Month: June 2023

Enlarge (credit: Canon)

Back in March, the editor-in-chief of the 25-year-old, Amazon-owned camera review site DPReview.com announced that the site would be closing in April. The site was the casualty of a round of layoffs at Amazon that will affect a total of about 27,000 employees this year; DPReview was meant to stop publishing new pieces on April 10 and to be available in read-only mode for an undetermined period of time after that.

But then, something odd happened: The site simply kept publishing at a fairly regular clip throughout the entire month of April and continuing until now. A no-update update from EIC Scott Everett published in mid-May merely acknowledged that pieces were still going up and that there was "nothing to share," which wasn't much to go on but also didn't make it sound as though the site were in imminent danger of disappearing.

Yesterday, Everett finally had something to share: DPReview.com and its "current core editorial, tech, and business team[s]" were being acquired by Gear Patrol, an independently owned consumer technology site founded by Eric Yang in 2007. The deal had already closed as of yesterday, June 20.

Enlarge / Senior Airman Ryan Hoagland operates an explosive ordnance disposal robot using an Xbox 360 controller. (credit: US Air Force / Flickr)

This weekend's tragic disappearance of an OceanGate Expeditions tourist submersible has led to a fair share of bemused coverage focused on the company's apparent use of a $30 Logitech F710 wireless PC game controller for its interface. But OceanGate is far from the first outfit to use off-the-shelf or slightly modified gaming control hardware to power expensive heavy machinery well outside of the gaming realm.

MRI analysis firm BodyViz, for instance, told the BBC that an Xbox controller provided a much more intuitive way to “rotate, pan, zoom or fly-through a patient's virtual anatomy” than the previously standard mouse-and-keyboard interface. And NASA has used an Xbox Kinect as an interface to control complex rovers like the six-limbed ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Limbed Extra-Terrestrial Explorer).

But international militaries have shown some of the most avid and continued interest in adapting game-control interfaces for decidedly non-entertainment uses. In 2014, the US Navy was promoting its use of "a video game-like controller" in a laser weapon prototype, for example. And in 2018, the USS Colorado attack submarine was handing Navy sailors an Xbox controller to operate its periscope-like photonic masts.