Men Must Have

Handheld ports and spinoffs and the like are well and good, but surely it’s about time for a new, numbered Sim City. If German magazine Gamestar is to be believed, you’ll be getting just such a thing next year…

You’ve waited some 11 years for an HD port of Silent Hill 2, so hopefully you won’t mind waiting another couple of weeks. The HD Collection’s now not releasing until later in the month…

Blizzard Entertainment has confirmed
the dismissal of 600 employees from its global workforce; 10% of
which were part of the developer’s game development team, but none of
which were associated with World of Warcraft…

One of the most impressive PS Vita games finally has a concrete international launch date…

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com

After two weeks with the Lytro camera, I still can’t decide if it’s a highly refined proof-of-concept or an uneven look at the future of photography. It’s simultaneously addictive and frustrating. It’s also, as advertised, a truly unique photographic experience.

If you missed the hype surrounding the announcement of Lytro’s light-field camera last year, the short explanation is that it allows you to focus your photos after you’ve taken them.

That’s the addictive part. No Lytro photo is ever finished. You can continually readjust an image to focus on the foreground, middle, or background merely by clicking around the image. This also means it’s nearly impossible to take an out-of-focus picture. Just aim and shoot, then focus later.

Lytro calls these “living pictures,” and all the data that powers this re-focusing trick travels with each square-cropped image. Post a Lytro photo (using the company’s custom Flash widget) on your blog, on Facebook or on Twitter, and your friends and followers can refocus the picture in their browsers without downloading any special software. It’s like a choose-your-own-ending Instagram.

At the core of the Lytro camera are the light-field sensor (hardware) and light-field engine (the software). The sensor, which looks like a flat, square fly’s eye, enables the camera to capture all the light traveling in every direction in a scene, rather than just the rays aimed directly at the lens. Think of all the light you see through a typical viewfinder as a rectangular cube. A conventional photo focuses on one plane of that cube. A light-field image captures the whole thing. Instead of megapixels, Lytro measures the sensor’s power in terms of how many millions of rays of light it captures — in this case, 11 million, or 11 megarays.

As I said, playing around with these images is addictive. But the camera suffers from design and usability issues. It’s a first-generation piece of hardware that has to solve problems no one has ever faced before. So, as would be expected, there are some kinks. The touch-sensitive zoom is too sensitive, and the 1.5-inch touchscreen feels too small and unresponsive. Also, while the always- in-focus nature of the camera does simplify one aspect of photography, taking a compelling light-field image requires more time and compositional forethought than normal point-and-shoot snapping. There’s a learning curve here that Lytro’s hardware design doesn’t really help.

One of the most impressive PS Vita games finally has a concrete international launch date…

Pac-Man is taking another run at small
screen stardom in “Pac-Man – the Adventure Begins”, a new 3D
animated series set to debut on Disney XD…

Team Meat’s Edmund McMillen today
confirmed The Binding of Isaac has been denied distribution
on Nintendo’s 3DS eShop due to “questionable religious content”. So
to review; flesh-eating zombies and war games are a-ok, but its at
sacrificial babies where the Big N draws the line…

The Kingdoms of Amalur is about to
expand with the arrival of the first story-based DLC, The Legend of
Dead Kel, on March 20…

Atari is inviting developers to
re-invent Pong for a chance to win up to $100,000 through a
publishing deal with the iconic, 40-year-old gaming company. The
catch? Well, it pays to read the fine print…