An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Now researchers at MIT have developed a new way to produce holograms nearly instantly -- a deep-learning based method so efficient, it can generate holograms on a laptop in a blink of an eye. They detailed their findings this week, which were funded in part by Sony, online in the journal Nature. Using physics simulations for computer-generated holography involves calculating the appearance of many chunks of a hologram and then combining them to get the final hologram. Using lookup tables is like memorizing a set of frequently used chunks of hologram, but this sacrifices accuracy and still requires the combination step.
[...]
The researchers first built a custom database of 4,000 computer-generated images, which each included color and depth information for each pixel. This database also included a 3D hologram corresponding to each image. Using this data, the convolutional neural network learned how to calculate how best to generate holograms from the images. It could then produce new holograms from images with depth information, which is provided with typical computer-generated images and can be calculated from a multi-camera setup or from lidar sensors, both of which are standard on some new iPhones. The new system requires less than 620 kilobytes of memory, and can generate 60 color 3D holograms per second with a resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels on a single consumer-grade GPU. The researchers could run it an iPhone 11 Pro at a rate of 1.1 holograms per second and on a Google Edge TPU at a rate of 2 holograms per second, suggesting it could one day generate holograms in real-time on future virtual-reality (VR) and augmented-reality (AR) mobile headsets.

On Friday, NPD Group analyst Mat Piscatella tweeted that the PS5 is currently the fastest selling hardware platform" in U.S. history, in terms of total dollar sales. CNET reports: Piscatella didn't share an exact dollar amount for the PS5 but noted that consumer spending across video game hardware, software and accessories has already totaled $9.3 billion this year. Sony didn't include specific sales figures in its earnings report last month, but the company did indicate it shipped 4.5 million PS5 consoles in 2020 alone. Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki said at a February news conference that Sony is aiming to sell upward of 14.8 million units in the coming fiscal year, which begins this month.

The PS5 did fall to second place for the month of February, according to NPD. It was superseded only by the Nintendo Switch, which may have seen a sales boost on the heels of Super Mario 3D World -- Bowser's Fury, the latest Switch title, released last month.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Have you ever bought a movie or TV show through the PlayStation Store? Me neither. As a result, Sony announced today it will remove them, starting August 31, 2021. "We've seen tremendous growth from PlayStation fans using subscription-based and ad-based entertainment streaming services on our consoles," Sony wrote in a post over on the PlayStation Blog. "With this shift in customer behavior, we have decided to no longer offer movie and TV purchases and rentals through PlayStation Store." As a multimedia company producing movies and TV alongside music and games, it made sense for Sony to sell all of it through various iterations of the PlayStation's digital storefront, in theory at least. In practice, it seems like console owners were mostly just interested in buying games, especially following the rise of Netflix and Amazon Prime.

The tech giant likes to test and tweak. Stadia promised to change the industry and failed to deliver. From a report: Google's streaming video game service Stadia had ambitious plans to disrupt the gaming industry, which is dominated by consoles. The tech giant had planned to pack Stadia with original content, announcing two years ago that it was hiring hundreds of game developers and starting studios in Los Angeles and Montreal. But those teams barely had time to get started before they were dismissed earlier this month as Google shut down in-house game development. From the beginning, Google's approach to video games wasn't very Google-like. The Alphabet company tends to launch bare-bones products and test them as they grow. With Stadia, it came out big. Flashy press conferences and ad campaigns promised high-quality games with innovative features playable on Android smartphones or on the TV through Chromecast. Gamers would have access to a library of exclusive titles and well-known favorites like Assassin's Creed without having to dish out $500 for Sony Corp's PlayStation or Microsoft's Xbox.

So when Stadia launched in 2019, gamers were expecting the complete package, not the beta model. While the cloud streaming technology was there, playing to Google's strengths, the library of games was underwhelming and many of the promised features nonexistent. Other platforms offer hundreds of games a year, but Stadia offers fewer than 80, according to Mat Piscatella, an analyst at the NPD Group, which tracks video game sales data. Players also didn't like Stadia's business model, which required customers to buy games individually rather than subscribe to an all-you-can-play service a la Netflix or the Xbox's Game Pass. Paying as much as $60 for a single game, for it only to exist on Google's servers rather than on your own PC, seemed a stretch to some. After all the hype, gamers were disappointed. Stadia missed its targets for sales of controllers and monthly active users by hundreds of thousands, according to two people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. A Google spokesperson declined to comment for this story. "I think it would be fair to say the messaging leading up to and around the launch was inconsistent," with the final product, Piscatella says. Further reading: Stadia Leadership Praised Development Studios For 'Great Progress' Just One Week Before Laying Them All Off.

