Science and Technology

While wanting to capture every moment we have lost the ability to appreciate the seconds, minutes, and hours of our lives in a tangible way.

Actor Wil Wheaton defends the importance of preserving the arts and STEM studies.

South by Southwest (SXSW), the annual music, movie, and technology conference that dominates life in Austin each spring, should be on everyone’s bucket list. Cutting-edge film, music, and technology can be enjoyed there, and there are ways to bring home the experience.

The question that dominated many of the VR/AR seminars at SXSW was “How do you tell a story using this new technology?” "New" because the hardware has become affordable for consumers, and game engines used to create VR have become more powerful. The market is attracting a range of companies, from startups to ancient tech giants like IBM and Microsoft.

Can news reporters use virtual reality? This is the question that participants at “Sucked Into the Story: Virtual Reality and News” tried to answer at SXSW. I had the feeling that somewhere around 1950, a similar group of people sat around discussing what the impact of “this television thing” would be on radio news. We may be at a similar juncture.

The Mars 2030 Experience is not just a video game, but a highly detailed and accurate simulation of the surface of Mars, based on data and photographs from the Mars Rover and a European satellite orbiting the red planet. It's part of a larger effort to determine the feasibility of establishing human habitation on Mars.

More sophisticated augmented reality applications can scan your environment, for example, a living room, and place virtual objects on walls and flat surfaces. The user can interact with these virtual objects to play games, or solve puzzles or mysteries.

“Voter Technology: A Reimagined Future”, a presentation at SXSW, focused on bringing election technology into the 21st Century. The speakers included Diego Bernal, a social worker and member of the Texas House of Representatives for San Antonio, and Peter Jackson, Public Sector Strategy Lead at IDEO, a design and consulting company based in San Francisco. Their goal: Use modern technology to facilitate the registration and voting process. They covered the motivations, possibilities and issues surrounding technology and voting.

Adobe has just released a new Mac-based program (English-only as of this release) of its new application design and prototyping tool, formerly known as Project Comet. Adobe Experience Design CC, also known as Adobe XD – the two names refer to the same product – was built from the ground …

Long ignored by many game developers, 'Poser' has always been a deep character creation and animation solution for hobbyists. With last year's Game Dev edition all of that changed, and 'Poser Pro 11' offers more than a few reasons to upgrade.