The Gravity Gun from Half-Life 2 has always been one of my favorite video game guns, both in terms of design as well as use. It was always amazing to me that it took almost eight years for accomplished prop builders to take a crack at it, given how iconic both the weapon and the game are to the broader gaming community.

In December 2012, I decided to start on a build of it myself.

For the uninitiated, the Gravity Gun is one of the primary weapons and tools that you use in the video game Half-Life 2. It allows you to pick up and throw various objects in the game. You only get to see it from the 3rd person in a few instances, thankfully one of which is when another character in the game is holding it.

You can see the size of the weapon here, and I used this image to help determine the scale used when building everything. Coming from a 3D design background, my primary prototype building methods utilize laser cutting and 3D printed parts. Props from video games make the first steps easy, since in most cases you can easily extract a game model into a workable format. However there are a few caveats to this:

For a robot the size of a shoebox, OpenROV has made quite a splash in the submersible community in the past year. Just after MakerFaire 2012, where we saw OpenROV for the first time, it and its creator Eric Stackpole showed up in the New York Times along with a bold proclamation about the open source project: "It could change the future of ocean exploration."

Photo credit: NASA

Those weren't Stackpole's words, but you can bet he believes them--his quest for a sub-$1000 exploration bot recently landed him on the cover of Make Magazine, and OpenROV was back at this year's Maker Faire. Last August, Stackpole and his partner David Lang raised over $100,000 on Kickstarter for the OpenROV. What's surprising, considering how successful OpenROV was in 2012, is just how far the ROV has advanced in the past year.

"Even when we were doing that expedition to the Hall City Cave that ended up in the Times, we didn't really have a robot that was fully functional," says Stackpole at Maker Faire 2013. "You know, this is a maker product. It was on its way, there were some things that could work. We could drive it around, but the video feed wasn't reliable. Now we're at a point where we have everything we had dreamed of. Live video streaming, we can do high definition, it's going up to a computer. It's functional. This is the part where it really gets exciting. This is where we're going to start exploring, really exploring, places that haven't been seen before."

Photo credit: Make

Stackpole is a fountain of enthusiasm, but he's earnest when he says things like "this is the part where it really gets exciting," he means it. His obsession with ocean exploration came while he worked at NASA as a mechanical engineer, and last year he reduced his hours to devote more time to OpenROV.

Just in the past few months, the OpenROV project has made a major breakthrough.

This year’s Google I/O came and went without a new version of Android, and there was much griping on the internet. Even though Google isn’t required to announce anything of consumer interest at a developer event, the past few I/O conferences have made it clear this is Google’s big software show. Everyone watches and waits on the big reveal, but this year we got nothing--or did we?

While it may appear at first blush that Google I/O 2013 was a bust, it was actually an incredibly important step for Google. This is the event when Google finally beat fragmentation.

Why Wait?

If you paid close attention to the developer talks and API announcements, there were some enticing tidbits about the future of Android. For example, Google made it clear that Bluetooth Low Energy (AKA Bluetooth SMART) was coming to Android, but not under existing OS versions. No, this Bluetooth 4.0 implementation would be part of the platform in API level 18. Jelly Bean 4.2 is API level 17. There were also various server log and benchmark leaks -- the kind of stuff we always see when a new OS is imminent.

Hints like this indicate there is a newer version of Android that is far enough along that it has a finalized Bluetooth stack and is being tested on internal Google devices. Rumors can’t always be trusted, but the word is that Google was prepared to announce Android 4.3 at Google I/O, but decided to hold back and make a point. What point? Simply, Google doesn’t need a new version of Android to rollout new services to users.

Look at the Android announcements that did happen: Hangouts, Google Play Games, app data sync, Play Music All Access, and synced notifications. Those are neat features, but no one is going to convince Android fans it’s as sexy as a new version of the platform. However, the impact might be even greater than if Google had announced Android 4.3.

Imagine that Google had shown off a new version of Android; let’s even say that it was extremely impressive. After hearing the news, most Android users would look at their Galaxy S3 or Droid RAZR Maxx HD, and feel a mixture of annoyance and apathy. When Google announces a new version of Android, it only has an immediate effect on Nexus owners, which make up a small percentage of total Android users. The new services Google announced affect almost every Android phone in the world.

Phones running Gingerbread or higher got these new features. According to the latest platform numbers that’s nearly 95% of active Android devices. Google is proving that it can improve the Android experience without waiting for every OEM and carrier to get device updates deployed. That's worth a small delay.

It’s safe to say that Nvidia is really competing with itself at this point in time. The current GeForce GTX 680 is pretty much even in performance to AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, but much quieter and uses less power. The GeForce Titan outperforms AMD’s single-GPU flagship by a wide margin, but costs a cool grand, so it’s out of reach of most users.

Enter the GeForce GTX 780. At first blush, it seems like a “Baby Titan”, but that would be inaccurate. Let’s look at the base specs, compared to both the Titan and the GTX 680.

Given that the GTX 780 uses the same GPU chip as the GTX Titan, but with roughly 15% fewer shader cores and half the memory, the GTX 780 offers about 80% of the gaming performance of a Titan, as we’ll see shortly. Take a look at that memory speed, too: 7000 MHz (effective), or 1gpbs faster throughput than the Titan or GTX 680. There’s no lack of memory bandwidth with the GTX 780. However, Nvidia told us that the GTX 780 would only have about a quarter of the double precision floating point performance of Titan. In other words, the GTX 780 will be a great gaming card, but won’t come close to Titan for high end GPU compute.