Sony is winding down original game development at its oldest first-party developer, Japan Studio, game news outlet VGC reported, citing sources. From the report: The iconic developer behind Ape Escape, Gravity Rush and Knack has seen the vast majority of its development staff let go, the sources said, after their annual contracts were not renewed ahead of the company's next business year, which begins April 1. Localisation and business staff will remain in place and ASOBI Team -- the group responsible for the Astro Bot games -- will continue as a standalone studio within Sony Japan, it's claimed. Some Japan Studio staff will join ASOBI, we were told, while others have followed Silent Hill and Gravity Rush director Keiichiro Toyama -- who left Japan Studio last year -- to his new studio Bokeh. It's not entirely clear if the restructure has affected the studio's External Development Department, which collaborated on games such as last year's Demon's Souls, but one person VGC spoke to suggested it would continue.

CD Projekt SA said Wednesday it will delay a promised update to the much-criticized role-playing game Cyberpunk 2077, pinning the blame for its slow progress on a recent security breach. From a report: What the Polish publisher didn't say is that most of its employees have been locked out of their workstations for the past two weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. The work stoppage is the result of a ransomware attack disclosed on Feb. 9. The extent of the disruption, which hasn't been previously reported, poses a major setback to CD Projekt's attempt to rescue a game in desperate need of repairs. CD Projekt has said it refused to pay a ransom to the hackers. As a result, employees remain unable to log onto the company's virtual private network, making it impossible to access the systems and tools needed to do most of their jobs, said the people, requesting anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk publicly. Although some CD Projekt employees are working from the headquarters in Warsaw, the majority are at home due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The PlayStation 5 will have its own virtual reality headset, however, consumers may face ongoing difficulties obtaining a PS5 console given a supply chain shortfall. From a report: Ryan revealed both developments in a Monday interview with The Washington Post. Ryan said developments kits for the PS5-specific VR headset will be sent out soon, though the company isn't ready to talk about the device's horsepower or specs. He did say the next headset will be considerably less cumbersome, as opposed to the current PSVR setup that requires wires running through a PlayStation 4, the TV and a separate black box called the PSVR processor. "Generational leaps allows you to sweep up the advances in technology that have taken place," Ryan said. "Given this was our first foray into virtual reality, it gives us a chance to apply lessons learned. One of the very vivid illustrations of that is that we will be moving to a very easy single-cord setup."

The next version of PlayStation VR will also borrow from its groundbreaking DualSense controllers, which debuted with the PS5 and provide super specific haptic feedback from the game to the palms of a player's hands. "One of the innovations we're excited about is our new VR controller, which will incorporate some of the key features found in the DualSense wireless controller, along with a focus on great ergonomics," Senior Vice President, Platform Planning & Management Hideaki Nishino wrote in a post on PlayStation's website Tuesday. There's no set launch date for the new VR device, according to Ryan. In an October 2020 interview with The Post, Ryan said while Sony was still very much interested in VR, any more news about the company's VR investments may not come in 2021.

Apple commentator Jason Snell writes: Why does this product still exist, and is there anywhere for it to go next? Gruber and Thompson [two other columnists] suggest that perhaps the way forward is to lean into an identity as a low-end gaming console. Maybe amp up the processor power, bundle a controller, and try to use Apple Arcade to emphasize that this is a box that is for more than watching video. The thing is, that's really been the story of the Apple TV for the last few years, and so far as I can tell, it's basically gone nowhere. Apple isn't Nintendo or Sony or Microsoft when it comes to gaming. Apple's track record with gaming products isn't solid, to say the least. It's hard for me to see this succeeding -- but it doesn't mean Apple won't try. The other possibility that I've come up with is to merge the Apple TV with some other technologies in order to make something more than just a simple TV streamer. Gaming can be a part of that, yes, but there needs to be more.

Broader HomeKit support, perhaps with support for other wireless home standards, would help, as would a much more sophisticated set of home automations. And if Apple really wants to continue to play in the home-theater space, I've been saying for years that there's room for an Apple SoundBar, that could integrate the big sound of HomePod with the Apple TV software to create a solid music and video experience. Then there's the final possibility: No more Apple TV. Removing it simplifies Apple's product naming scheme (Apple TV is a hardware box, an app, and a streaming service, but not yet a dessert topping), and allows the company to focus on other things -- perhaps including other home-themed products that might be more up its alley. I don't think Apple is going to kill the Apple TV, even though I might recommend that it do so. If I had to predict a next step, I'd go with Gruber and Thompson: Apple TV Arcade, an updated, premium-priced box that will lean into games and other features that competing TV boxes don't offer. I'm not optimistic that it'll be successful, but it does seem like something Apple would try.

