Hololens developer Kenny W puts a mind-blowing spin on Microsoft’s mixed reality technology with a reality-warping tech demo that incorporates gameplay mechanics from Valve’s hit first-person puzzler Portal.
The demo allows users to place virtual portals on real-world walls, floors, and ceilings, which then interact with Portal‘s Companion Cube in a startlingly convincing fashion. Could the next Portal sequel take place in your own living room?
Valve’s Portal, originally released in 2008, tells a sci-fi tale in which a captive test subject must solve a series of teleportation puzzles using a gun that creates human-sized rifts in reality. In Valve’s game, objects that pass through a player-created orange portal instantly emerge from a nearby blue portal, and vice-versa. Portal uses this mechanic to great effect with a wealth of clever puzzles that challenge players to rethink mechanical concepts like momentum within a confined physical space.
Portal also introduced the Companion Cube, a featureless metal box that nevertheless endears itself to players over the course of a single in-game test room. Though the Companion Cube meets an unfortunate end in Portal, the beloved crate makes a triumphant return for the sake of pushing the creative possibilities of Hololens technology to new heights.
In Kennywdev’s Portal-themed Hololens demo, players are able to place orange and blue portals atop real-world physical surfaces. Hololens portals behave much in the same way as they do in Valve’s Portal, allowing a virtual Companion Cube to instantly warp across large expanses of physical space as a result.
Realistic physics modeling further completes the illusion, as Kenny W’s demo shows the Companion Cube rolling down stairs, appearing from walls after being dropped into floor portals, and achieving accelerated momentum following multiple consecutive portal jumps. While its creator describes the experiment as “a fun side project” that has not yet been publicly released, the concepts demonstrated here have immediate and obvious applications within the world of game design. We hope you’re watching, Valve.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.