Physicists inject a dose of reality into screen simulations.
Fire up most video games and you enter a parallel universe where the laws of physics do not apply. Trajectories, collisions, explosions all behave differently than they do here on Earth. While graphics resolution and sound quality have dramatically improved in recent years, the underlying physics have remained primitive.
That's about to change. In their continuing quest for greater realism, game makers are upgrading and designing new 3-D simulation games by injecting a heavy dose of real-world physics. "Game developers always need to find new things to innovate and for many today that means better physics," notes Chris Hecker, a technical developer at Definition Six, a Seattle-based game company who has organized talks on physics at developers' conventions.
To read the entire article you must log in:
Most of our content — all daily news, blogs, and videos — is free. Magazine stories are paid. To read this story, you must have a subscription or you must use a reading credit. Registration to Technology Review is free and entitles registrants to three free reading credits.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
View full PDF >
Listen to story > 
Our list of the 50 most innovative companies, including the following:
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed