survival fashion, so despite its rudimentary mechanics it that regard, it’s still the quintessential wilderness. That is, until I can afford to build a real log cabin deep in British Columbia and live as a hermit with only a faithful hound for company.
Played like this, Minecraft is an infinite source of solitude. The thought of its many bustling multiplayer servers is horrifying. Sometimes it’s good to be antisocial for the sake of your sanity, and on those occasions, Minecraft has just the empty expanse for you.
