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:

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.

Three months after Sony held a special event to announce the PlayStation 4, Microsoft responded with the announcement of the Xbox One. This is the follow-up to the Xbox 360, eight years down the road, and Microsoft's sticking with a familiar strategy: Dominate the living room. In the first 30 minutes of its Xbox One presentation, Microsoft focused more on the console's ability to switch seamlessly between live television, movies, music, and gaming than it did on games themselves. This is the definition of a do-everything box: in fact, Microsoft's combining its Windows 8 architecture and Xbox software into one unified experience.

Microsoft demonstrated that combination by showing off Windows 8's window snapping feature on the Xbox. While watching a movie, they brought up Skype on Xbox and snapped it to one side of the screen, allowing both movie and video chat to run simultaneously.

Through the first 30 minutes of its presentation, Microsoft quickly ran through the Xbox One's new hardware, new user interface, and new Xbox Live features. Everything has been changed and updated, including the Kinect and the controller. Thankfully, Wired has also taken a closer look at the Xbox One's hardware. Let's dig in.

We’ve now burned through a few gallons of very expensive silicone rubber to make molds of every one of the Halo Reach Needler prop's 12 individual parts. There are a bunch of Needler-shaped cavities that need to be filled with something, and in a similar theme to making the molds themselves, there’s a variety of ways to go about doing so.

Techniques and materials will vary depending on the final use of the piece, but for the purposes of this tutorial we’ll be concentrating on urethane casting resin and leaving out other plastics such as epoxy or polyester. I’ll cover solid casts, hollow parts, and translucent/clear pieces as well.

The most basic parts to be made will be the solid pour castings. For these parts I’ll be using Smooth-On’s product “Smooth Cast 320” and the detail bit that sits underneath the upper casing will be used as an example (apologies for the process photo, I didn’t have a shot of the completed master before molding.)

The initial step after removing your master part from the mold will be to apply a powder layer to all facing edges of the mold. Personally I use baby powder, but I have heard other propmakers use talcum as well. This may seem like an odd step, but this will help reduce bubbles in the finished part. You can think of the thin layer of powder like a paper towel over a spilled drink. Just like a napkin will wick up moisture, a thin coat of powder in your mold will allow the resin to flow more easily into detail edges. What you’re working against here is the surface tension of the liquid, which will have a more difficult time seeping into detail areas without this step.

Have you ever thought about how odd it is that stacks of money, or diamonds, or dollar signs, or gold bars, aren't the icons we associate with slot machines? These machines are designed to do one thing, and one thing only: keep us playing. To catch us in a loop, to make us want to win, to make us keep playing and playing hoping to see those symbols line up and spill out a jackpot. We know slot machines are about money, but the iconography we associate with these machines is not dollar signs or gold coins. It's fruit.

99% Invisible recently devoted a 20 minute episode to the ingenious (and insidious) design of slot machines and how they've evolved. And those fruit icons have a long, long history.

Photo credit: Flickr user andresrueda via Creative Commons.

"To circumvent anti-gambling laws in the US, early slot machines masqueraded as vending machines," says 99% Invisible. "They gave out chewing gum as prizes, and those prizes could be redeemed for cash. That’s where the fruit logos come from. In fact, in the UK, slot machines are called 'fruit machines.' Despite outward appearances, slot machines have evolved dramatically since they first appeared in 1895."

That evolution is fascinating, since modern slot machines actually look fairly similar to models from half a century ago. They now have bright LCD screens and buttons to more rapidly start new games, but the visual language of slot machines is more or less unchanged. They still use fruit as icons. They still have levers on the side, which are totally optional--in a computerized system, the lever is simply a novelty. They're now called "legacy levers."

If you've ever wondered what the classic "BAR" symbol represents, it has a similar story. "The near-universal BAR symbol, which I always thought represented stacks of bars of gold, is actually based on the logo of the Bell Fruit Gum Company," says 99% Invisible's Roman Mars.

The three-reel slot machine design has been around for more than 100 years, and it's still what we think of first when we imagine slot machines. But many of today's machines are far more complex, even though they retain the same visual sensibilities. They'll feature multiple rows and columns of matchable objects (including fruit, of course) that produce hundreds--if not thousands--of possible combinations.

Last time, we covered the basics of simple block-style moldmaking. While this technique is versatile and can produce very good results, it’s often not the best solution for molding complex or larger parts. The Halo Needler prop has many parts both complex and large, so we’ll need to look into other methods. But first, a little show off of the completed master sculpts all sitting pretty. Now I just need to make copies of everything!

I’m going to use the upper casing as the test mule here for showcasing a technique called “brush-on” moldmaking. The basic premise is gradually building up layers of silicone onto a part until the desired mold thickness is achieved. It’s a bit more complicated than just slathering some rubber on though, so let’s take a look at the individual steps.

