News::Intel and Lady Gaga team up to 'Hack Harassment'

Hack Harassment is exactly what it sounds like -- a tech-driven initiative to curb online harassment and find solutions to issues with hate speech and threats on the web. The program, which Intel teased during its CES conference this week, is spearheaded by Intel, Vox Media, Re/code and Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation. Hack Harassment's first move will be a series of hackathons, held both online and in-person, with the goal of advancing anti-harassment technology.

Source: Business Wire, Hack Harassment

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News::Alienware announces Oculus-ready PCs, teases OLED laptop

Breaking down and accepting the Oculus Rift's $599 price tag is just the first step of experiencing virtual reality. The second step is getting yourself a gaming PC capable of running high-end VR content. That means juggling specs, buying the right parts, buildling a machine... or picking up an Oculus-Ready certified build from Alienware.

Source: Alienware

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News::Intel's RealSense camera made me the star of 'Fallout 4'

Over the holidays, I've really been putting the hours into Fallout 4 So when Intel and Uraniom said that it'd be demonstrating its RealSense 3D camera to embed people into that vault suit, I knew what I had to do. Uraniom's tech includes machine learning, geometry processing and 3D game engineering to ensure anyone that plants themselves into games (including GTA, FIFA and Skyrim) gets suitably freaked the heck out by the fluid, not-too-out-of-place results. After getting scanned by a HP tablet with RealSense cameras, the data was transferred to a work PC, where one of Uraniom's guys added trackers around my eyes and and mouth. (My fluffy Tintin hair isn't usually well-suited to 3D scanning, but the results this time are still uncanny.) Less than a minute later, I was looking slender and radiation-free in my vault suit and soon I was equipped with a jetpack powersuit and flying around a devastated Boston.

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News::The Oculus Rift made you forget what the first iPhone cost

Yesterday, Oculus VR finally announced the price of its first consumer virtual reality headset: $599, plus shipping. Fans reacted quickly, shocked that the price was twice as much as the original developer kit and furious that the company was charging so much. During Palmer Luckey's evening AMA on Reddit, fans were petitioning the company to remove the Rift's audio tech and packaged Xbox One controller to bring the price down. That's denial, anger and bargaining, guys. Let's skip the fourth stage of grief and jump to the end: acceptance. The Oculus Rift's launch price is completely normal.

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News::Recon's HUD mask transfers your gaming skills to paintball

Recon Instruments and Empire Paintball's paintball mask is fun to wear — and I didn't even get to shoot anyone. The Empire EVS houses Recon's Snow2 heads-up display in bottom-right of the goggles, running on Android, with nine-axis sensors, Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS, while the helmet itself looks like a color-saturated Darth Vader pretender -- and I mean that in the best possible way. Slipping into it is easy, and an armband control unit with directional buttons makes navigation through menus (as well as zooming in and out of maps) hard to screw up. The mask itself, coming from paintball equipment maker Empire has UVA/UVB radiation protection and doesn't fog up inside when the action picks up and your breathing gets heavy. The heads-up display (HUD) can also talk with action cams like the GoPro, which you can mount on your paintball gun to peek around corners and, as one Engadget editor calls it: "cheat".

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News::Pirates are finding it harder to crack new PC games

Pirates at the infamous Chinese hacking forum 3DM are complaining that recent PC games are simply too darn hard to crack, according to Torrent Freak. The problem is apparently Denuvo, a copy protection scheme that prevents tampering of the underlying DRM. Two recent games that use the scheme, FIFA 16 and Just Cause 3, have still not been cracked, despite appearing in early December. Based on the current pace of encryption tech, "in two years time I'm afraid there will be no free games to play in the world," said one forlorn pirate.

Via: Kotaku

Source: Torrent Freak

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News::Nintendo is renovating its one-of-a-kind New York store

Nintendo's headquarters may be in Kyoto, Japan, but the spiritual center, where most big US console launches happen, is the Nintendo World store at Rockefeller Plaza, New York. The only official Nintendo store in the world is about to undergo a major renovation and when it's over, it'll also have a new name -- Nintendo NY. The new look will include an updated interior design, new Wii U and 3DS demo units, a 15-foot gaming screen and a large bronze coin at the entrance with the tagline "Where everyone comes to play" (below).

Source: Nintendo

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