Category: Technology

It might not be an overstatement to say Rode’s original Wireless GO microphone system changed how a lot of YouTubers work. It wasn’t the first wireless mic system, not by a long long shot, but its focus on creators made it incredibly popular. That success would inspire a lot of competing products — such as DJI’s — which have since won over fans in a category that Rode arguably defined. Today, Rode fights back with the Wireless Pro — its new flagship wireless microphone system for creators.

The headline feature is the inclusion of onboard 32-bit float recording which means you should no longer have to worry about setting mic gain levels (though it’s probably best that you do). This feature means the onboard recording will be almost impossible to “clip” or distort through being too loud. Effectively you should always have a useable recording if things went a bit too loud on the audio in your camera, which will be a great anxiety reducer to anyone who’s ever had a production ruined thanks to bad audio.

The Wireless Pro could arguably help bring 32-bit float into the mainstream. There are specialist audio recorders out there that already offer this feature. And Rode already included it on its NT1 hybrid studio microphone, but given that you can plug a lot of different microphones into the Wireless Pro transmitters, this opens the door for recording a wide variety of audio content in 32-bit float — as long as you can feed it into a 3.5mm jack.

In a further attempt at streamlining the creatory process, the Wireless Pro also has advanced timecode capability so you won’t need an external device for this. Though you will need to set this up via Rode Central, the companion app for the mic (there’s no option on-device for this setting).

The Wireless Pro borrows a few features from alternatives or aftermarket accessories by including a charging case as standard (Rode currently offers one as a standalone purchase). That case is good for two total charges of the entire system according to the company and comes as standard with the new model. The stated battery life for the transmitters and receiver is around severn hours, meaning the Wireless Pro should be good for at least 20 hours total recording onto the 32gb storage (good for 40 hours of material apparently).

Another key upgrade is the improved range. The Wireless GO II, for example, has an approximate range of 656 feet (200 meters). The new Pro models expands that to 850 feet (260 meters) which is, coincidentally, a shade more than DJI’s stated 820 feet (250 meters).

When Rode unveiled its more affordale Wireless ME kit, it introduced the idea of the receiver doubling as a “narrator” mic via a TRRS headset in the headphones/monitoring port. That’s a feature that carries over to the Pro meaning you can record up to three different speakers albeit one of them will be wired, rather than cable free.

There are a couple of minor, but welcome quality of life updates, too, such as locking 3.5mm jacks so you won’t rip your lav mic out and plugin power detection so the system can detect when the camera its plugged into is active, using that info to optimize power usage.

At time of publication, DJI’s dual-mic product retails for $330. The Rode Wireless Pro will cost $399. That’s obviously a slice more, but the company decided to include two Lavalier II mics as part of the bundle. The Lavalier II costs $99 on its own, so from that perspective the entire bundle represents a decent value if you’re looking for complete solution. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/rodes-wireless-pro-mic-kit-lets-you-forget-about-clipped-audio-000028417.html?src=rss 

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured extraordinarily detailed images published today of the Ring Nebula. The gaseous cloud, also called M57 and NGC 6720, contains 20,000 dense globules rich in molecular hydrogen. It sits about 2,500 light years away from Earth.

The first image (above) was taken with the NIRCam (Near InfraRed Camera), one of the Webb Space Telescope’s primary sensors. It is designed to detect light in the near-infrared spectrum and can capture remarkably detailed images. NIRCam also took the equally hypnotizing updated image of the Pillars of Creation.

Meanwhile, the second image (below) was captured using the JWST’s MIRI (Mid-InfraRed Instrument). It better highlights the nebula’s (roughly) ten concentric arcs beyond its outer edge, likely formed from its central star’s interaction with a lower-mass companion in its orbit. “In this way, nebulae like the Ring Nebula reveal a kind of astronomical archaeology, as astronomers study the nebula to learn about the star that created it,” the European Space Agency wrote in a press release.

