Epic Games has prevailed against Google in U.S. District Court, scoring a victory in the 2020 lawsuit filed against the search giant over antitrust behavior related to its Google Play store. Epic claims that Google leverages control over the Android mobile operating system to require content creators who want a presence on an estimated 71 percent of the world’s smartphones to sell through the Play Store. The verdict “proves Google’s app store practices are illegal and they abuse their monopoly to extract exorbitant fees, stifle competition and reduce innovation,” Epic wrote of the win. Google disagrees with the ruling and says it plans to appeal. Continue reading Court Rules in Favor of Epic Games in Google Antitrust Case

Valve’s Steam Deck OLED comes to market Thursday with an HDR OLED display that sprawls 7.4 inches, better audio, and a huge boost in battery life. Lighter, cooler, and promising faster downloads, the Steam Deck OLED comes in two storage configurations: 512GB and 1TB, priced at $549 and $649, respectively. As with its predecessor, Steam Deck OLED features a microSD card slot. A $79.95 Steam Deck Docking Station is also available to connect to external displays, wired networking, USB peripherals, and power. The release date is set for November 16. Continue reading Valve to Launch Its Overhauled Steam Deck OLED This Week

Sony’s Crystal LED displays are designed to enable realistic backgrounds for virtual production. Now, after two years of research and development, Sony Electronics has unveiled its first line of Crystal LED Verona wall displays, purpose-built to meet the needs of virtual production. The result of a tight feedback loop between Hollywood end users and Sony engineers in Tokyo, Verona aimed to solve what were identified as the two biggest issues with virtual production backgrounds: a need for “deeper black-level expression” and “reduced contrast loss caused by light from adjacent LED panels and studio lighting equipment.” Continue reading Sony Unveils Its CLED Verona Displays for Virtual Production

Epic Online Services, the development hub for Epic Games, has expanded its crossplay overlay initiative to include initial support for games on Microsoft Xbox, Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation, optimizing its free SDKs for multiplayer crossplay and making it easier for developers to link their games and communities for those platforms across multiple stores. Last summer, EOS launched a PC crossplay overlay. The current upgrade enhances “capabilities across all supported platforms,” the company says, noting “crossplay enables bigger games, bigger audiences” and global games industry growth by connecting more players with a single overlay. Continue reading Epic Offers Crossplay Support for Xbox, PlayStation, Switch

Led by Pixar Animation Studios, a consortium of tech companies has formed the Alliance for OpenUSD to promote an open 3D computer graphics standard for the metaverse and other 3D projects. Adobe, Apple, Autodesk and Nvidia are also founding members along with the Linux Foundation’s Joint Development Foundation. The group will promote the development and standardization of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description tech, a 3D platform that is interoperable across a variety of tools, data and workflows. The goal is to make it easier to describe, compose and simulate large-scale 3D imaging projects and services across industries and platforms worldwide. Continue reading Tech Firms Join Pixar in Group Promoting OpenUSD Standard

The Entertainment Technology Center@USC has released the third installment of its case study, “Fathead: Virtual Production & Beyond.” Section 3 of the four-part white paper is “State of the Industry: Beyond Trends,” which discusses “where we’re at, and where we’re going” and features compelling interviews with thought leaders from companies including The Third Floor, Stargate Studios, Orbital Virtual Studios, Vū Technologies, Lux Machina, nDisplay, Epic Games and Unity Technologies. Click here to access Section 3 and we’ll post announcements when the final section — “Fathead: A Proof-of-Concept Short Film” — becomes available. Continue reading ETC Releases Section 3 of Its Virtual Production White Paper

Brands are eager to promote their products in front of the estimated 3.7 billion people worldwide who play video games. Now, rather than simply purchasing visibility, more adventuresome advertisers including PepsiCo and L’Oreal are creating games of their own. PepsiCo had a quest developed in collaboration with Y2K Games for Mountain Dew inserted into the latest edition of the publisher’s blockbuster “NBA 2K” series. L’Oréal embedded a mini game in Activision Blizzard’s “Candy Crush Saga” and saw 40,000 samples of the Prada Candy fragrance that was the reward for completing the game claimed on day one of the five-week promotion. Continue reading Brands Create Their Own Games to Expand Marketing Reach

