Month: March 2018

Nathan Mattise

AUSTIN, Texas—Robots and research during the day, barbacoa and bands at night. South by Southwest may not deliver the product announcements of CES or the in-depth technical analysis of Google I/O or WWDC-types, but Austin's contribution to the tech calendar remains perhaps the most unique annual event on the Ars radar.

The 2018 event only emphasized this. SXSW remains the place where you may decide to check out the Westworld showrunners talking about season two when all of a sudden Elon Musk shows up, Thandie Newton (Mae) reveals her deep passion for improving life in the Congo, and everyone starts discussing how to inspire humanity. Or, you might decide to check out the much-hyped Ready Player One "Oasis" experience only to discover HTC quietly snuck its newest headset iteration in, and you can finally comfortably wear your eyeglasses while gaming.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Apple is reportedly taking a big step into making its own displays, and it isn't using the technology you may be most familiar with. According to a Bloomberg report, a secret facility in California close to Apple Park houses engineers developing microLED displays for Apple mobile devices. While Apple has been making its own chips for its mobile devices for a few years, this would be the first time the company has attempted build its own displays.

MicroLED technology is still in its infancy, particularly in its application in consumer electronics. We last saw microLEDs show up in Samsung's gigantic, 146-inch TV dubbed "The Wall," which it debuted at CES in January. Making microLED displays is no easy task since the panels are made up of individual pixels that need to be individually calibrated. Each pixel is self-emitting as well, meaning microLED displays do not require individual backlights. But microLEDs produce displays that are incredibly bright, with deep blacks and high contrast ratios; they are also slimmer and don't require as much power as their LCD counterparts.

Due to the complexity of microLED display development and application, Apple is reportedly still in the experimental phases when it comes to these panels. The company reportedly has about 300 engineers working on the initiative, reportedly codenamed "T159n" which is being overseen by Lynn Youngs, who helped develop touchscreen display technology for the original iPhone and iPad. Apple also gleaned some intellectual property about microLED development when it acquired the screen-tech startup LuxVue back in 2014.

Game makers looking for inspiration or stock content to use in their Unreal Engine projects now have access to thousands of skins, animations, effects, dialogue snippets, and environment components from Paragon, the company's defunct free-to-play "action MOBA." Epic is making the audio and visual assets from the game available for free use in Unreal Engine projects, with "no strings attached," through its Unreal Engine Marketplace, starting today.

Following on the stratospheric success of Fortnite and its compelling Battle Royale mode, Epic slowly shifted focus away from Paragon in recent months. Epic then announced in January that the game's servers would be shutting down in April, a disappointing fate for a title with a $12 million development budget and a total lifespan of roughly 20 months.