Digging a little deeper into the features of the GTX 780 card itself, Nvidia’s made some interesting design decisions in the reference design. The cooling subsystem is tweaked from Titan to run even quieter. Nvidia accomplished this by managing fan speeds to run closer to a steady state, rather than ramping the fan speeds up and down rapidly.

The GTX 780’s cooling system minimizes noise by keeping the average speed within a narrow band, avoiding fast spin rate ramps.

The GTX 780 will cost substantially less than a Titan, at about $649 for reference grade cards, but that's nearly $200 more than a 2GB GTX 680. However, 4GB GTX 680s still cost nearly $600, so the price differential between a GTX 780 and GTX 680 4GB card isn’t as large, while new new card offers quite a bit more performance. Still, $649 is a pretty steep price for a video card, and it’s partly a result of AMD’s inability to compete on single GPU performance. The lack of competition puts Nvidia in the enviable position of being able to set higher prices than they might have if competition had been stiffer. I included a GTX 680 4GB card for comparison, but it’s likely that performance differences with a 2GB card will be minor.

With this sobering thought in mind, let’s take a look at performance.

Recently, we’ve seen some buzz about Dolby Atmos, a relatively new movie theater sound technology that gives the illusion that there are an infinite number of audio speakers and channels surrounding the audience. It’s hard to believe we didn’t even have wide-spread Dolby Stereo in movies until Star Wars, and if theaters wanted to play Lucas’s space opera, they had to redo their sound system, or Fox wouldn’t give them the film reels.

Several years prior to Dolby Stereo, studios also experimented with a short-lived experiment in movie sound that’s fun to look back on today: Sensurround. It was a gimmick of its time, because the era of the all-star disaster film was in full swing, and while Sensurround wasn’t as high tech as Lucasfilm's THX or Dolby's Atmos, it did try to make movies feel bigger and more realistic through the sheer power of sound, and perhaps helped pave the way for today’s cinema audio technology.

Photo credit: Flickr user hijukal via Creative Commons.

Sensurround was the brainchild of the late Jennings Lang, a Hollywood producer who knew the power of showmanship. Lang was one of the first to call a film an “event” back in 1974 for Earthquake, and legend has it the idea for the film was based on a true event. Lang was in a movie theater when a real life earthquake happened. Then Lang got the idea about making a disaster film where an earthshaker hits L.A., and it would somehow shake the hell out of the audience as well.

“My dad was one of the last true showmen,” says his son, Rocky Lang. “He realized that movies had to be bigger and more event oriented. He was always trying to find a way to make the movie going experience bigger and better.”

"ATTENTION! This motion picture will be shown in the startling new multi-dimension of Sensurround. Please be aware that you will feel as well as see and hear realistic effects such as might be experienced in an actual earthquake. The management assumes no responsibility for the physical or emotional reactions of the individual viewer."- Theater Notice For Earthquake (1974)

By setting up a series of speakers in the theater, and running a soundtrack with very low tones, an earthquake simulation could be done, and there were cues on the Earthquake soundtrack when the special speakers were to be triggered.

"Your brain is not a video camera," writes Vice, in an article that describes something seemingly impossible: Music affecting how our brains perceive the world. This is not about a perspective or point-of-view--it's about how music can actually create a motion aftereffect in our perception. What we see is fundamentally different from reality.

Motion aftereffects are common without a musical element. Stare at this animated waterfall, for example, and when the image shifts, your brain will still see motion when it isn't there. But the idea of music affecting our perception is far more interesting, because it shows how tangled our sensory processes are.

Photo credit: Flickr user Maxime Gendre via Creative Commons.

"[Pascal] Wallisch and colleagues are the first to report a disruption in people’s judgment of visual motion from listening to music," writes Vice. "The experiment was simple. Participants listened through headphones to ascending and descending piano scales for sixty seconds. Then they had to judge the direction of moving dots on a computer screen. The authors found that subjects who listened to scales that moved “up” the piano perceived the dots to move down. Those who listened to scales that moved “down” perceived the dots to move up."

Wallisch furthers his statement, that the world we perceive is hardly concrete reality, by pointing out that the retina is a 2D surface, and our 3D perception is actually created by how the brain infers information. "Put differently," writes Vice, "not only is the brain not a video camera, the audio feed is not even independent of the visual feed. It is inherently tangled up. Already on the frontend. In most cases, this is beneficial to disambiguate the world. We are simply taking advantage of this in this experiment.”

Listening to jazz, which is structurally complicated, may do more to affect your cognition than pop music.

The article digs beyond how music affects perception into how music actually affects the way we think. Listening to one type of music or another isn't going to completely define your personality, but listening to jazz, which is structurally complicated, may do more to affect your cognition than pop music.

When you think about our cultural understanding of music and how deeply it's integrated with our visual processing, the motion aftereffect makes sense. Vice writes that it's"elicited by confusion between your brain’s audio and visual feeds" and how we perceive musical scales. We associate "up" with ascending scales and "down" with descending scales (even though those keys are actually arranged from left to right on a keyboard).

Wallisch speculates that tribes who haven't been exposed to this musical form won't experience the same aftereffect. Sounds like the basis for an even more interesting experiment.