Similar to Nintendo's "Joy-Con drift," Sony's PlayStation 5 DualSense controller is apparently suffering from drift: movement on-screen that doesn't correspond to any button press or input. ExtremeTech reports: Users have reported DualSense drift as quickly as 10 days after purchasing a PlayStation 5, which tracks with some of the shorter reports we've heard about Nintendo as well. We can assume that some DualSense controllers will suffer drift because no consumer company can guarantee that literally 100 percent of its products will not contain a defect of some kind. One key factor to look for when judging the seriousness of claims like this is how many people encounter the same issue repeatedly. [...] Kotaku reports that Sony is honoring requests to repair DualSense controllers under warranty, but you'll have to pay the shipping fee to send your controller to the company. Return shipping and the cost of repairs or replacement will be covered by Sony. According to IGN, the U.S.-based law firm of Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith LLP has set up a questionnaire page on its website, allowing PS5 owners to report problems with their DualSense controllers.

No action has been take yet, but CSK&D stated that it is "investigating a potential class action based upon reports that Sony PS5 DualSense controllers for the PlayStation 5 console can experience drift issues and/or fail prematurely," reads the page introduction. "Specifically, it is reported that the joystick on certain PS5 DualSense controllers will automatically register movement when the joystick is not being controlled and interfere with gameplay." The firm was one of the firms that handled the Nintendo "Joy-Con drift" situation last year.

Sony shipped more than 4.5 million PlayStation 5s from the console's Nov. 12 launch to the end of the year, but it took a loss on those sales because the PS5's "strategic price point" is lower than what it cost to manufacture it. From a report: The disclosure was part of Sony's quarterly report to investors, delivered in Japan earlier today. The losses on PS5 sales were not specifically broken out -- and they were part of an overall Game & Network Services Segment that saw a 26.7 billion yen ($2.5 billion) increase in operating income over the same quarter in 2019. Sony's PlayStation revenue from game sales (both PS4 and PS5, add-on content included) plus larger profit margins on the outgoing PlayStation 4 more than made up any shortfall, the company said. By comparison, the PlayStation 4 sold more than 4.2 million units from its November 2013 launch to the end of that year. The company in November said the new PlayStation 5 is facing "unprecedented" demand, making its availability scarce, even though more PS5s have been available, in whole numbers, than their predecessor. Microsoft's Xbox Series X has faced the same issue, with the company's chief financial officer telling investors back in November that a console shortage could last until April.

"We messed up today," the Xbox Live Gold team wrote late Friday night, "and you were right to let us know." Their blog post's new title? "No Changes to Xbox Live Gold Pricing, Free-to-Play Games to be Unlocked."

Forbes reports: It has been a very strange few days for Microsoft and Xbox fans. On Friday, Microsoft announced that for effectively no real reason, it was doubling the price of Xbox Live Gold from $60 a year to $120 a year. Immediately, this generated massive pushback from both players, who would bear those costs, and the press, who dubbed Xbox Live Gold suddenly "the worst deal in gaming."

It took all of maybe 14 hours for Microsoft to come back and...kill the entire idea. Not only that, as in addition to reverting the planned price increase, they also announced that they were working on making all free-to-play games able to be played without needing Xbox Live Gold, a long-requested change, which would roll out over the next few months...

Microsoft is trying very hard to push people into signing up for Ultimate and Game Pass, and this price increase was meant to be a win-win for them. Either people were now close enough to the yearly price of Ultimate where they'd just do that instead, or they would be paying twice as much for Gold which meant more sub revenue anyways. What could go wrong? What is not clear, however, is why Microsoft did not anticipate the reaction....
Citing a Twitter thread from analyst Daniel Ahmad, the article concludes that "Microsoft knows that it is losing the console sales battle, and they will likely continue to lose it to Sony.

"So their main desire is to increase Game Pass adoption as much as possible to essentially be the definitive game subscription service in the market before others catch up."

You know it's bad when James Bond still can't get out of the house. "No Time to Die," the 25th film in the Bond franchise, was delayed for a third time late Thursday, the surest sign yet that Hollywood does not believe the masses will be ready to return to movie theaters anytime soon. From a report: Daniel Craig's final outing as 007 will now arrive on 8 October, the official Bond Twitter account announced. It had been set to be released in April following multiple pandemic-enforced delays. No Time To Die is the latest major release to be pushed back as Hollywood studios scramble to protect their films from certain box office doom, with cinemas remaining closed in markets around the world. Earlier this month Warner Bros announced it was delaying the release of Sopranos prequel The Many Saints Of Newark. And after MGM released the Bond news, Sony said Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway was moving from April to June, Ghostbusters: Afterlife was pushed from June to November and Cinderella, which stars singer Camila Cabello, will now arrive in July.

Apple's first crack at a headset is designed to be a pricey, niche precursor to a more ambitious augmented reality product that will take longer to develop, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: The initial device has confronted several development hurdles and the company has conservative sales expectations, illustrating how challenging it will be to bring this nascent consumer technology to the masses. As a mostly virtual reality device, it will display an all-encompassing 3-D digital environment for gaming, watching video and communicating. AR functionality, the ability to overlay images and information over a view of the real world, will be more limited. Apple has planned to launch the product as soon as 2022, going up against Facebook's Oculus, Sony's PlayStation VR and headsets from HTC, the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing private plans.

Apple's typical playbook involves taking emerging consumer technology, such as music players, smartphones, tablets and smartwatches, and making it reliable and easy to use for everyone. This time, though, Apple isn't looking to create an iPhone-like hit for its first headset. Instead, the company is building a high-end, niche product that will prepare outside developers and consumers for its eventual, more mainstream AR glasses. The plans suggest that Apple's first headset will be far more expensive than those from rivals, which cost about $300 to $900. Some Apple insiders believe the company may sell only one headset per day per retail store. Apple has roughly 500 stores, so in that scenario, annual sales would be just over 180,000 units -- excluding other sales channels. That would put it on par with other pricey Apple products, such as the $5,999 Mac Pro desktop computer.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Somehow, it's already been two decades since Microsoft first announced the Xbox, its foray into console gaming. Specifically, the Xbox was unveiled at CES in 2001 -- to commemorate that launch, Bloomberg has published an in-depth oral history of how the console came to be. It's a fascinating read, but one particular passage stands out: details on Microsoft's efforts to secure games for the brand-new console. While the company implored third-party developers to work on the Xbox, Microsoft also considered using its considerable financial might to buy developers. And Microsoft set its sights high, approaching Nintendo about an acquisition. Microsoft was laughed out of the room, says Kevin Bachus, a director for third-party relations on the Xbox project. "They just laughed their asses off," Bachus said to Bloomberg. "Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went."

Microsoft's specific pitch did make some amount of sense. At the time, Nintendo was lagging behind Sony badly from a hardware perspective. So Microsoft figured it could take on hardware production and leave Nintendo to focus on the software. "We actually had Nintendo in our building in January 2000 to work through the details of a joint venture where we gave them all the technical specs of the Xbox," said head of business development Bob Mcbreen. "The pitch was their hardware stunk, and compared to Sony PlayStation, it did. So the idea was, 'Listen, you're much better at the game portions of it with Mario and all that stuff. Why don't you let us take care of the hardware?â(TM) But it didn't work out."

Sony is probably the most storied TV brand still standing and while it's no longer a top 5 seller, it remains a powerhouse among high-end models -- aka TVs that cost a lot of money. Its 2021 lineup of new sets, announced in advance of CES, includes lots of impressive technology and will likely cost a pretty penny too. From a report: The highest-end new Sony has 8K resolution, but the most interesting TV to video quality nerds is the new Master Series A90J OLED TV with higher peak brightness -- marking the first time in years an OLED TV maker has touted brighter panels. Brightness is important for HDR and for making an image pop in bright rooms, and it's the one major area where OLED traditionally lags LCD.

Sony is also the first company to officially announce a new size of OLED: 83 inches, the largest 4K OLED to date. (If you're keeping track, LG has an 88-inch 8K OLED for, cough, $30,000.) And if that's not big enough for ya, the successor series to my favorite Sony (for the money) of 2020 includes a 100-inch model. Less exciting (to me) than bigger, brighter TVs is something Sony calls "cognitive" processing, available on all of its 2021 TVs. [...] More welcome was the news that all of the models detailed below include HDMI 2.1 gaming extras, namely 4K/120fps input and variable refresh rate (the latter available via a firmware update), which were previously reserved for just one 2020 model, the X900H.

