#silicon image

실리콘 이미지, 초저전력 싱글 칩 60GHz WirelessHD 모바일 트랜스미터 발표

실리콘 이미지, 초저전력 싱글 칩 60GHz WirelessHD 모바일 트랜스미터 발표 유무선 HD Connectivity 솔루션 전문기업인 Silicon Image (www.siliconimage.com)는  60GHz RF 트랜시버, 베이스밴드 프로세서, 내장형 안테나 어레이를 하나의 IC 패키지로 통합한 모바일 기기용 통합 WirelessHD 트랜스미터인 WirelessHD UltraGig™ 6400을 발표했다. 유무선 HD Connectivity 솔루션 전문기업인 Silicon Image는  60GHz RF 트랜시버, 베이스밴드 프로세서, 내장형 안테나 어레이를 하나의 IC 패키지로 통합한 모바일 기기용 통합 WirelessHD 트랜스미터인 WirelessHD UltraGig 6400을 발표했다.…

Lattice Semiconductor to Buy Silicon Image

Lattice Semiconductor is paying $600 million in cash, a price that is 23.7 percent above Silicon Image’s closing price on Monday.

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#Qualcomm investit 7M$ dans #Qterics, spécialiste de la gestion des #objetsconnectés #iot

Par l’intermédiaire d’un investissement en capital estimé à 7 millions de dollars, Qualcomm Technologies prend le contrôle de 7% dans le capital de la société Qterics, une filiale de l’américain Silicon Image, créée suite à l’acquisition d’UpdateLogic en mai 2014.

La société Qterics est spécialisé dans les services sécurisés à base de connectivité IP, permettant notamment la gestion à distance…

Gamer girls. Are they a tantalizing myth created by videogame marketing companies to keep us all hooked to online play in the vain hope that one of those gorgeous metal-bra clad warrior elves actually has a real-life girl on the other end of the ludicrously complicated macro setup? Perhaps they only exist out there as auto-aim-despising sirens of beguiling beauty, strewn across the wave-lapped rocky outcrops with Xbox 360 controllers and finely honed twitch reflexes?

Of course, the idea that gamer girls are some kind of myth is of course, itself a myth. There are indeed gamer girls out there, even though it’s sometimes difficult to believe. It’s even more difficult to believe that there might be one with all of the other necessary stability with which to form some kind of a successful relationship. The idea of securing even a brief moment of respite from the nagging better half amidst a solid 12 hour gaming session is a heavenly idea in itself.

The notion of sitting down and actively enjoying extended gaming sessions with our partners is almost too much for the average fragile male intellect to withstand. Let’s take a look at the current situation with girl gamers around the world to determine how to land one in the future.

Los Angeles Girl Scouts Create Game Development Badge

It might sound like a bad pun, but it’s actually true. The Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles (GSGLA) created a game development badge in partnership with Women in Games International (WIGI), a very awesome collective of professional women in the gaming industry. The organization has a very cool tagline of “your parents were wrong, do what you love” and the vice president told journalists that the badge was to “get young girls excited in technology and science and let them know that they, too, can have a career in the video game industry.” Kudos.

In addition to being generally awesome, the news demonstrates the fact that it is generally accepted there are less gamer girls in the industry and initiatives are in place to do something about it.

The Professional Female Gamer

Anyone who thought a professional girl gamer might be some kind of token attraction to the main event would be sorely mistaken. Very sorely mistaken in fact, and match up may well see you not coming away with your male pride intact.

On the subject of sirens of unimaginable beauty, Linda “Pikachu” Liao, a professional StarCraft II player who counts Razer amongst her sponsors list and averages around 220 actions per minute enjoys 10 hours straight practice sessions on the weekends. The number of StarCraft II Grand Masters in the world is in the low thousands and only a tiny percentage of these are women. Anyone who’s played this game will be familiar just how unimaginably difficult it is to get anywhere near Grand Master.

Can We Expect More Female Gamers in the Future?

In short, the answer is: probably. Hopefully. In some countries, the female gamer contingencies actually represent a significant percentage such as Australia where the ratio is reported to be as high as 41% women. Depending on where you look, research demonstrates that games such as Diablo 3, World of Warcraft, The Sims and casual and mobile gaming tends to have a larger percentage of female gamers than the average first person shooter.

A couple of years ago at the 2010 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, gaming hardware companies such as Sony and Nintendo were joining in the hype from development companies including Electronic Arts (EA), touting 3D gaming as the inevitable pending standard. Journalists and industry insiders from all over the glove donned various pairs of three-dimensional-image-inducing glasses to enjoy gaming visuals with 3D-movie-like-depth.

Roll forward 2 1/2 years and 3D gaming is far from being the norm. Debates rage on in game publications article posts, forums and social media threads of various descriptions about whether or not 3D gaming is a waste of time. With the exciting releases of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720 creeping ever closer, let’s take a look at the current state of play in 3D gaming and finish off by looking towards at the potentially exciting future. Minus the hype.

Do You like 3D Gaming?

First off, if you read this, we’re interested to know what you think so feel free to head over to our Facebook page and post comments or opinion on 3D gaming. Did you like Gears of War in 3D or perhaps you feel like 3D is better for sports titles?

