Month: March 2020

• 

  The e-ink display is a bit grainy thanks to the 800x600 resolution. [credit: Waveshare ]

NFC is usually only used to for quick text transfers, like a tap-and-pay transaction at a register or a quick data transfer from an NFC sticker. A company called "Waveshare" is really pushing the limits of NFC, though, with a 7.5-inch e-ink display that gets its data, and its power, from an NFC transfer. The $70 display doesn't have a battery and doesn't need a wired power connection.

E-paper (or e-ink) displays have the unique property of not needing power to maintain an image. Once a charge blasts across the display and correctly aligns pixels full of black and white balls, everything will stay where it is when the power turns off, so the image will stick around. You might not have thought about it before, but in addition to data, NFC comes with a tiny wireless power transfer. This display is designed so that NFC provides just enough power to refresh the display during a data transfer, and the e-ink display will hold onto the image afterward.

NFC's power transfer works just like wireless phone charging: the reader (probably your phone) generates an RF field to transfer power to the passive NFC object. NFC stickers (and any other NFC device) have a sizable spiral antenna to harvest the RF signal, just like a wireless charging coil. The amount of power you can transfer over NFC depends on the design of the object and the reader, but Waveshare warns that some phones might not put out enough power. If your phone doesn't work, the company recommends an NFC board that puts out 1.4 watts of power, but Waveshare also shows the device working with a pretty old Android phone, a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge from 2016.

Enlarge / The future of video game expos has arrived—and just in time, in case you (like many of us) are stuck at home for the foreseeable future. (credit: Valve)

For the second time in three months, Steam is hosting a virtual video game expo where users from around the world can download time-limited demos of unreleased games. This time, circumstances are wildly different.

The biggest difference with today's launch of the Steam Game Festival: Spring Edition has little to do with the implementation itself. Like the offer we saw in December, which was attached to a livestreamed Game Awards presentation, users can head to Steam right now and download a bunch of demos of games that are not officially available for purchase. Only this time, the count has grown significantly to 59 games (the list is below).

What's different is how these games are sorted and why that is the case. Most of these game demos were prepared for presentations at the developer-centric Game Developers Conference 2020, which was supposed to take place in San Francisco through this week. That expo, like many others, was summarily postponed last month in the face of mounting pressure from health experts and city and state officials. As a result, you'll notice designations for most of the games such as "Indie Megabooth," "Wings Fund," "Indie MIX," and "Day of the Devs," which are organizations that typically present new and independent video game demos at GDC-affiliated events.

• 

  Mark Cerny explained that prior console generations put a strain on developers to get up to speed with how to maximize a console's potential. (Note here that he's being pretty generous about the archaic architecture that plagued the PS3.) [credit: PlayStation ]

PlayStation 5 lead system architect Mark Cerny revealed a bevy of details about the upcoming console in a livestreamed presentation today, promising the system's built-in SSD would be able to load content 100 times faster than the old spinning hard drive system on the PS4. The increased loading speeds enabled by SSDs are "really... the key to the next generation [of consoles]," he said.

While the PS4 hard drive can achieve speeds of 100MB/s for data laid out in an ideal form, time spent "seeking" across the head of the hard drive means effective loads speeds are closer to 20 seconds per GB, or 50 MB/s, Cerny said. For the multi-gigabyte content of today's games, Cerny said that means "load times can get pretty grim... [players have to] wait for the game to boot, wait for the game to load, wait for the level to reload every time you die, and wait for ... 'fast travel'."

Using the SSD on the PS5, by contrast, Cerny says developers can load 2GB of data in just 0.27 seconds, two orders of magnitude faster than the PS4. That 5.5 GB/s speed is faster than the 2.4 GB/s loading quoted by Microsoft earlier this week for the upcoming Xbox Series X.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Jena Ardell)

The US government is reportedly preparing for the coronavirus pandemic to last 18 months or longer and result in "significant shortages for government, private sector, and individual US consumers."

A 100-page US government plan was leaked to The New York Times, which today published an article summarizing the highlights.

"A federal government plan to combat the coronavirus warned policymakers last week that a pandemic 'will last 18 months or longer' and could include 'multiple waves,' resulting in widespread shortages that would strain consumers and the nation's health care system," the Times wrote.