Month: January 2016

(credit: NOAA)

Citizens of the United States have a higher income than Costa Ricans, and they spend more of it on health care. In spite of this, Costa Rica has a higher life expectancy than the US—a new article published in PNAS attempts to explain why. The analysis focuses on the steep socioeconomic gradient in health that exists in the US, where the poor have considerably worse health outcomes than the wealthy.

The authors, Rosero-Bixby and Dow, argue that while the wealthiest people in the US have a higher life expectancy than anyone in Costa Rica, the poorest residents of the US have a considerably lower life expectancy.

In Costa Rica, the life expectancy is 78.5 years, though the per-capita GDP is quite low at $9,200. In contrast, the US has a GDP of $40,000, and a life expectancy of 77.4 years. Typically, economic development raises the national life expectancy, so it’s unusual that the US does not have a life expectancy commensurate with its income.

(credit: New Balance)

The world of wearables is taking a turn as we see more nontraditional entrants into the smartwatch and fitness tracker market. The newest to jump into the game is the sportswear company New Balance, announcing that it will make its own Android Wear running watch by the end of 2016. The device will be just one part of a larger collection of "Digital Sport" wearables, although we don't currently know much about the other products in the line.

According to some reports, the running watch will have a built-in GPS as well as enough onboard storage to keep some music locally for playback without a smartphone nearby. Many sports watches have these features already, with one of the newest being the Moto 360 Sport. As with Fossil's and Tag Heuer's smartwatches, Intel will provide the chips for New Balance's device, and the company has been working with other developers at Strava and Zepp to finalize it. While plenty of fitness trackers and smartwatches are compatible with the cycling and running app Strava, Zepp is a particularly interesting company for New Balance to partner with as it makes a line of "swing" tracking devices for sports, including baseball, golf, and tennis.

Other than the Android Wear watch, no other specific devices from the Digital Sport range have been announced. However, New Balance is looking into embedding small sensors into clothing and footware, which would make it one of the many companies experimenting with smart clothing now. Smart shoes appear to be the first step for many companies looking to get into connected clothing; Under Armour announced the SpeedForm Gemini 2 smart shoes at CES last week (in addition to its new HealthBox), which have accelerometers embedded into the soles and may not require regular charging.

Forget latex suits and white ping-pong balls. Motion-capture sessions for video games and films have only gotten more intense over the years, thanks to advances like improved, LED-loaded motion-capture outfits and the ability to see robust TV-screen renders of an actor's performance as soon as a take is complete.

Of course, not every studio has a Peter Jackson-caliber budget for motion capture facilities, but the small development team behind upcoming VR game The Gallery: Call of the Starseed found an affordable path to capturing a human actor's performance—and then remembered they already had one cutting-edge gadget handy: the dev kit for the upcoming HTC Vive virtual reality system. The result, shown off in the studio's latest development diary on Tuesday, may very well be the world's first documented use of VR in a motion capture session.

"We wanted the actor to feel as if they were acting on a stage," Cloudhead Games staffer Mike Wilson wrote at the company's blog. As such, after making actor and motion-capture veteran Adrian Hough (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) put on a suit made by mo-cap company Noitom, the designers also asked him to wear a Vive headset. HTC's system enables room-scale tracking, so that users can walk around up to roughly 15 square feet of real space, which means Cloudhead was able to virtually transport Hough into the shoes of his in-game character, the Watcher.

Leslie Benzies, boss of the Edinburgh-based Rockstar North studio behind the development of the Grand Theft Auto series, has left Rockstar Games. Benzies had been on sabbatical for the past 17 months and decided not to return to work for the company.

Alongside Rockstar co-founders Sam and Dan Houser, Benzies was instrumental in the development of the Grand Theft Auto series—which continues to be developed out of Edinburgh—as well as the likes of Red Dead Redemption, Manhunt 2, LA Noire and Max Payne 3.

Benzies' contributions to the industry were recognised back in 2014 as he was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame alongside Dan and Sam Houser.

(credit: Flickr)

A combination of holiday sales and the launch of Windows 10 weren't enough to slow the decline of PC sales, which have fallen to their lowest levels since 2007. Shipments declined by as much as 10.6 percent year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2015, according to analyst firm IDC. Fellow analyst Gartner had similarly dire numbers to share: 75.7 million PCs shipped for the quarter, down 8.3 percent on 2014.

Overall sales for the year were just as bad, with IDC estimating shipments fell 10.4 percent to 276.2 million units, and Gartner pushing the slightly less terrifying number of 299.6 million units for an 8 percent fall.

The only manufacturer to show any growth for the year was—you guessed it—Apple, which managed to grow 2.8 percent according to IDC and 5.8 percent according to Gartner. Everyone else's sales shrunk, although Lenovo—the number one PC vendor worldwide—at least managed a mere 3.6 percent fall compared to the 6 percent-or-larger drops seen by HP, Dell, Asus, and Acer.