At present, many sporting titles such as Madden NFL are playable in 3D, but was the effort really worth it? This game scored a measly 49/100 on Metacritic and you can’t help but wonder what lengths were gone through to create a game with this feature.

Fans of the long-lived Gran Turismo series may hold a particular contempt towards 3D gaming after the title experienced even more delays to jump on this particular bandwagon a few years ago.

Sony and Nintendo Feel it was a Passing Novelty

In interviews with journalists, top dogs in both Sony and Nintendo have admitted they see 3D gaming as more of a novelty than anything else. Because Sony has a vested interest in selling 3D-ready televisions, it’s not surprising that the creators of the PlayStation were heavy proponents of the concept of 3D gaming, thus fulfilling their “vertical integration” marketing strategy with the consumer electronics division.

Sony’s PlayStation Executive, Shuhei Yoshida, stated at CES 2013 that if the “consumer electronics side of Sony, or all of the companies have shifted focus from 3D TV to something else, so if they’re not talking about it, why would we?”. That something else is of course the new 4K high-definition format which, of course, WiHD technology is fully compatible.

Nintendo’s President, Satoru Iwata said in the middle of last year, “I think when we launched the 3DS there was a kind of 3D boom, which is perhaps slightly on the wane again,” which he then went on to say he feels is now “on the wane”.

Exciting Differences in PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720 3D Strategy

It’s fun to debate with our fellow gamers about the future, relevancy and value of 3D, even if the people quoted above are the ones who can call the shots. Sony is focusing more on the new 4K high-resolution format, though the PlayStation 4 will support 3D and also have a stronger focus on 1080p60 (obviously, also already supported by WiHD) which will create smoother and more immersive 3D experiences. However, it seems Microsoft is taking a different route.

In September last year it surfaced that Microsoft had filed a patent for an augmented reality projector which sends images all around the walls of the room, immersing the gamer wearing Kinect 3D glasses in the center. If implemented well and taken up by game developers, this has the potential to launch the Xbox 720 console into the league of its own.

Technology in its Infancy

It’s a great feeling when you stick with a game for some time and you start noticing your skills improve. You start developing twitch resistance to hold your own through increasingly higher ranked servers and matches, and spend more time owning (and subsequently mocking) your friends. But what would it take to be so good at a game that you could earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and quit your day job? The word ‘practice’ is an understatement.

Where It All Began

We recently looked back on some nostalgic cult classic games including the first-ever multiplayer first person shooter (FPS) game, MIDI Maze released on the Nintendo Entertainment System. However, the first online FPS multiplayer came with the arrival of Doom back in December 1993. Yes, we’re aware this was 20 years ago and we apologize for making any of the more mature gamers suddenly feel very old…

Rather than having a built-in matchmaking system, something we all take for granted these days, a whole separate company (called DWANGO, or Dial-up Wide-Area Network Game Operation) used to manage competitive play over the net. Nowadays, people play FPS, real-time strategy (RTS) multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) and other genres effortlessly and by the millions with professional enjoying prizes of up to $1 million in major LAN tournaments.

The Real Price of Entry

The price entry to an international professional gaming tournament is not a matter of money. It’s really a matter of life (as in ‘to sacrifice your entire’…) or, in some cases, death. In countries such as Korea, gamers sit at their screens for 18 hours a day honing their skills to develop the necessary minimum circa-200 actions per minute (APM) to even be a remotely viable entry into a Starcraft II tournament. Deaths do happen through fatigue and worse in the process of getting there.

The Korean government has even set up treatment centers that help people who become hopelessly addicted to both video games and the aspirations to become a professional gamer. We all love the idea of having what it takes to become a world international gamer, but these aspects are often taken for granted.

The Current State of Play

Most important thing to note here is that gaming tournaments are epic fun and increasing in popularity. Many major development studios including Blizzard, Capcom, ID Software, Infinity Ward and Valve recognize the power of providing fans with fuel for our competitive gaming passions, regularly holding major tournaments as a result. The WiHD team is also putting together a tournament for Gears of War: Judgment at E3 2013 where we’ll be giving away a ton of great stuff, including a DVDO-Air Transmitter/Receiver set.

Other major driving forces of gaming tournaments include Major League Gaming, a great source for upcoming tournaments and a place to watch video streams of Black Ops II, League of Legends, StarCraft II to and Planetside 2 at levels of play demonstrating skill ceilings higher than the average Dubai skyscraper. The company has enjoyed phenomenal success in the 10 years since it launched.

We all know what it’s like. We get a new game, play it for those first few glorious hours, love it and subsequently allocate 65% of our intellect inventing ingenious ways to get as little done as possible and think of as many excuses as possible to spend as much time as possible indulging our latest addiction. Even though we appreciate these experiences, it’s easy to take for granted the blood, sweat and nerdrage it takes to craft a gaming masterpiece. This article is an ode of appreciation to those that build our beloved digital fantasy worlds.