First off, you need to determine if your master part will need to be molded in sections; and if so, where should the seam line be positioned. There is a significant amount of spatial organization to consider - most notably where will seam lines be the easiest to conceal and clean up later - but also things like how easily the parts will be to de-mold and how the mold will be disassembled and reassembled after use. For this upper casing, I chose to follow the lower seam line around the base of the part, then follow this hard edge line up the front. Any seam lines will be easy to sand off in these areas, and the resulting silicone mold parts will be easy to remove from the cast part. I also added a section of ¾” PVC conduit to act as a pour spout. This area will be covered up by another part after assembly, so we don’t have to worry about losing any detail here. Non-sulfur clay is used to create the parting seam, and small indentations (registration keys, as we learned last time!) are marked into the clay.

At CES 2013, Microsoft showed off a new Microsoft Research project called IllumiRoom, not as a product, but as a proof-of-concept--a possible way to do something very, very different with the Kinect. IllumiRoom combines a Kinect sensor with a projector to take in the layout of a room and then project video from a game onto the walls surrounding the TV. The system could extend the content of a game beyond the boundaries of the television screen, effectively turning an entire part of a room into a giant screen. But the augmented reality potential of the technology is much cooler.

Microsoft Research just released a video overviewing IllumiRoom's potential uses. Check it out for yourself below. Extending a full game's environment outside the TV looks jarring and distracting in some cases--due to the differences in tone and brightness, the two don't really blend. The AR effects, on the other hand, look pretty cool. In one example, the video shows only gunfire and explosions in a first-person shooter extending onto the walls, and the way they fly out of the TV frame and into the living room works really well. A similar gimmick makes it snow all around the TV.

The Research team also released a white paper describing the technology of IllumiRoom and giving multiple examples of how it could be implemented. Here's an excerpt describing how IllumiRoom could be implemented:

"Our vision for a fully developed IllumiRoom system includes an ultra-wide field of view device sitting on the user’s coffee table, projecting over a large area surrounding the television. The device would be connected wirelessly to a next generation gaming console as a secondary display...

Our current proof-of-concept prototype uses a commodity wide field of view projector (InFocus IN126ST) and a Microsoft Kinect for Windows sensor. The prototype is limited by the field of view of the Kinect and projector (~57º horizontal FOV). Therefore, the system is mounted above and behind the user’s head, as they are seated on a couch in front of the television.

The Kinect sensor captures the color and geometry of the scene, and the system renders the illusions using the acquired depth map. Careful calibration of the system is required in order for the illusions to tightly match the onscreen content and the physical environment. The calibration of the IllumiRoom system is fully automatic, determining the relative pose of the projector to the depth sensor and the position of the television in the projector image. Therefore, setup only requires that the projector and depth camera are placed such that they cover the area surrounding the TV."

The use of the Kinect allows IllumiRoom to conform to furniture or other objects in a room, which means it isn't limited to a flat, white surface as much as other projectors. But there are other limitations--you'll still need a dark room, bundling a projector with a console would be expensive, and developers will have to rethink or reprogram their games to fully take advantage of IllumiRoom. On that note, though, Microsoft's video also demonstrates some ways IllumiRoom can still interpret game motion and show that on the walls in what they call Peripheral Flow.

Even if this proof-of-concept isn't destined to show up at Microsoft's May 21st Xbox reveal, we hope Microsoft Research sticks with it. IllumiRoom could be in the running for weirdest video game accessory ever if it becomes a weird product.

It's taken AMD a few months to plan its counterattack to Nvidia's fastest graphics cards, the dual-GPU GTX 690 and monstrous single GPU GTX Titan. But now that response is here in the form of the Radeon 7990, a dual-GPU card that essentially slaps together two of the (already speedy) 7970GEs, which sell for at least $400 by themselves. AMD's press release proudly proclaimed this was the card EA used to premiere Battlefield 4, and that it's the only one around that can run Crysis 3 and Tomb Raider at 4K resolution.

AMD's hailing the new 7990 as the world's fastest graphics card thanks to its count of 2048 stream processors per GPU, 950MHz core clock, and 6GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 6GHz. Total, the 7990 is packing about 8.6 billion transistors. None of this comes cheap, of course--the 7990 will launch online in a couple week at $999.

Anandtech has some great analysis of the new card that digs into the advances AMD has made with dual-GPU tech. It's important to note that this technically isn't the first 7990 model to hit the market--ASUS and PowerColor released their own versions before AMD, but it looks like this will be the one to get. Writes Anandtech:

"AMD’s 7990 has an official TDP of just 375W, which although common for official dual-GPU cards, is quite a bit lower than the TDPs of the unofficial 7990s. As the GPU manufacturer AMD has the ability to do finely grained binning that their partners cannot, so while Asus and PowerColor have essentially been putting together cards that really are two 7970s on a single card – right down to the TDP – official 7990s get the advantage of AMD’s binning process, significantly reducing power consumption. The end result is that while an unofficial 7990 would be a 450W+ part, AMD can deliver the same or better performance while consuming much less power, putting the 7990 within the all-important 375W envelope that OEMs and boutique builders look for."

