Month: April 2019

Enlarge / A rendering of 851 W. Randolph Street in Chicago. (credit: Newcastle Limited)

Last year, a report from the Chicago Tribune claimed that Google was "close to finalizing a lease" for a flagship retail store in Chicago. The 14,000-square-foot space would have been Google's first major retail space that wasn't a temporary pop-up store or a demo area inside a third-party electronics store. Eight months later, the Chicago Tribune is back to report the deal is off, after "Google halted plans late in the leasing process."

When we first wrote up the news eight months ago, it came with the caveat of "When it comes to Google and retail, nothing is certain until the store actually opens." You can add this store to the growing list of started-and-stopped retail projects. Who remembers the infamous Google Barge, a floating modular retail space with a "party deck" built out of an old container ship? Then there was that time in 2015 when Google leased a 5,000-square-foot retail space in New York City, spent $6 million renovating it, and then canned the idea before the store opened.

When asked to comment by the Tribune on this latest deal falling apart, Google only offered the usual statement of “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation.”

• 

  This compact little thing is Audi's AI:ME. Does it point the way to an eventual MEB-based electric Audi? [credit: Audi ]

The 2019 Shanghai auto show is now underway, and electric cars are thick on the ground. If there was any doubt about how important the Chinese market is to the world's car makers, this year's show should put it to rest, with forward-looking vehicles on show from established OEMs and startups. Some, like the Audi AI:ME point the way to a possible future of autonomous transport. The AI:ME is a followup to 2017's AIcon, this time showing us the company's idea of a much more compact self-driving vehicle.

But plenty more are closer to reality. Volkswagen took the wraps off yet another ID family member—the ID Roomzz joins the ID range alongside the Crozz, Buzz, Vizzion, and Buggy. A three-row SUV, this one goes on sale in 2021 and unlike the compact ID itself, we're pretty sure that includes the US market as well as Europe and Asia.

It's not all SUVs, either. Though we keep hearing that time's up for the humble four-door, the evidence at Shanghai points to that idea being premature.

2010 video game Amnesia: The Dark Descent is an obvious candidate for our eventual "best games of the '10s" list, owing to its revolutionary take on interactive horror. The indie game ushered in a new era of horror gaming, thanks in part to its brief, focused scope and its utter lack of weapons or combat. But how did the designers at Swedish game studio Frictional Games pull off Amnesia's scariest stuff?

The mouth of madness

In our video interview, Grip talks about how Amnesia came about after the completion of a creepy puzzle-platformer series called Penumbra. That series was built upon a physics system that let players pick up, stack, and contend with objects in the world in order to proceed, and Friction wanted to follow those games with a "good horror" experience, inspired in part by Konami's Silent Hill series.

The studio's original thinking for Amnesia revolved around forcing players to survive with a very old-school system of a life bar, but play-testing revealed that this focus either annoyed players or didn't scare them. The above interview delves a little more into experiments with things like a light-and-dark hiding system and how the game's "sanity" meter originally worked like a traditional "hit points" counter.

Enlarge / A nurse working with the World Health Organization (WHO) shows a bottle containing Ebola vaccine at the town hall of Mbandaka on May 21, 2018 during the launch of the Ebola vaccination campaign. (credit: Getty | Junior D. Kannah)

An experimental vaccine against the Ebola virus is 97.5 percent effective at preventing the disease, protecting well over 90,000 people in the massive, ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to preliminary data.

The outbreak has flared since last August, involving 1,264 cases (1,198 confirmed; 66 probable) and 814 deaths (748 confirmed, 66 probable), making it the second-largest Ebola outbreak recorded. So far the outbreak has stayed within the DRC’s North Kivu and Ituri provinces, which sit on the eastern side of the country, bordering South Sudan, Uganda, and Rwanda. But, response efforts have been severely hampered by community distrust of public health campaigns. One result of this distrust has been several attacks by militants on medical facilities, injuring medical staff and, in one case, killing a police officer. Some public health experts fear the outbreak will continue to spread without new strategies and more aid, possibly across nearby borders.

Still, the outbreak could have been far worse if it had not been for an experimental vaccine. The rVSV-ZEBOV-GP Ebola vaccine, made by Merck & Co, contains a live attenuated virus harmless to humans that researchers genetically engineered to carry an Ebola glycoprotein. Ebola usually uses this protein to interact with human cells, but in the vaccine, it triggers the human immune system to generate powerful antibodies to attack the virus. Early tests of the vaccine seemed to confirm this, suggesting it is safe and effective. And a World Health Organization Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) has given responders the greenlight to use the vaccine during outbreaks, based on an Expanded Access/Compassionate Use protocol.

Enlarge (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Sony hardware architect Mark Cerny has revealed the first official details on "the as-yet-unnamed console that will replace the PS4" in an exclusive story offered to Wired reporter Brian Rubin.

While Cerny was not ready to talk about details like a price or release date, he did tell Wired that the coming console will not be ready by the end of 2019. All indications are this console won't be another PS4 Pro style mid-generation upgrade, but instead what Cerny calls a "fundamental change" in what is possible with a game console.

Cerny did go into some detail on the system's hardware configuration, which will include an eight-core AMD Ryzen CPU, built on the 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture, and an AMD Radeon-based GPU with ray-tracing support. Aside from graphical benefit, Cerny hinted that the ray-tracing GPU will also include a "custom unit for 3D audio," that can similarly trace in-game sound back to its source. That unit will allow for a more immersive surround-sound-style experience that Cerny says won't require any additional hardware outside of your TV speakers.