Author: Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Seattle's Pacific Science Center is the latest home to Nathan Sawaya's all-LEGO art exhibit.

42 more images in gallery

SEATTLE—We at Ars love a good piece of LEGO design, particularly the fare found at regional fan fests like BrickCon on an annual basis. But while those shows impress with pop-culture references and sprawling towns full of vehicles, spacecraft, ships, and villagers, they don't typically include the kinds of original work or high-art references you'd expect to see at a museum.

Oregon-raised artist Nathan Sawaya, on the other hand, has made art out of LEGOs for years—and shown it off at art galleries across the world since 2007. The artist's latest show, which we caught on its opening weekend in Seattle, continues to revolve around his original creations, which are included in the lower gallery (and will be familiar to anybody who's attended a Sawaya show over the years). But his more recent work has revolved around LEGO recreations of classic paintings and sculptures, which you'll see in this article's upper gallery.

From Monet to Munch, and from Egyptian temples to politically charged Americana, Sawaya's Art of the Brick collection crosses a ton of artistic movements off the LEGO list. You can see all of this and more at the Pacific Science Center until September 11.

Enlarge / An artist's rendering of SoundCloud and Landr's new, free "auto-mastering" computer system at work. (credit: Sam Machkovech / Jason Scragz)

First, the robots came for our factory jobs, then for our fast-food jobs. Now, they're aiming their laser-guided sights at... music-recording engineers?

On Thursday, the audio-processing company Landr (founded in 2014) announced its partnership with the hugely popular self-publishing music platform SoundCloud. SoundCloud users can now have their original tunes processed and "optimized" for free by Landr.

This news promises a different kind of audio-related snake oil than we're used to at Ars. We've seen plenty of products advertising instant audio benefits, from cords to pre-amps to DACs, which largely target music consumers. Landr flips its sales pitch by targeting music creators.

(credit: Sam Machkovech)

The motion-sports craze has given us approximations of just about every pub game, parlor game, and lawn sport, from darts to bowling to bocce. But one Western real-gaming staple somehow never got a good version during the Wii and Kinect eras: billiards. Wii Play's billiards mode was too limited, while Pool Hall Pro wasn't very convincing in terms of implementing real motion. But, really, how the heck do you translate the physicality of billiards to a home system?

PoolNation VR has an answer, and it comes thanks to its required use of the HTC Vive virtual reality system, as opposed to Oculus or any other option. The $20 game officially launches June 1, but its creators were kind enough to offer Ars a beta key and free reign to post impressions ahead of the launch. So I set up a camera rig, dressed up in my orange, Fight Club-caliber leather jacket (I never leave the house wearing that thing, swear), and cracked open a cold one to simulate the pool-hall experience in my living room. (Watch until the end to see me "pick a fight.")

Ars tests PoolNation VR; edited by Jennifer Hahn (video link)

An artist's approximation of ex-McDonald's CEO Ed Rensi in his Fox Business appearance on Tuesday. (credit: South Park Studios)

For years, economists have been issuing predictions about how automation will impact the world's job markets, but those studies and guesses have yet to make a call based on what would happen if a given sector's wages rose. Instead, that specific guesswork mantle has been taken up by a former McDonald's CEO, who declared on Tuesday that a rise in the American minimum wage will set our nation's robotic revolution into motion.

In an appearance on Fox Business' Mornings with Maria, Ed Rensi claimed that a minimum wage increase to $15 an hour would result in "job loss like you can't believe" before ceding ground to our new robotic overlords. "I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday, and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry—it’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging French fries."

When pressed, Rensi admitted that he thinks "franchising businesses" like fast-food restaurants are already hurtling towards automation, saying that those businesses are "dependent on people who have low job skills that need to grow. If you can't get people a reasonable wage, you're gonna get machines to do the work. It's just common sense. It's going to happen whether you like it or not." He then insisted that an increased minimum wage will make robotic worker adoption "just happen faster."

Let the Ars Overwatch commence! (credit: Sam Machkovech)

After an extensive beta period, Blizzard's first foray into first-person combat, the new team-based shooter Overwatch, finally launches on Monday, May 23. The game's final version didn't get a preview period for press, but our time with the game's beta has left us convinced that we're in for a pretty quality shooting game—and quite possibly the best entry in the "hero shooter" genre.

While Ars staffers and contributors have logged significant time in the beta, we're not ready to turn in our "review" call just yet, especially with a game so reliant on online play. Thus, we're going to whet your appetite with a live stream of Ars' dive into the game's first few hours of retail existence.

The game goes live at 7pm EDT, and while all of Ars' eager gamers are pre-installed and ready to rock on our gaming PCs, we're going to give the game's servers a little while to breathe before soft-launching our livestream at 7:30pm EDT today (and "officially" starting at 8pm, or 1am if you're in the UK). Click the above YouTube Gaming video box, or this link, to tune in. The feed will star yours truly on both webcam and gameplay feed, but Ars' Kyle Orland, Steven Strom, and Peter Bright will be on board as both voice chatters and party members. We'll do our best to respond to questions in both the YouTube Gaming chat scroll and on the Ars comments thread. Expect the live feed to last until roughly 9:30pm EDT tonight.

(credit: iFixit)

Currently, only two virtual reality platforms exist on Windows PCs: the Oculus Rift and the SteamVR-powered HTC Vive. Each set has its strengths and weaknesses, but until recently, they at least both offered limited compatibility with their rival's software stores. Oculus headset users can pick through compatible games on the SteamVR store and interface, while HTC Vive wearers could install a fan-made patch to play Oculus software.