Two other important things to note. One: AMD's new power technology, which they've dubbed ZeroCore, can turn off a slave GPU when not in use. So for your normal day-to-day, the 7990 can shut off one of its GPUs and bring its idle power consumption down to about 20 watts. And that other important thing: AMD is giving away a ton of games with this card.

Your $999 will also buy you copies of BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, Far Cry 3, Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, Hitman Absolution, Sleeping Dogs and Deus Ex Human Revolution. If spending a grand on a graphics card leaves you too poor to buy anything else for a month, at least you'll have plenty of games to play.

Our Halo Needler prop is somewhere around 15 pounds at the moment, an amalgamation of wood, foam, bondo and various types of plastic. While the shape of the whole thing is spot-on, the prop leaves a little bit to be desired with how heavy and fragile the mishmash of materials ends up being. The parts we’ve got so far have to be molded, then cast in urethane plastic. This will yield a piece that is both far lighter as well as more durable, since it’ll all be one cohesive material through and through.

There are many types of techniques to make molds, and just as many types of materials to make molds with. The techniques covered in this and the next build installment will give an overview on the processes for making hard copies--that is, a piece that ends up being cast in rigid plastic. First, to those who aren’t familiar with moldmaking, I’ll cover a bit of terminology. Important moldmaking terms will be bolded.

The part to be molded is referred to as a “master” or sometimes as the “sculpt." For the purposes of this article I’ll be covering molding the grip section of the Needler. The grip here is made from MDF, Acrylic, PVC, Bondo and some epoxy clay. This is the grip master.

(Of note in the shot above is a little trick I learned from some of the modelmaking guys at the Replica Prop Forum. The little black arrows on the grip were cut at a local sign shop and adhered to the grip before molding. After making the mold and pouring a casting in resin, this will create small raised details in the final part.)

The technology has never been right for VR headsets, but as long as techheads have been designing head-mounted displays, they've faced a simpler challenge: Weight. In 1995, Nintendo's Virtual Boy weighed so much, at 1.65 pounds, that the company wisely released it with a stand for resting it on a table (releasing the Virtual Boy turned out to be less wise). The Oculus Rift is a featherweight compared to the Virtual Boys and other 80s and 90s HMDs, but a recent teardown reveals an interesting fact: There's not a ton going on inside the headset itself.

iFixit took a screwdriver and spudgers to the Oculus Rift dev kit to open it up. Good news for tinkerers: the kit is really easy to dive into. iFixit easily popped open the housing for the 7-inch LCD display with a plastic tool. Opening the Rift revealed that the 7-inch panel it contains is from Taiwanese manufacturer Chimei Innolux; iFixit writes that the manufacturer "is Taiwan's largest LCD manufacturer and is rumored to be a replacement source for Apple's iPad Mini screens."

Credit: iFixit.

In addition to the LCD panel, the housing only contained a timing controller and a very small custom circuit board housing the sensor package and CPU responsible for making the Rift's head-tracking mojo work. iFixit has close-up photos of each in its post.

And that was basically it. The rest of the Rift's virtual reality immersion comes from the control box, which facilitates the connection with a PC, and with software on the PC side.

First takeaway: the Oculus Rift dev kit is very, very easy to take apart. Second takeaway: This thing can probably be even lighter, since the key components add little to the overall bulk. We might see an even thinner and lighter housing with the consumer Oculus Rift next year, which will be key for extended gaming sessions--speaking of, check out Will playing Team Fortress 2 for nearly an hour. Our necks will thank Oculus for every ounce they can shave off the HMD's bulk.

[Harrison is away on an overseas trip this week, so he hasn't had the opportunity to continue working on the Halo 4 Needler prop. In its stead, he sends over this writeup of his recently constructed mask from the first BioShock game. --Norm]

I suppose it's no secret that I'm a pretty big BioShock fan. BioShock: Infinite has recently been released and I'm really excited by all the props that game will open up to me. But before I can get to those there was one object from the world of Rapture I wanted to take a crack at building: the Splicer mask. Here’s my journey building on leading up to the launch of the next BioShock chapter. And if you want to take a pass at making your own Splicer mask, I sell raw styrene copies of the finished mask in my store, ready for trimming and paint!

The Splicer characters in BioShock wear once-festive party masks that have been smattered with blood and cracked with abuse during their time in Rapture. My favorite design has always been the bird Splicer masks, so when I got a commission for one earlier this year, I jumped on it.

