Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The battle of Uncanny Valley is where CGI finally triumphed over reality: pixels stood proudly over humans showing off their parametrization maps and tone mapping that accurately depicted the imperfection of human skin and declared victory over reality. The first shot in the war fired when researcher Jorge Jimenez released this work on real-time realistic skin rendering, showing off the difference SSSS (Sexy Separable Subsurface Scattering – okay, I added that first ‘S’) makes.
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David Braben, he of Elite fame, has unveiled a PC that fits on a USB stick, the Raspberry PI. He has also unveiled a brand new way of pronouncing “obfuscated”. The device has an HDMI in at one end, and a USB out at the other, letting you plug it directly into a television, and then attach a keyboard. Braben’s rather egalitarian idea is that it would be cheap enough (“Ten to fifteen pounds,”) that every child could own one, with the idea that they could learn to program. It sounds really promising. But are there some issues, too?

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Are you ready to have the way you play PC games revolutionised? No? Well tough, because a man said it’s going to happen. News from Consumer Electronics Show suggests that there’s a push to convince us we need a six-axis/Wii remote/wavy throwy gun-style controller for the PC, and no less than Valve are providing the shouting. The attack is coming from three companies, peripheral manufacturer Razer, Sixense, a motion tracking tech company, and them there Valve lot, who appear to be suggesting it’s how we should be playing Left 4 Dead 2.

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Valve have released the latest user survey data, which records the specs of the machines, and software on those machines, belonging to the people playing their games.

If you’ve used Steam, you’ll know that every now and then you’re asked to participate in the survey (and if you’re me, which I am, you’ll know that for some reason it always fails to send). All that data is collated into their constantly updating results page, where you can go, “Coo, are people really still trying to use machines with 128MB RAM?” And then laugh about how superior your machine is, until noticing that 3.95% of people have quadcore, and feeling rubbish again.

You can view the latest figures here, and compare them to the May to August figures here. Below are some of the more interesting changes.

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Glance to your right, down a bit, down a bit more, no, up a little, and there. You’ll see we’ve a few more pages, some of which pertain to you, the perfectly-proportioned reader, and how you can help RPS and the community we hope to build here. Have a read, why not?

Also, we’ve a fancy new random-image header to the site, but in some browsers it requires pressing Ctrl+F5 to do a complete refresh, or it’ll stick with whatever the last image you saw was until you empty out your browser cache. Which you should do regularly anyway, or the wife (or husband – Ed) will find out about your thing for female bodybuilders (or non-gender-specific, mixed-race, vertically-challenged 8-stone weaklings – Ed). We’ll be adding new headers over time, and I guess you can submit your own should you feel so inclined- a 643×293 image of something awesome would do it, ideally with some space around the top left for us to slap our logo onto. Super-splendid ones will go into our banner rotate-o-tron.