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The above is an official tourism video for the city of Hakodate, Japan. Giant squid battling giant robots with local landmarks as collateral damage is nothing short of genius.

According to a survey of 100 aliens, Hakodate is the number one city they would most like to invade.

To see more videos in the series, all equally brilliant, you can hit up the Pink Tentacle link, which offers a breakdown of the back story. You can also find the rest on the official YouTube channel.

via Engadget.

A new online gaming service called OnLive was announced this week at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), promising a new way to play video games via digital distribution, but will it undermine the hardware based consoles?

Instead of worrying about keeping that tricked out gaming rig up to spec, or having a big old console sitting under your TV, OnLive actually runs the games on their own servers and streams the video to you through a 1Mb browser plug-in for your computer or a “microconsole” hooked up to your monitor/HDTV. They also have a very Xbox 360-like wireless control to control the games (though I’m guessing that keyboard and mouse support will be there too), and promise a number of online community features, such as being able to watch others play a match without owning the game, their own version of achievements and much more.

Pricing for games will include a combination of subscription and purchase options, which offers a lot of flexibility, with a number of big name game developers already signed on, such as EA, Take Two Interactive, Warner Brothers, THQ and Eidos.

The idea of being free of the hardware hassles of keeping up with the Pwnses is may be liberating, though it may come with a price.

Read more

Been working with Ash on the latest video lately. The project is a wrap, and so is his own personal website at ashrants.com.

Enjoy.

One of the great rock and roll hold outs in the digital age has been The Beatles. Rumours of the Fab Four hitting the mp3 stores surface every year like clockwork. Surprisingly, all the speculation has been wrong.

Finally, Harmonix looks to be on track to be the first to get the Fab Four online, as long as you want to play along, that is. September 9th, 2009 is the scheduled release date of an unknown number of Beatles tracks (albums?) for the popular music game Rock Band. Along with the music, there will be new instruments based on the gear the band used.

It’s not surprising to see Apple Corps Inc. dipping their toes in the datastream in this manner, for a couple of reasons. First is that by definition, tracks for music games are DRMed by default, which gives them a more controlled environment. Secondly, with the average tune costing somewhere around $2 there’s a built in premium that I’m sure the Corps likes.

So if you’re a Beatles fans (honestly, I’ve never been personally), check out their placeholder website, and sign up to notified when more details arrive, if the throngs of screaming teenage girls don’t tip you off in advance.

And if anybody ever gets wind of Harmonix doing the same for Pop Will Eat Itself, The Dead Kennedys or Bauhaus, PLEASE let me know.

A new twist on playing Call of Duty: When 13-year-old Evan Spencer wanted to play the ultraviolent video game Call of Duty, his parents gave him the green light, on one condition: He had to follow the Geneva Conventions.

Before he could even play the game, he read through all the Geneva Conventions, and his father quizzed him on them.

read more | digg story

Some months ago, Twitter removed its SMS based service in Canada, citing high costs. Now the service is back on Bell, but will cost users 15 cents per message, sent or recieved, regardless of whether one has an unlimited SMS package with Bell.

A spokesperson for Bell Canada said Twitter is considered a “premium” third-party service, so it’s not covered under its plans.

Twitter is an online service that lets people communicate in 140-character status updates and subscribe to the “tweets” of other members. Many people subscribe to hundreds of other members, which can result in hefty text-message fees.[Ottawa Citizen]

Of course, there are a number of ways around this with the right application, without breaking the bank or any agreement with Bell. If you’re a Bell customer with a non-smart phone (also applicable to the HTC Touch and Samsung Instinct), you can get their cheapo $10/month ‘Mobile Internet’ package, which offers unlimited data to your phone, then hunt down a data-based Twitter app for your phone.

Personally, I’m using PockeTwit for Windows Mobile, and can vouch that it’s a great free app that doesn’t hook into the wallet violating Canadian SMS network.

You can find a comprehensive list of mobile Twitter apps here, although some may make use of SMS, so double check each before installing.

Posted via rgbFilter

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First saw this link posted by warrenellis over at Twitter…

The best horror-musical since Evil Dead: The Musical. The video was made by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS) over at cthulhulives.org/, a site that any Cthulhu fan can appreciate. The HPLHS also released a film adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Call Of Cthulhu” a couple of years ago, which I’d highly recommend.

I’ve already posted on rgbFilter about the graphics power of Nvidia’s long awaited Tegra platform that should appear on both Google’s Android and Windows Mobile in the not to distant future. Beyond processing power, there were some new interfaces demoed at Mobile World Congress in 2009 worth highlighting.

Stantum demonstrated their new multi-touch technology, but what makes it different is that it’s using resistive touch screens, as found in many current mobile phones, GPS units and more.

The TouchPark software solution allows for an unlimited number of touch points, accepts stylus, finger or even a paintbrush as an input device and most importantly, has pressure sensitivity. In a video captured by Engadget, a Stantum representative states that their technology can work with current resistive touch screens, and that the TouchPark framework also has ’sub-pixel’ resolution, meaning that the accuracy is more refined than the pixel resolution of the screen.

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(Video originally recorded by engadget)

Also on display were some new interface designs by TAT (The Astonishing Tribe). First up is a consumer friendly interface dubbed the “Foldout UI”…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtR_zA9elrM&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6]

Then there’s an example of an interface that makes use of eye tracking and tilting to provide a virtual 3D experience. As TAT mentions in their description…

Imagine tilting your mobile so you can look around corners and behind objects in the GUI to access additional information. Imagine layered GUIs where pop-up windows really pop up.

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There’ll be no shortage of processers able to handle these types of interfaces, either. The Foldout UI was running on the Texas Instruments OMAP 3430 processor (the same processor found in the soon to be released Palm Pre), and Qualcomm has hit the ‘high speed’ mark with it’s 1GHz Snapdragon, currently in the Toshiba TG01 mobile phone.

[posted via rgbFilter]