The Ring Nebula was discovered somewhat serendipitously in 1779 by French astronomers Charles Messier and Antoine Darquier de Pellepoix while they searched for comets. It’s a planetary nebula, named as such because early researchers mistook their appearances for distant worlds. The Ring Nebula formed from a medium-sized star that shed its outer layers as it exhausted its fuel and approached its demise.

“The colourful main ring is composed of gas thrown off by a dying star at the centre of the nebula,” the ESA wrote. “This star is on its way to becoming a white dwarf — a very small, dense, and hot body that is the final evolutionary stage for a star like the Sun.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/webb-space-telescope-captures-the-ring-nebula-in-mesmerizing-detail-213005773.html?src=rss 

Imagine a game that might be described as the opposite of Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. These are first-person shooters set in wartorn, post-apocalyptic cities, so their inverse might be a third-person game with no weapons at all, set in a warm, buzzing metropolis of friendly characters, maybe starring an adorable cat. Weirdly, the result could look a lot like Little Kitty, Big City, the first project from former Valve designer Matt T. Wood.

In nearly 17 years at Valve, Wood helped build and ship the company’s most notable titles, including Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2,CS:GO and both episodes of Half-Life 2. He was a founding member of the CS:GO project and worked on that series for six years; he was pivotal in crafting Portal 2’s co-op mode, and he created choreography and combat scenes in Half-Life and Left 4 Dead. Level design was one of his specialties.

Wood left Valve in mid-2019, and today he’s the head of his own game development company in Seattle, Washington, Double Dagger Studio. He didn’t plan on starting his own studio post-Valve, and he certainly didn’t think he’d be building and self-publishing a game about an adorable cat. But, he is, and it’s called Little Kitty, Big City.

“It really is more about cozy exploration,” Wood told Engadget. “The game has aspects of platforming, but it’s very light platforming. It’s more about exploring vertically, and exploring nooks and crannies. I’ve done a lot of things throughout my career, but one of the things I spent a lot of time doing was level design in video games, so I have a lot of personal interest in creating spaces that feel fun to explore, to sort of poke around in.”

Little Kitty, Big City has Saturday-morning-cartoon vibes, with hand-animated scenes and a clean, friendly art style. The main character, Kitty, has wide green eyes, inky fur and batlike ears, and they’re on a mission to find their way home to an apartment complex in the center of a bustling downtown. However, procrastination is highly encouraged. Little Kitty, Big City is an open-world game filled with adorable animals to befriend, people to pester, quests to complete and hats to wear.

The hats are embellished bonnets that come in various forms, including a fish head, a half-shucked corn cob, little devil ears, a cowboy situation, a hedgehog and even some root vegetables. Kitty’s face endearingly pokes through the center of each hat, and they can be equipped at will throughout the game. Aside from a few unique cases, there are no stats attached to the hats — wearing the ladybug head doesn’t grant Kitty movement speed, and the construction hat doesn’t add bonus armor. Mostly, they exist to be cute.

“As a game designer, you kind of sit down and go, what is the purpose of this thing that you’re doing?” Wood said. “You always need a function, a purpose, a reason for doing the thing. I think 10 years ago, I would have said, OK, hats are gonna give you this ability, or, like, there’s going to be all of this gameplay tied to all this stuff. And while that is true for some things regarding the hats, largely, they’re cosmetic. It was refreshing to come to that conclusion to say, no, these are just for fun.”

Wood’s long history at Valve contextualizes his current role as the founder of an independent studio, and his years inside the insular company have helped shape his approach to game design.

Valve is a unique behemoth, even in the AAA space. It owns Steam, which functions as a bottomless bank; it’s a private company, so it doesn’t have shareholders to appease; and it’s the steward of iconic franchises including Portal, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress and Dota 2 (many of which are on Wood’s résumé).

“Valve is not a typical large game studio,” Wood said. “You have a lot of autonomy and freedom to do things there. But, you still sort of live within that direction that Valve goes in.”

Valve’s internal structure has long been the subject of myth and legend among video game fans, with the company’s founder Gabe Newell in the role of messiah and the Valve Handbook for New Employees as its sacred text. The handbook made its way online in 2012 and went viral for its Libertarian-inspired corporate ideals — it outlined a flat hierarchy at Valve, suggesting employees had the ability to manage themselves and work on their dream projects at any given time. This cemented Valve’s reputation as an ultra-rad, super-cool video game company in the public eye, and this perception persists today.

In practice, this structure has resulted in an incredibly rich company that doesn’t produce much. It’s a running joke that Valve can’t count to three: Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Team Fortress 2 came out in 2007, Left 4 Dead 2 came out in 2009, and Portal 2 came out in 2011. In 2020, Valve debuted Half-Life: Alyx, a VR game exclusive to the studio’s Index hardware, and after ignoring an extremely disruptive bot invasion, the company rolled out an update to TF2 this summer, largely comprising community-made maps and assets. Meanwhile, Steam has been printing money while maintaining Valve’s deathgrip on the PC marketplace.

When Wood talks about the fun and freedom he feels building Little Kitty, Big City, he compares it with a top-down rigidity and complacent bureaucracy he experienced in Valve’s production line. Here’s how he described it:

“Valve talks a lot about, like, you can do anything you want. And it’s like, well — that’s never true. You know, Valve has a direction and they have a trajectory. And so, for me, it was realizing that the direction that Valve was going in was not a place that I wanted to be long-term. Because I’d been there for a long time and they were sitting on their laurels a little bit, and it’s like they weren’t really challenging themselves, taking risks or doing anything. Steam’s making a lot of money so they don’t really have to, but I was not OK with that. And after many years of trying to figure out how to manage that, I decided, you know, it’s important for me to go and make my own decisions for a while.”

Wood made it clear that he appreciated the opportunities and stability that Valve provided him, and overall he called it a “great company.” It’s easy to see why so many talented game developers are drawn to Valve, a studio with unlimited resources, a laissez-faire management style and a library of prestigious IP. Working at an established studio also means there are plenty of experts around to check your progress and offer advice, and these are fail-safes that Wood doesn’t have any longer as an independent developer.

“That can be a bit scary,” Wood said. “But it’s been great. I love working with a small team focused on a game where, to us, it’s different. To me, it’s a challenge.”

Wood said that even though he likely works more now, he also has more energy and passion for his projects than he did in his final five years at Valve. Little Kitty, Big City represents a litany of game-design firsts for Wood, including the fact that it’s a mini open world and it has zero combat. There are now seven full-time team members at Double Dagger Studio, plus a few contributors, and they all found each other naturally, by Digital Age standards — Wood shared early ideas of Little Kitty, Big City on Twitter, and interested developers got in touch.

“At first I did reach out to some of my co-workers who had left Valve already and they were interested, but like — this was a common theme about reaching out to people who used to work at Valve, is that most people when they leave Valve, they’re kind of done,” Wood said.

Despite the current surge of indie-focused publishers like Annapurna Interactive, Devolver Digital, Private Division, Humble, Netflix and Raw Fury, Wood is self-publishing Little Kitty, Big City under Double Dagger Studio. That’s not to say he didn’t explore a potential partnership — he actually made it all the way to final contract meetings with one publisher in particular, but in the end, he turned the deal down.

“It didn’t make any sense,” Wood said. “Because what they were able to do, for me, absolutely did not justify the money that they were gonna take. And so it was really hard to find a publisher that made sense. I think that the difference between where I was in my career, and where someone maybe right out of school would be, is that I walked away from Valve with a chunk of money that I said, ‘I’m gonna invest that into a company.’ And so I didn’t have to rely on a publisher to spend $100,000 on a year of development or whatever. I did have that freedom and space to say no.”

This year alone, Little Kitty, Big City was announced for Switch, it had a successful showing at Summer Game Fest, and it’s getting some fresh swag in the form of a Makeship campaign offering an exceedingly cute Kitty plush and a salmon-shaped, zip-up catnip toy. The Double Dagger team is finishing the game while Wood oversees it all, no safety net in sight.

When we first started talking, Wood described Little Kitty, Big City as something like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz, a game about a lost soul trying to find their way home and meeting a colorful cast of characters along the journey. This may be Kitty’s story, but at this stage in his career, it feels a lot like Wood’s, too.

Little Kitty, Big City is on track to come out in 2024 for Switch and PC — via Steam, of course.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-cozy-cat-game-that-escaped-from-valve-180052174.html?src=rss 

A cargo ship equipped with rigid sails, each the height of a 10-story building, has departed on its inaugural journey. The Pyxis Ocean vessel will test WindWings sails, designed to harness old-school air power to help reduce fuel usage — and the shipping industry’s CO2 emissions. The sail’s creators estimate the technology could decarbonize cargo ships by about 30 percent as the maritime sector tries to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The estimated reduction could be higher if paired with alternative fuels.

The ship has been retrofitted with two WindWings, each measuring 37.5 m (123 ft) tall. The rigid sails are made from the same materials as wind turbines and can be added to cargo ships’ decks, providing an option for older vessels to reduce environmental impact. The ship’s maiden voyage will chart a route from China to Brazil.

The project is a collaboration between BAR Technologies (which developed the sails), Cargill Ocean Transportation, Mitsubishi Corporation and Yara Marine. “The Maritime Industry is an extremely hard industry to decarbonize,” said Cargill president Jan Dieleman. “So there’s not many tools that you have. So it’s really important that we as users of the maritime industry are also going to get involved in some of the innovation and really move the industry forward.”

The shipping industry agreed in July to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero “by or around, i.e., close to, 2050.” The nonbinding agreement is essentially toothless but meant as a signal to governments of where to benchmark their (binding) targets, according toThe New York Times. The agreement would have been even more lax if not for a “strong last-minute push” from small island nations and other less economically developed coastal countries, which led to a plan that provides a chance at limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. That’s the threshold climate experts agree the world needs to avoid to spare Earth from the worst climate-change scenarios.

“We fought tooth and nail for these numbers,” Carlos Fuller, Belize’s representative at the United Nations, told the NYT last month. “They aren’t perfect, but they give us a shot at staying within 1.5 degrees Celsius. And that’s what we came here to do.”

Wind power has the potential to help reach those goals, but adoption is a challenge. “We have the number of ships using this technology doubling over the past 12 months,” Stephen Gordon, managing director at maritime data firm Clarksons Research, told the BBC. “This is from a low base, however. In the international shipping fleet and new-build order book of over 110,000 vessels, we have records for under 100 having wind-assisted technology today.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hard-sail-test-hits-the-high-seas-aiming-to-reduce-cargo-ship-emissions-by-30-percent-172738236.html?src=rss 

Sony has been offering custom PlayStation 5 plates for quite some time now, including a recent version that brings a Spider-Man 2 look to the console. Microsoft, which has given away several custom Xbox Series S units in contests, is getting in on the action by selling official wraps for the Xbox Series X.

Along with two camouflage colors, Arctic Camo and Mineral Camo, a Starfield-inspired wrap will be available. Pre-orders for the wraps are open now. The $50 Starfield one will ship in the US, Canada and Europe on October 18th, while the $45 camo options will hit those regions on November 10th (though fans in Europe will miss out on the Arctic option for now).

The Starfield wrap matches a themed controller and headset Xbox recently started selling as it gears up for its most important game of the year. Bethesda’s next giant RPG drops on September 6th, so you’ll have to wait several more weeks for the Starfield console wrap if you want to go all in on the game’s aesthetic.

The wraps are made up of solid core panels with “high-tech fabric finishes.” They have a hook and loop system, as well as a silicone design on the interior, to keep them secure. Microsoft says it designed them to make sure that there was no impact on performance — the company notes that the wraps even have small feet on the bottom to help maintain airflow.

Third-party companies such as Dbrand (which previously ran into trouble with Sony over its PS5 plates) have long been selling custom skins for Xbox consoles. But this isn’t exactly the first time Microsoft has waded into console customization. The Xbox 360 had swappable faceplates. However, the company later admitted this idea flopped.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/official-xbox-series-x-console-skins-are-coming-soon-starting-with-starfield-and-camo-options-173735898.html?src=rss