It might have taken more than 20 years, but a game intended for the original PlayStation has at last made its way into the world. Engadget reports: A group of Japanese developers worked on Magic Castle for eight months in the late '90s. They used Sony's Net Yaroze, a system with which hobbyists could make games for the console. The team sent the RPG to several publishers, but most didn't bite. Sony showed interest, but it wanted the developers to ditch their game and move to a different project. The team rejected the offer and later disbanded. And so the unfinished Magic Castle stayed on the shelf for over 20 years. Until now.

One of the developers, who goes by PIROWO, rediscovered the Magic Castle source code a while back. They decided to finish and release it, four console generations later. Magic Castle has some interesting tricks up its sleeve, as EuroGamer notes. It features dynamic music and you can customize the position of the user interface. There are four character classes to choose from and 20 floors with randomized elements to make your way through. You can download the game from the Internet Archive and play it with an emulator.

Phoronix reports: It's been a turbulent year and 2020 is certainly ending interesting in the Linux/open-source space... If it wasn't odd enough seeing Sony providing a new official Linux driver for their PlayStation 5 DualSense controller for ending out the year, there is also a new Linux port to the Nintendo 64 game console... Yes, a brand new port to the game console that launched more than two decades ago.

Open-source developer Lauri Kasanen who has contributed to Mesa and the Linux graphics stack took to developing a new Nintendo 64 port and announced it this Christmas day. This isn't the first time Linux has been ported to the N64 but prior attempts weren't aimed at potentially upstreaming it into the mainline Linux kernel...

This fresh port to the N64 was pursued in part to help port emulators and frame-buffer or console games.
And also, the announcement adds, "Most importantly, because I can."

CD Projekt SA, the Polish video-game publisher of Cyberpunk 2077, was sued by an investor who claims the company misled him about the potential of the error-plagued game whose botched release this month caused shares to dive. From a report: Andrew Trampe sued Thursday in federal court in Los Angeles and seeks to represent other investors who bought the company's securities. CD Projekt failed to disclose that Cyberpunk 2077 was "virtually unplayable on the current-generation Xbox or Playstation systems due to an enormous number of bugs," according to the complaint. As a result, Sony Corp. removed Cyberpunk 2077 from the Playstation store, and Sony, Microsoft and the company were forced to offer full refunds for the game, according to the complaint.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have discovered a way to make self-assembled nanowires of transition metal chalcogenides at scale using chemical vapor deposition. By changing the substrate where the wires form, they can tune how these wires are arranged, from aligned configurations of atomically thin sheets to random networks of bundles. This paves the way to industrial deployment in next-gen industrial electronics, including energy harvesting, and transparent, efficient, even flexible devices.

Using a process called chemical vapor deposition (CVD), they found that they could assemble TMC nanowires in different arrangements depending on the surface or substrate that they use as a template. Examples are shown in Figure 2; in (a), nanowires grown on a silicon/silica substrate form a random network of bundles; in (b), the wires assemble in a set direction on a sapphire substrate, following the structure of the underlying sapphire crystal. By simply changing where they are grown, the team now have access to centimeter-sized wafers covered in the arrangement they desired, including monolayers, bilayers and networks of bundles, all with different applications. They also found that the structure of the wires themselves were highly crystalline and ordered, and that their properties, including their excellent conductivity and 1D-like behavior, matched those found in theoretical predictions. The research has been published in the journal Nano Letters.

Sony has published a new "hid-playstation" Linux kernel driver for bringing up the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller and will also be used for supporting other PlayStation hardware on Linux. Phoronix reports: This new Linux kernel driver supports the PlayStation 5 "DualSense" game controller both in USB and Bluetooth modes. All key functionality along with LEDs, motion sensors, touchpad, battery, lightbar, and rumble are all supported by this official Sony Linux driver. The Linux kernel already has the existing "hid-sony" driver while this PlayStation 5 game controller comes with the hid-playstation driver. In announcing the new driver, they are planning to move some of the Sony Interactive Entertainment hardware support from the existing hid-sony to hid-playstation drivers. The hid-sony driver will continue to be maintained and used by broader Sony devices. This new driver follows the move from about a year ago of Sony "officially" maintaining the hid-sony Linux input driver.

This new driver comes in at just over 1,400 lines of code in its initial form catering to the PS5 controller. When transitioning support for older hardware to this new driver there is also a promise of unit test coverage and more. The new HID-PlayStation driver is currently under review and isn't yet queued up for mainlining but those wanting to try it out can find the 13 patches up for testing.