SteamVR still plays nice, but the other side changed its tune on Friday with a major Oculus app update for Windows PCs, complete with advertised "updates to platform integrity checks." It didn't take long for the team behind that aforementioned HTC Vive patch, dubbed "Revive," to announce that those "integrity checks" appeared to block users' access to Oculus games on unauthorized hardware.

"Oculus has added a check [to look for] whether the Oculus Rift headset is connected to their Oculus Platform DRM," Revive developer "CrossVR" posted to the Vive Reddit community on Friday. "While Revive fools the application [into] thinking the Rift is connected, it does nothing to make the actual Oculus platform think the headset is connected."

Minecraft's iconic Steve character will finally land on Chinese computers and smartphones thanks to a licensing deal with a Chinese game publisher. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

When Microsoft opened its wallets in 2014 and traded $2.5 billion for Mojang, the public by and large nodded their heads in agreement. Right, the makers of Minecraft. Those dudes are worth a lot of money.

But any doubters who questioned that sky-high valuation saw a new feather drop onto Microsoft's cap this week: Minecraft's PC and smartphone versions are finally coming to China. On Friday, Microsoft and Mojang announced the beginning of a "five-year exclusive partnership" with Chinese software publisher NetEase, Inc to roll the game out onto Chinese computer and smartphone marketplaces.The game's Chinese rollout date and release details have yet to be announced, and neither company confirmed how much money exchanged hands for the deal.

China isn't hurting for games originally published in the West, but Minecraft is arguably the world's most popular video game. Microsoft was able to publish the game on Xbox One consoles late last year, but those consoles have yet to penetrate the Chinese market to the extent that PCs and smartphones have, and the fact that even Microsoft had to license the game to someone else as opposed to launching it from its own Shanghai campus is a stern reminder of what roadblocks stand in the way of Western software developers.

This Halo 5 combatant looks like he's praying. If he's praying for some actual Halo 5 on PC, then he's in for some good news.

Microsoft's play to bridge the gap between Xbox One consoles and Windows 10 PCs got a lot more interesting on Thursday thanks to a pretty major Halo 5 announcement. Microsoft and its Halo development house, 343 Industries, have taken the wraps off the awkwardly named Forge–Halo 5: Guardians Edition, which they say will launch for free across Windows 10 "later this year."

This limited free version of Halo 5 won't include the game's single-player campaign, nor will it include multiplayer matchmaking with random opponents. However, Microsoft representatives have confirmed to Ars that the free Windows 10 game will support unfettered online play with anyone on a player's friends list. That means players can create or download a Forge map and invite anyone else playing the Windows 10 version to join in and play to whatever "kill count," time limit, or other win condition they've set. Even better, Microsoft says that this friends-only multiplayer mode in Windows 10 will fully support mouse-and-keyboard game controls.

As series fans know, Halo's Forge mode allows players to build content-filled maps and lay down a litany of custom rules and modifiers for the game. This Windows 10 version, as its lengthy title suggests, will allow people to do the same thing on their PCs, complete with mouse and keyboard support that 343 Industries says will be "easier/faster" to use than an Xbox controller (though we have yet to see how keyboard shortcuts and other features will work on a PC version).

An official Nintendo restaurant? We'd be down, if only to see more bento boxes as cool as this one made by a fan. (credit: Miki Yoshihito)

Nintendo's most recent fiscal-year disclosure made headlines for announcing a release window for the new "Nintendo NX" console and yet another Zelda game delay, but it also included news of serious corporate restructuring. The short version: Nintendo will soon involve a supervisory committee in making top-level executive decisions.

The company has begun rolling out more details about how that restructuring will work, and in doing so, Nintendo's Japanese arm has tipped its hand about possible new business plans. A Tuesday announcement included the company's amended articles of incorporation, expected to be approved by shareholders this June, and it included three new entries in its "business engagement" list: restaurants, medical and health devices, and "computer software."

Longtime Nintendo followers will recognize the second of those three entries, as Nintendo has publicly announced, then recanted, both a heart rate monitor (the Wii Vitality Sensor) and a sleep-tracking system. Meanwhile, a Nintendo-themed restaurant seems like a simple-enough expansion for a company that already operates physical businesses such as the Nintendo Store—though, clearly, we'd love to see an official Nintendo diner—and a pun-filled menu. (Kirby cream puffs, Sausage "Link"s, Moo Moo Meadows burgers, and on and on...)

(credit: Shawn Campbell)

Reports and rumors about changes to Twitter's famous character-count limit became more concrete on Monday thanks to a new report, and the alleged change appears to split the difference between the current model and an unlimited post size.

Bloomberg's report credits "a person familiar with the matter" in claiming that Twitter posts will soon begin serving links and images that do not eat into a post's 140-character limit. The report's source indicated that the change could happen "in the next two weeks" but was unable to offer any firmer timeline. Currently, Twitter automatically shortens any URL or uploaded image into a link that takes up approximately 21 characters.

Many users, including Ars Technica's official Twitter feed, have begun relying on attached, text-filled images to show longer text passages, pull quotes, and the like. We imagine the tiny boost of 21 characters for image posts will simply encourage more users to follow suit, though it remains to be seen how such links will be served, particularly to any users who rely solely on character-limited SMS access. In January, Ars' Peter Bright argued that such image-posting capabilities, combined with a 140-character limit, would preserve Twitter's best attributes better than a previously rumored plan to open posts up to a much larger 10,000-character limit.