Category: Kev’s Blog

Sony has recently acquired SN Systems and formed alliances with Ageia Technologies, Havok and Epic Games in an attempt to provide PS3 platform developers with development tools essential for developing games for their next generation platform.

Analysts estimate the current cost of developing a console game (for PS2 or the XBox) is currently around $10million. Due the expected massive improvements in graphics and processing power of the next gen platforms like the PS3 and the XBox360, it is estimated that the average development cost may increase to between $15 to $20 million.

The agreement with Epic Games is to make the Unreal Engine 3 available to PS3 developers as an evaluation version, which can enable developers get up and running from day one of new development on the new platform.

Havok produce an advanced physics and animation engine, and Ageia PhysX SDK (also known as NovodeX) is a software development kit. All of these products are to be bundled in the SDK from Sony.

It had to happen at some point – a group of students in Copenhagen has developed a beer and have released its recipe under the Creative Commons open source license, bringing new meaning to the phrase “free, as in beer”.

The recipe has been released as open source as an experiment to see what happens to real-world analog products when released under the open source model.

Occasionally I come across some new technology that completely blows me away. Google Earth is definitely in that category. If you haven’t seen it yet, this is the technology that Google recently acquired from Keyhole. Go and download it now and take a look.

After downloading the client app, you can interactively browse and fly around the globe, zooming in and out as you please, browsing a seamless tapestry of satellite imagery and maps. Google has also overlaid search engine information so you can search for places, businesses, points of interest etc, and they are placed on the satellite images with a map pin.

To add another dimension, there is a community of users who have found interesting places and landmarks etc, and have submitted their own map pins which you can selectively enable. You can browse their submissions in the online forum, and then clicking on the link in the forum automatically takes you into Google Earth and zooms into the chosen location.

Very impressive. For any company that deals with geographical data, this surely is a killer app (and commercial subscriptions for enabling more information and features are available). For everyone else, there is a free version, and you browse the world from your desk 🙂