Epic Games is releasing MetaHuman Animator, which lets developers create nuanced facial animation by capturing an actor’s performance using an iPhone or stereo head-mounted camera system and a PC. The system eliminates the need for manual touch-ups, according to Epic, capturing “every subtle expression, look, and emotion” and replicating it onto a digital character for a faster performance capture workflow that allows more creative control. The new feature set uses a 4D solver to combine video and depth data with a MetaHuman representation of the performer. The animation is produced locally using GPU hardware, providing final results in “minutes.” Continue reading New Tool from Epic Simplifies High-Fidelity Facial Animation

The film “Fathead,” produced by the Entertainment Technology Center@USC, continues to garner recognition. Nominated earlier this year for a NAACP Image Award in the Outstanding Short Film (Live Action) category, the film was most recently included in The American Pavilion’s Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at the 76th annual Cannes Film Festival. “Fathead” — directed by c. Craig Patterson and produced by Erik Weaver, ETC’s director of adaptive production — was featured among 38 short films in the Showcase at Cannes and was announced winner in the Student Short Film category. Continue reading ETC’s ‘Fathead’ Receives Honors at the Cannes Film Festival

Generative AI is expected to play a big role in video game production, increasing development speed, reducing costs, and helping to come up with new ways for players to interact with characters. Major firms including Epic Games, Unity, Ubisoft and Roblox have all announced generative AI integrations for their development kits. Nonplayable characters — foils that act and speak independently — are soon to be wholly AI-powered rather than preprogrammed options. Publicly available AI tools are already commonly used by players creating user-generated game content. However, use of AI to create commercial games is not without controversy. Continue reading Use of AI to Build Video Games is Popular, But Controversial

On April 1, after students presented their ideas for AI-Assisted Experiences during ETC’s latest student challenge, a group of leading tech executive judges engaged the students in a spirited discussion of possibilities, opportunities and ethics related to artificial intelligence. Interactive Media and Game Design senior Toby Zhao and Universal Pictures’ Sherry Wong discussed the uses and limitations of AI in today’s creative process. Psychology graduate Erik Rollins asked whether the industry is thinking about how AI will influence society. Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri responded that society needs standards that will let us know when something is real versus synthetic or altered. It is already too easy to distribute manipulated or false information and rile people up, he said. Continue reading Executives Evaluate AI Proposals for ETC Student Challenge

User-generated content is surging on a new front: gaming. Epic Games is teed-up to challenge Roblox in the race to become what one media outlet called “the YouTube of gaming” as they lay the groundwork to empower individual creators. While Roblox is all about user-generated games, Epic is inviting creators in to riff on its popular Fortnite world. Roblox, which draws a younger crowd, is said to have about 400 registered users, while battleground Fortnite has about 300 million. Meanwhile, with the growing popularity of UGC gaming, these giants now have game platforms dot big bang and CliCli nipping at their heels. Continue reading Fortnite Challenges Roblox in User-Generated Games Space

Apple is preparing for the release of its upcoming mixed reality headset by engineering software that, while aimed largely at developers, would also allow users to create their own augmented reality apps in the same way as Final Cut Pro, which is used to edit video by both professionals and laymen. Apple’s highly anticipated headgear is expected to come to market this year, and a general use AR development tool would be a major coup for the company, given that AR apps are complicated to create and new technologies typically rely on fresh content to drive sales. Continue reading Apple Developing User-Friendly AR Creation App for Headset

Connection, collaboration, and cooperation are three words that underscore almost everything we saw during four days at CES 2023. We anticipated this would not be a show of breakthrough innovations. Instead, we expected innovative ways to use recent advances. In broad categories, AR, haptics, and AI were much in evidence. Interesting light field displays and curved screens caught our eye. There were fewer cars but way more commercial vehicles and components driving “software-defined mobility.” TVs were secondary to connected ecosystems in Samsung and LG’s displays, while creators took center stage for Sony, Canon, and Nikon. Clear across the show, innovation may come from startups but to scale it takes giants. Continue reading CES: Show Floor Reveals the Ups and Downs of Tech Trends

Inspired by the “universal human desire to experience joy, wonder and amazement, moments that move people’s hearts and connect them to one another, what we call Kando,” Sony chairman, president and CEO Kenichiro Yoshida began Sony’s CES media briefing by celebrating creators. Evident was a more unified corporate direction and concrete examples of Sony divisions working together. Movies, television, music, games and sports, and ways for audiences to experience them, were prominent examples. Following an exhilarating clip from the upcoming feature “Gran Turismo,” based on the PlayStation game, the prototype for the first Sony Honda Mobility car rolled out. Continue reading CES: Sony Focuses on Creators and the Power of Technology