Kinect sells over 10 million, celebrates with a Guinness

According to a Microsoft press release, the Kinect for Xbox 360 has sold over 10 million units, and in its short 4 month history has also sold over 10 million standalone titles. It’s a pretty impressive feat, making it the Fastest-Selling Consumer Electronics Device according to Guinness (the Book of World Records, not the delicious stout).

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Killzone 3: The Glorious Fruits of Our Land

The standard review approach for Killzone 2, Guerilla Games’ showcase PS3-exclusive first-person shooter, focused on judging its merits in comparison to landmark Xbox 360 shooters like Call of Duty and Halo. The latter comparison was especially enticing—clash of the console-exclusive titans! Take that approach to its logical conclusion and you end up with the majority opinion about the game: graphically impressive and plenty of fun, but occasionally marred by poor design decisions…

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The Bell Motorola ATRIX, coming March 17th: Revolutionary, but at what cost?

When Motorola announced the ATRIX at CES, I was very excited – even more so when they followed up that announcement with news that it was coming to Canada on Bell. Up to that point, as a long-time Milestone (Droid to our US readers) user, though, I had been a little disappointed in Motorola. They had seemed to have forgotten about Canada. Both the Droid X and Droid 2 were released in the US last year, but they never came up north. By year’s end, it was almost like Motorola…

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Angry Birds everywhere

It seems that Rovio’s fowl flinging game is aiming to be completely ubiquitous this year. The smash hit that took the iPhone by storm has since been ported to Android and a board game will be appearing soon on Windows Phone 7, Xbox LIVE arcade, and Nintendo’s Wii and 3DS. Beyond that, they are launching a Facebook version of the game in the coming weeks as well. The Finnish company has even announced a somewhat bizare deal with deal with Microsoft for Bing to be the ‘official decision engine‘ for…

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Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted hits Cineplex

If you like animation, but haven’t heard of Spike & Mike, I’d be surprised. Their Festival of Animation has been running in various formats since the mid 1970’s, and has introduced animation fans to a number of artists that later went on to bigger things, such as Mike Judge, who’s “Frog Baseball” featured an early version of Beavis & Butthead, Bill Plympton (a personal favourite), Trey Parker and Matt Stone and many others.  In short, Spike and Mike know good animation, and love sharing it. In the past, the touring…

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Saturday Morning Science 005

This installment has nothing to do with Charlie Sheen. Popular science writing doesn’t need him, it’s got String Theory. This week it’s all about gravity; the weak yet pervasive force that holds everything together and either kick starts grand theories or brings them to a grinding halt. Every toddler becomes a gravity theorist when they first get it into their head to can the crawl and get with this walking thing. I’ve noticed two distinct styles to this process. Some kids are devout Newtonians. They stand and then tilt themselves in…

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New Steelseries headsets, ready for your PS3 & iPad

When we looked at a couple of SteelSeries’ gaming peripherals last year, the Xai mouse and 6GV2 keyboard, we were very impressed by both their quality and the technology inside. We were also impressed by the fact that, compared to most ‘gaming’ gadgets, their design was understated — even elegant. Very Apple-like, you could say. Now SteelSeries has decided to broaden their audio options to ”meet Apple Performance Standards for Music, Mobile, and Gaming”. Updated versions of the 7H and Siberia v2 headsets, already available for PC gamers, are coming…

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Microsoft Research demos smart interactive displays

Microsoft Research has put out no shortage of impressive tech demos, some which evolve into consumer products like the Kinect, and others either geared towards institutional use such as the Surface, which in some cases trickles down to consumer tech. In a recent video, Director of Microsoft Applied Sciences Steven Bathiche demonstrates some of their latest research into smart interactive displays, from “capturing light from the user to sending light to the users eyes”. Consider it a sort of mashup of Kinect and Surface, with the ability to display different…

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Computing Science 

Saturday Morning Science 004

The problem is a simple one, despite being the storehouse for the knowledge of an entire planet sometimes the Internet can be a bore. Facebook, YouTube  and Twitter present us with a world of ideas, tiny ideas, iterations of personal data, statements, hopes, curses and bleats amounting to a wall of cozy noise; full of sound and  fury. Here are five sites on the web, five oasis in the sometime wasteland, five challenging  places that reward the time spent with them. Feynman’s Robb Lectures– Anyone with an internet connection can…

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