Gathering reference was a bit tricky here. I don't have the PC version of the game and though someone unfolded a pepakura model of the mask some time ago, it has since disappeared after the demise of Megaupload. Nothing left to do then but fire up the game! One of my save files happened to be very convenient as my character was wearing the Big Daddy suit and the Splicers would ignore him. Perfect for gathering reference images. I found a bird splicer, dispatched the poor fellow, then used the "Telekinesis" plasmid ability to get about a hundred different views of the mask.

I used these references to put together a set of blueprints, then commenced building.

"The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." - Sci-fi author William Gibson

This quote from Gibson--which he said in a 1999 NPR interview, though not for the first time--endures in popularity because it implies two exciting ideas. One, that with our Internet and our smartphones and scientific advances, we're living in a "future" sci-fi authors imagined in the 1980s. Two, that the future is a nebulous concept, rather than a sudden moment in time, that pops up in different parts of the world based on wealth and other socioeconomic factors. Even as the future as crept forward in fits and bursts, one of its most enduring icons--virtual reality--has stubbornly remained in the realm of fiction.

Until now. The Oculus Rift has arrived.

Oculus VR's head-mounted display fits into the first part Gibson's paradigm. It's a technology driven by sci-fi fantasies like Tron and The Matrix and Star Trek: The Next Generation, but in reality, head-mounted displays have been impossibly expensive and, in consumer models, pretty crappy, until the Oculus Rift. It's the right time for high-resolution displays and low-latency technology to deliver virtual reality into our present "future." But the Oculus Rift--and VR in general--also fit into the second part of that paradigm: Virtual reality is complicated, and it will be a long, long time until it's evenly distributed.

If there's anyone who knows exactly what it will take to overcome VR's complex challenges and hurry along its development, it's Michael Abrash. Abrash programmed Quake alongside John Carmack and has worked on games and graphics programming at Microsoft and other tech companies for more than 20 years. He's spent the past two years at Valve researching wearable computing. This is his thing. And at this year's Game Developer's Conference, Abrash talked to a packed room about why virtual reality is hard and where it's headed in the next few years.

In fact, Abrash and Carmack have both spoken and written extensively about VR in the past year; Carmack demonstrated an early Oculus Rift prototype running Doom 3 at E3 2012, and a few months back Abrash wrote a fascinating dive into the challenge of latency in virtual reality. In his 25 minute GDC talk, Abrash delved even further into the challenges and complexities of both VR and AR. By the end of Abrash's talk, it would be easy to look at the long list of deeply technical challenges he referenced as insurmountable obstacles. But he's a technical guy. These are problems to solve, and he's giddy to solve them. So let's get technical for a bit.

Anti-aliasing isn't always there for us when we need it. Jaggies are the enemy, and PC gaming typically arms us with a few ways to beat them back, smoothing out those harsh lines and minimizing that unsightly simmer. But sometimes even minimal anti-aliasing hits performance hard. Sometimes AA options can cause graphical glitches; temporal anti-aliasing offers clean lines in exchange for unsightly ghosting. And, worst of all, some games don't offer anti-aliasing options at all. There are often ways to force anti-aliasing in games, but there's another solution: Downsampling.

It's a simple concept. Downsampling involves running a game at a custom resolution higher than the native output resolution of your monitor. For example, if your monitor outputs a 1920x1080 image, downsampling would require telling a game to run at, say, 2560x1440. That's a total increase of 1.6 million pixels! When that 2560x1440 image is rescaled, or downsampled, to 1080p, the extra pixels help smooth out those jagged edges and produces a sharper, cleaner picture.

Image Credit: Kasra Korki

Downsampling is performance intensive, of course. A guide on Guru 3D elaborates that "the performance impact will be proportional to the increase in resolution or total number of pixels; however, graphics card memory may also need to be considered." The upside, though, is that downsampling "should provide image quality comparable to full screen antialiasing but with far less compatibility issues and in many cases higher performance." And if your graphics card is especially powerful, you can combine anti-aliasing with downsampling for even better image quality.

Downsampling PC games starts with setting up a custom resolution through an Nvidia or AMD control panel. Finding the right resolution--high enough to improve image quality, but not too high for the GPU to handle--takes some tweaking. The type of monitor you have, the bandwidth of the cable used to connect to it (DVI, DisplayPort, etc.), and your graphics card drivers can all affect how well downsampling will work on your machine. That all sounds like bad news, but the good news is better: finding out if you can downsample will only take about 10 minutes, and the resulting custom resolution should work in just about any PC game you play.

Image Credit: Kasra Korki

We've worked up separate guides to downsampling for AMD and Nvidia graphics cards and thrown in some additional links to longer walkthroughs and more information on different types of anti-aliasing. If you're inspired by some of the amazing screenshots downsampling enables, give it a shot.