Breaking, Comic-Con, Entertainment, Event, Gaming, News, Virtual Reality (VR)

Steven Spielberg Pushes into VR with Ready Player One

During the Cannes Film Festival, Steven Spielberg expressed word of caution when it came to movie industry adopting the Virtual Reality as a medium. Just a few months later on Comic-Con conference, the famous producer is more open on the subject, and is focused on creating a world that can serve both the interactive medium as VR, as well as the “conventional” movie going experience. Steven is directing “Ready Player One”, famous dystopian book which inspired many Sci-Fi movies, including The Matrix. In a world destroyed by global warming, people survive by using Virtual Reality to play The Oasis, a re-imagined 1980s world. This 2011

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Augmented Reality (AR), Breaking, Comic-Con, Entertainment, Gaming, News, Virtual Reality (VR)

Star Wars Chess is Becoming a (Virtual) Reality

One of ways how the new technologies will enable future realities is through entertainment. After all, Six Flags is putting VR experiences on its roller coaster rides. Now, what if experiences from the past come to life? Especially if we are talking about movie effects. One such movie effect is coming to life thanks to Phil Tippet, movie magician that worked on dozens of AAA movie titles, including legendary Star Wars. The “Let the Wookie Win” scene from Star Wars IV: A New Hope with holographic chess long belonged to the Hollywood prop magic. In the scene, Luke Skywalker is getting acquainted with the light saber, while Chewbacca and

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Comic-Con, Entertainment, Event,

Star Wars: The Force Awakens – Behind The Scenes

Star Wars: The Force Awakens -2

The Star Wars: The Force Awakens show reel starts with “Everything’s changed, but nothing has changed”. It shows us what was revealed to the fans at the 2015 Comic Con in San Diego. A combination of personal views from the actors, behind the scenes shots and some rather interesting glimpes of what’s about to come later. It’s a real treat for anyone who ever loved these movies. It’s a glimpse into the fascinating space of Star Wars. If we’re honest completely. Revealed at the San Diego Comic-Con’s Hall H, it treated fans with a special look behind the scenes of Star Wars:The Force Awakens by

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2014, Comic-Con, Entertainment, Event, VR World

2014 San Diego Comic-Con Complete Photos and Video

Comic-Con

In case you missed our 2014 San Diego International Comic-Con coverage over the course of the past week, and didn’t read our Comic-Con preview, Preview Night or Day 1 articles, we’ve got all of the images (and video) we’ve taken compiled together for you neatly in this article. If you’d like to know more about what happened, then we recommend you read those articles to see exactly what went down this past week. Yes, there were a lot of geeks, cosplayers, and comic fans, but Comic-Con once again went off mostly without a hitch.     We’ve also included some of our short videos from

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2014, Comic-Con, Event, Gaming, Hardware, Mobile Computing, VR World

2014 San Diego Comic-Con: Day 1 Pictures

Comic-Con

On day one of the 2014 San Diego International Comic-Con we got a chance to check out some of the off-site events going on around the show as well as walk some more of the show floor and take a look at what people are doing. On Day 1 there were a lot more people dressed up in costumes than during Preview Night, but there were also a lot more people in general. Day 1 was a pretty great success because we got a chance to play laser tag with people from Nerdist and 2K in the Borderlands the Pre-Sequel laser tag. They also had

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2014, Comic-Con, Entertainment, Event, VR World

2014 San Diego Comic-Con: Preview Night Gallery

Every year Comic-Con rolls around and every year they have a preview night where you can check out some of the booths that are already setup and even some of the off-site stuff that’s already set up. This year, it seemed like almost all of the booths onsite (in the conference hall) were pretty much up and running (and selling stuff or signing stuff). However, a lot of the off-site things were not quite ready yet and were in the process of being brought up. As such, this gallery won’t be as complete as some of our later ones, but we wanted to give you

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2014, Comic-Con, Entertainment, Event, Hardware, VR World

2014 San Diego Comic-Con Preview

San Diego Comic-Con

We’ve been asking around, trying to figure out what will be going on on and off site this year and we’ve been sure to hit up all of the usual suspects in terms of gaming and hardware companies to see what they’ll be doing at Comic-Con this year. This year, Legendary will be having a pretty major focus on World of Warcraft, as they’ll be having a signing with the upcoming movie’s director, Duncan Jones. The signing will occur at 2pm on Saturday (likely immediately following their Hall H panel) and in order to get a poster and in line for the signing you need