The Whirlwind of the Development Process

Creating triple-A title from scratch is epic, a core reason we see so many sequels. First of all, a concept must be masterminded by some godlike human being or other. Once an idea is ironed out, a storyboard comes next but, unlike a triple-A Hollywood movie, a game can have thousands of different storylines and many endings.

Next, concept sketches are finalized before programmers can start to build skeletons, exoskeletons and beautifully rendered textures of characters, objects and entire game worlds. Further extensive programming work creates believable artificial intelligence, physics, lighting models, voice actors and audio tracks, all of which must meld together seamlessly.

Commercial schedules must be adhered to, further pressuring individual teams to form a congruent whole. Many times, bad games are released because timeframe limitations forced a rushed product out the door and not because the development teams were incapable of putting together a 10/10 title. The pressure is almost unimaginable and many major development companies have teams working through the night to hit the release schedule.

Long Live the Programming Nerds

Sure, we’re all nerds in one respect or another. Here we’re talking about the superhero nerds. The game development programmers who sculpt games, one indecipherable line of programming code at a time.

In a guest presentation to UC Berkeley, independent videogame developer, Jonathan Blow (responsible for the creation of the infamous Xbox live Arcade success, Braid) explained things well.

The average number of lines of computer code written every year by a government department employee is around 3,275. Braid is approximately 90,000 lines of code (excluding all of the thrown-out and rewritten code). On this basis, it would take 28 years for an independent developer to create a game.

As it stands, development often must be finished in closer to 3 years and a drop in quality is 100% not an option if it’s ever to be published, let alone successful. If this is the workload for a ‘simple’ 2-D platform the title, imagine what it takes to create games such as the pending Grand Theft Auto V with its impossibly vast and realistic cities.

In Honor of the Quality & Assurance Tester

So, it’s taken all of these teams all this endless work for everything to come together. Guess what? At first, it doesn’t work so smoothly. Bugs of varying severities run wild in early (or “alpha build” and “beta build”) stage games and they must be ironed out. The talented artists and programmers who spent many years studying and establishing themselves in the industry don’t do this. It’s a job reserved for quality and assurance (or Q & A) tester.

As any gamer or a tech nerd will tell you, the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is a mecca of technological and visual splendor shrouded with mystery, awe and excitement. It’s an eagerly anticipated industry-only tradeshow which witnesses announcements of similar magnitudes to man landing on the moon, the end of the Second World War and the opening of the new series of Game of Thrones. Okay, maybe not quite as big as the new series of Game of Thrones starting, but it’s pretty big okay?

The-primary reason for this annual event is media hype. It’s commonly said that hype is not to be believed and, in many cases this is true. However, some of the greatest successes in digital entertainment history started out with an announcement at E3, so it’s definitely not it’s not all smoke and mirrors, unlike the painfully obvious staging ‘moon landing’…

Needless to say, WiHD will have a booth at this maelstrom of an event reserved only for the most awesome things and, with that in mind, we wanted to examine some previous highs and mysteries. What sorts of things have been released at E3 in the past and what might we expect at this year’s E3? Let’s take a trip down memory Lane.

The Mysteries of E3

Its good fun both reading up on and getting excited about pending releases, so it’s deflating when they vanish into the ether of Hypeland, nothing more than pure vaporware. So many of these have evaporated from the various E3’s over the years, you could write a book about them, but let’s take a look at two especially memorable examples.

The Phantom Entering the console market means going up against the serious superheavyweight competition. Back in 2004, apparently-pending console, The Phantom, had a booth at E3 where it promised a console box which streams games to the television, potentially representing a precursor to today’s OnLive HD game streaming cloud service. Much like its namesake, The Phantom vanished shortly thereafter.

Molyneux’s Milo At E3 2009, arguably one of the most respected game developers of all time, Peter Molyneux presented to the crowds a purely digital yet frighteningly sentient boy named Milo. In his presentation on the subject of interaction with games, a video was played of a woman engaged in what appeared to be a conversation of detailed emotional recognition with the young rendered chap who was evidently feeling bad for not having done his homework.

Imagine playing Skyrim where all the characters in the virtual world could be looked at and interacted with as normal human beings rather than through the use of dialogue boxes, keyboards and controllers! Shortly afterwards, Milo had all but completely vanished.

The Biggest Surprises

While some announcements vanish, others flourish. Looking back, and much like man walking on the moon, it’s easy to take many past-announcements-turned-modern-norm for granted. Here are some of the WiHD team’s favorites.

KillZone 2 KillZone 2 is a PlayStation 3 game announced at E3 2005 and it (quite rightly) took the crowds by shock-worthy storm. The combination of excellent graphics development work and solid artistic direction made for some utterly breathtaking visuals you might expect from a PlayStation 5. This game on a decent home cinema will blow you away even today and it’s scary to think it was first seen some eight years ago now.

Valve Partnering with Sony On the subject of the PlayStation 3, another huge shock came when Valve announced it would be working with Sony. After Valve chief, Gabe Newell, gave Sony’s PlayStation 3 console a the kind of bashing not even a good ol’ HazMat suit could withstand following the release of the Orange Box collection of games, this is a good example of the kind of unexpected industry twists which can come out of this event.

What Will WiHD Show?