Month: October 2018

Enlarge / Participants in new neuroimaging study watched an edited version of Forrest Gump. (credit: Paramount Pictures)

Watching the 1995 film Forrest Gump can elicit sincere emotion and pleasure or more negative responses in viewers, depending on one's subjective cinematic tastes. It can also teach neuroscientists something about how the brain encodes everyday events into long-term memory, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience. The brain seems most interested in tracking transitions between distinct events, the better to segment and store them.

The hippocampus is the brain region most closely associated with forming new memories. Most experiments focusing on memory use the most minimal, simplified stimuli possible to better control for variables, according to co-author Aya Ben-Yakov of the University of Cambridge. But in reality, the brain actually processes a huge amount of continually incoming stimuli. This is the first study to specifically investigate how the hippocampus operates during so-called "natural experiences."

Films turn out to be ideal for simulating that kind of natural continuous input, mimicking our daily lived experience. And Forrest Gump is one of the most popular with neuroscientists, thanks in large part to an open source dataset called studyforrest. Founded in 2013, the project is a repository for experiments that study the brain's natural behavior in response to watching the film, using fMRI, eye tracking, structural brain scans, and more.

When the consumer-level VR revolution came in 2016, it left behind a lot of potential consumers. That's because, as Ars editor Sam Machkovech puts it, "a lot of [existing VR] is very expensive or very underwhelming."

Oculus' upcoming Quest headset is setting out to be the middle ground between these two poles. Unlike most cheap, untethered headsets, the Quest offers full motion and hand tracking with its built-in cameras and included Touch controllers. Unlike high-end tethered headsets, it doesn't require external cameras or a connection to an expensive computer tower or game console; $400 will get you "all in" for self-contained VR starting in the spring.

Fresh from demoing Oculus Quest at the Oculus Connect conference in San Jose last month, Ars has put together a short video taking you through the pros and cons of the headset's compromises. Click through to hear some nitty gritty details about the system's hardware, comfort, frame rate, and what kinds of games we expect to see on the standalone device.

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This is the third installment of my conversation with the outspoken author, podcaster, philosopher, and recovering neuroscientist Sam Harris. Please check out part one and part two if you missed them. Otherwise, you can press play on the embedded audio player or pull up the transcript—both of which are below.

Today, we start off discussing Harris' first bestselling book, The End of Faith, inspired by September 11th attacks. Having recently spent ten years on his own self-styled spiritual journey, “I immediately recognized the spiritual intensity of that enterprise,” he recalls. Of Osama Bin Laden, Harris says, “He was not faking his belief. He believed what he said he believed, and it was only rational to take his stated beliefs at face value.”

Harris denounces his critics for viewing the religious justifications of terrorists as “just propaganda, and propaganda that nobody believes" and for thinking that more standard geopolitical or sociological motivations must surely be at work instead. “Many academics,” he says, “virtually every anthropologist I've ever had to talk to about this stuff, many journalists, many so-called scholars of religion just don't know what it's like to believe in God. And then doubt that anyone really does.”

Enlarge / Are developers being asked to push themselves too hard to make games like Red Dead Redemption 2? (credit: Aurich / Getty / Rockstar)

Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser has drawn criticism this week for an interview where he said "we were working 100-hour weeks" on the upcoming Red Dead Redemption 2. The ensuing conversation, which now includes many current Rockstar employees speaking publicly for the first time, has reignited a long-running argument about how much "crunch time" (if any) should be expected from developers in the run-up to major game releases.

The controversy started Sunday, when a rare interview with Houser and fellow studio co-founder (and brother) Sam Houser ran on New York Magazine's Vulture vertical. Dan's statement that "we were working 100-hour weeks" several times in 2018 is treated as almost a throwaway line in the context of other numbers highlighting the immensity of the game: 300,000 animations; 500,000 lines of dialogue, and "several hundred" edits for every trailer. It's a theme that runs throughout the interview, where the Housers brag about the game's 2,000 page "main story" script, 1,200 SAG-AFTRA actors, 2,200 days of motion-capture work, and 192 separate "interactive" musical scores, for example.

"We always worked ourselves to the bone," former Grand Theft Auto developer Navid Khonsari notes in the Vulture piece. "We all thought we were making badass shit, so it didn’t matter how hard we worked."