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2014, Analysis, Business, Comic-Con, Enterprise, Event, Hardware, Opinion, VR World

Post-Computex Blues – Yet Another Bloodbath on the Horizon

Computex Taipei_1000

Or… The Vendors Never Learn It’s been a full 2 weeks now since the end of Computex, and the associated roaming around Greater China and certain (mostly Chinese speaking too) neighboring realms. This being at the very least fifteenth Computex for me, I didn’t bother much with press conferences and such, but checking the show floor to see what’s really going on, and then do a real check with selected vendors after the event is done with. The Taiwanese, with diminishing focus on high end ‘added value’ PC stuff, moving towards mainstream consumer things with corresponding reduction in differentiation and ability to charge larger margins,

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2014, Comic-Con, Event, Hardware, VR World

Synaptics' Thintouch Keyboard for 2-in-1's at Computex 2014

Synaptics Thintouch

We sat down at Computex 2014 with Synaptics’ Godfrey Cheng and Scott Poole to talk about the company’s latest innovations, including their developments with their Forcepad. I was personally unaware that Synaptics’ first generation Forcepads actually had glass built into the touchpad to enable the Forcepad to work correctly and evenly distribute the pressure. However, the new generation of the Forcepad is capable of measuring the smallest amount of pressure at every point and no longer uses glass, making the touchpad more flexible, less breakable, and thinner than the previous generation. We also got some hints that the company might be working on some interesting

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2014, Comic-Con, Event, Gaming, Hardware, VR World

Gigabyte Suite at Computex 2014, Mountains of Motherboards

Gigabyte Gaming Motherboards

As we had already covered most of what Gigabyte already had to announce from their new 9 series motherboards at the beginning of Computex, we were interested to see exactly what Gigabyte had to show us at their suite on the 36th floor of Taipei 101 (somewhere about 1/3 of the way up). After we got to their suite, we were greeted by Gigabyte’s Irene Huang, who graciously showed us around Gigabyte’s suite and introduced us to their full line of motherboards that they had announced earlier in the week. The first thing that caught our attention was Gigabyte’s walls of motherboards, with their new

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2014, Comic-Con, Event, Gaming, Hardware, Mobile Computing, VR World

Kingston's Newest Products Shown at Computex 2014

Kingston HyperX Computex 2014

At Computex 2014, Kingston had a lot of products to show attendees at their HyperX suite which also featured Kingston’s HOT (HyperX OC Takeover) where overclockers competed for a share of $10,000 in prize money. The rest of the floor was shared by Kingston’s various new products, some never seen before, and others updated since CES. The main stage was where Kingston would show off these products as well as host their League of Legends competition. We got a private tour of all of the products that Kingston currently has to offer, including the lowdown on how the company is rebranding their HyperX line of

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2014, Comic-Con, Event, Gaming, Graphics, Hardware, Mobile Computing, Software Programs, VR World

Videos: AMD FreeSync and 4K Laptop at Computex 2014

FreeSync On FreeSync Off

This year at Computex 2014, AMD had a lot to show consumers including their new Kaveri mobile chip, FreeSync and the Toshiba 4K laptop running Battlefield 4 in 4K. Those three things were without a doubt AMD’s biggest announcements this week at Computex and we’ve got you covered with all the information about them, including videos and photos to simplify the explanation. We’ll be following up this article with another talking about Kaveri mobile, so most of the focus here will be on FreeSync and the Toshiba 4K laptop playing Battlefield 4. At the beginning of Computex, AMD had a press conference where they talked

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2014, Comic-Con, Event, Hardware, VR World

Kingston's HyperX OC Takeover Results

Kingston HyperX OC Takeover

Kingston today held an overclocking competition with some of the world’s leading overclockers, their HOT (HyperX Overclocking Takeover). They offered a prize pool of $10,000 that would be distributed among the top 3 winners of 3 different benchmarks including Memory Clock speed, SuperPi 32M and Intel’s XTU. The teams were competing with eachother all day long and ultimately the majority of the competition was won by Team Gigabyte, who had utilized Kingston’s memory earlier in the week with their board to break the memory clock speed world record at 4.5 GHz. Over the course of the day, the overclockers were competing to win the three

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2014, Comic-Con, Event, Hardware, VR World

Computex Expanding into Cars and Fashion with Ford and Thermaltake

My first day at Computex Taipei 2014 went much better than I thought. No, really. It turned out that when you’re a (blonde) girl wearing a Google Glass on an event such as Computex, your ego just rises up to the sky. You know that feeling when everyone kindly smiles at you, nodding their heads and you feel like a freaking genius nodding them back. Yup, you feel like one of the crowd. To be honest, I hardly manage the difference between this and that graphic card or different motherboards. However, a 4K screen from the ‘ordinary’ one is easy to catch up. But it’s

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2014, Comic-Con, Event, Hardware, VR World

Intel Unleashes Devil's Canyon, Boosts the Desktop

Intel has made it quite clear that they are dead set on reviving the PC market, especially from the high performance desktop point of view. They are showing their commitment to that vision today with the announcement of their new Devil’s Canyon refresh to the Haswell CPUs that they had launched last year. These new Devil’s Canyon CPUs are designed to accompany the company’s newly launched Z97 chipset, which adds a few minor features to the already existing Z87 chipset that Haswell had launched with. In fact, Gigabyte launched their full Z97 line of motherboards yesterday incorporating some of the new features of the Z97

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2014, Comic-Con, Event, Gaming, Graphics, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, VR World

Corsair Launches Variety of New Products at Computex 2014

Today at Computex 2014, Corsair released a variety of new products. First up are the Cherry MX RGB Gaming Keyboards, the first mechanical keyboards to utilize the Cherry MX RGB switches that allow for different lighting. They’ll be available as the K70 RGB and K95 RGB. Also launched is the M65 RGB mouse, a gaming mouse that provides three zone 16.8 million color backlighting. The K95 RGB will have an MSRP of $189.99, the K70 RGB will be $169.99, and the M65 RGB will be $69.99. Next up is Corsair’s new Hydro Series HG10 GPU cooling bracket. The cooling bracket will replace the reference cooler

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2014, Comic-Con, Event, Hardware, Opinion, Smart Home

Computex from a Woman’s Perspective, Part I

When I found out that I’m actually going to Computex Taipei 2014, my first thought was – well, nothing. The fact is that through all of my journalist years I’ve heard news bits about an IT conference that is held in Taiwan every year for the last 33 years. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine myself being actually there on that very spot. I’m aware that as for all of you BSN readers, I don’t have to explain what it’s all about. Somehow though, I still like to think that I’m not the only one who’s been IT ignorant so maybe this typically chick-lit text will find

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2014, Comic-Con, Event, Gaming, Graphics, Hardware, VR World

Nvidia Throws Gamer's Day at Computex 2014

Today, the day before Computex 2014 officially starts, Nvidia held their very first Gamer’s Day across the street from Taipei’s famous Taipei 101 at ATT 4 Fun’s 7th floor Show Box. The company had trucks driving around the area making the public and Computex attendees alike aware of the all-day festivities which started at 11 am and went til 7 pm. While we didn’t get a chance to stay for the whole event, we did spend quite a bit of time walking around the venue and watching the festivities unfold, mostly in Mandarin. The focal point of the event was the professional League of Legends

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2014, Comic-Con, Event, Gaming, Hardware, VR World

Gigabyte Introduces New 9 Series Z97 Motherboards

Gigabyte Z97 SOC Motherboard

As you would expect, Gigabyte has announced their new line of 9 series Intel chipset motherboards, with the primary focus being on their Z97 chipset motherboards. This time around, Gigabyte will have four different flavors of Z97 boards, which will support both 4th and 5th generation Intel Core processors. Gigabyte has rolled over a lot of the things from their Z87 line of motherboards, but also made some modifications and improvements to make the Z97 a worthwhile upgrade. Gigabyte’s four different lines are their Gaming line, Ultra Durable line, Overclocking line and a new Black Edition line. The bulk of Gigabyte’s boards are going to

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2014, Comic-Con, Event, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, VR World

Crucial to Launch SSDs with 16nm Memory Chips

As Computex is getting ready to open its doors in and around Taipei, the capital of Taiwan – more products are leaking to the surface. Thanks to a Spanish e-tailer PCComponentes, we learned of one such product coming to the market comes from the States, in the form of Crucial’s Solid State Drive (SSD).   MX100 line of SSDs will mark the beginning of the end for memory chips produced using the 20nm process. While the 128GB drive will carry the 20nm MLC NAND memory chips, 256GB and 512GB models will feature brand new 16nm NAND flash from Micron. According to Micron, “Our 16nm NAND technology

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