Posts Tagged ‘gaming’
Why Baccarat, the Game of Princes and Spies, Has Become a Target for High-Tech Cheaters
Inside the world of high-stakes sneakery
See our gallery of cheating techniques
A favorite pastime of James Bond, baccarat attracts high-rollers willing to make large bets – and it's easy to play. In the most common variant of "punto banco" baccarat, the game requires a gambler to make just one decision: whether to bet that the value of a "player" or "banker" hand of 2 or 3 cards will end up totalling closest to 9, with face cards counting as zero and aces as 1. Game outcomes are fixed by the cards dealt, and players make no decisions after the initial bet. There's no skill to it at all…unless a person cheats.
The "Cutters" syndicate preys on a tank-sized hole in the security protocols that most casinos apply to baccarat. As part of the tradition that has built up around the game, high-end players expect to participate in flamboyant, superstitious rituals. Gamblers may handle, fold, or blow on the cards. Many baccarat tables allow players to use a single card to cut the deck. The Cutters cheat by exploiting that ceremonial cut, surreptitiously riffling the deck with a finger and recording a section of the card order with a hidden camera.
"It's stupid that this is allowed to happen," says a Las Vegas game security consultant, who asked not to be named out of concern for angering casino managers. "The lunatics run the asylum."
But when a "lunatic" at the baccarat table will wager a million dollars over a long afternoon, recession-weary casino managers starved for high-end action will indulge superstitious antics – even if it drives the surveillance guys nuts.
Fooling those eyes in the booth was the key strategy in both the Macau auto-shuffling scheme and the card-switching gambit in Connecticut.
"These are con men," says John Connolly, a casino security expert based in Central Europe. "They practice the art of distraction."
At unnamed casinos in Macau, a gang of seven people repeatedly slipped doctored auto-shufflers onto the table while surveillance eyes were diverted elsewhere, until they were caught in March. At Foxwoods, the female accomplice Wookyung Kim would nuzzle close to her male partner Young Su Gy and otherwise block the view of casino personnel as he made switching cards look like he was idly shuffling his hand.
And the mathematics of baccarat make a scam in progress difficult to spot. “The use of statistics for live gaming is limited in what it can prove or disprove,” high-end casino security contractor Bill Zender concludes, in a 2009 analysis of baccarat. The game has a small but significant house advantage, over time transferring just over $1 from player to casino for every $100 wagered. But Zender’s analysis shows that results may fluctuate wildly in either direction until the sample size goes above 10,000 hands. A high-roller who wins $250,000 by playing 1,000 hands over a holiday weekend is well within the normal range of probability for a non-cheating player.
With a speedy pace of about 60 hands per hour, a compromised game can cause six-figure losses in a matter of minutes. After multiple huge baccarat wins by the same player, a surveillance guy can't know from the laws of probability if he's just temporarily unlucky – or been taken by a con.
Disney Tactile Device Lets Games and Movies Literally Send Chills Down Your Spine
Tactile Brush works via a series of vibrating coils embedded in the back of a chair. These coils create illusions based on a variety of sensory phenomena that have been somewhat understood for decades but never really implemented into entertainment devices.
In one illusion known as apparent tactile motion, if two vibrating objects are placed near each other on the skin in quick succession, the skin often experiences the sensation of a single vibration moving between the two points. A similar illusion called phantom tactile sensation makes the body experience a pair of fixed vibrations placed apart from each other on the skin as a single vibration in between the two points.
And so on. Software that understands how this sensory trickery works can create a variety of sensations on command. Using a chair embedded with 12 vibrating coils in the back, the Disney researchers have created a system that can create a range of realistic effects. So if a person is playing a car racing game, for instance, the chair can gives the impression of gravitational forces pushing on the person in the chair when he or she makes a hard turn. Similarly, the chair can simulate things like rain running down the subject’s back, or someone touching the person from behind.
That could go a long way toward augmenting video games, horror flicks, and other experiences where a little tactile sensation would go a long way. The researchers hope to integrate it into 3-D theatrical film experiences to help theaters compete with the home entertainment experience and make moviegoing a more well-rounded sensory experience.
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How L.A. Noire Rebuilt 1940s Los Angeles Using Vintage Extreme Aerial Photography
L.A. Noire's carefully reconstructed world owes a huge debt to Robert Spence, who photographed Los Angeles while leaning out of a biplane with a 46-pound camera in the 1920s
Since 1997, when players first sped stolen police cars through the bird’s eye canyons of Liberty City in the original Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar Games has constructed bigger, better, and more detailed virtual worlds than any other gaming house. These worlds--from the dusky horizons of Red Dead Redemption to the cocaine-dusted nightclubs of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City--have always owed as great a debt to the popular imagination as they have to historical research. They are uncannily skillful recreations of places we know from movies and magazines. They are hyperreal, rather than authentic.
But building a faithful version of 1940s Los Angeles for their newest, L.A. Noire (out today), required more than a mastery of popular culture and a healthy knowledge of . It required Robert Spence. A Los Angeles photographer, Spence was the subject of a recent profile in and was Rockstar's secret weapon in re-creating the city.
of Robert Spence's daredevil photos and the L.A. Noire screenshots they inspired.
Team Bondi, the Australian developer behind L.A. Noire, pored over Spence’s photographs in the UCLA Department of Geography, where they’ve been held since 1971. The pictures gave Team Bondi building locations and conditions, public transportation routes, traffic patterns; the real arterial structure of a city preserved mostly in film and literature. As a result, gamers will be immersed in the most accurate version of 1940s Los Angeles ever created.
"During the roaring twenties," writes Air and Space, "Los Angeles bigshots hired Robert Earl Spence to take aerial photographs of their homes, paying $10 a picture." Spence in turn hired a pilot and an accompanying airplane to complete the task, leaning out from the cockpit with his 46-pound camera (makes you think better of the "bulky by 2011 standards" , eh?) and shooting at an angle rather than straight down, as most other aerial photography was done at the time.
That was a huge help to Team Bondi--Simon Wood, production designer for Team Bondi, calls the Spence collection a "magical find, as they're the equivalent of satellite photography" decades before satellite photography would become common. Spence's photos actually showed Los Angeles as it was to its residents. Says Wood, "They showed us the density of the traffic and the pedestrians, the trolley car routes; they showed us different mosaics and sidewalk patterns that we couldn't make out from the other street photo reference materials. They showed the different types of rooftops and tar roof styles and air conditioner units."
The booming decade also meant a boom in real estate, which meant construction. Everywhere. Team Bondi incorporated details from the construction, captured by Spence, into several missions in L.A. Noire--without Spence's photos, Team Bondi never would have understood the now-abandoned construction methods used at the time. They even reproduced in full the now-unrecognizable Pershing Square--Los Angelenos can't experience, as Wood says, the "curved footpaths, street lamps, the food stall and the fountain" that were integral to the park. But players of L.A. Noire can wander around in the park to their hearts' content.
The Spence Collection held some surprises for Team Bondi, as versed as they were becoming in 1940s Los Angeles. "The most striking thing," says Wood, "were the oil wells! There was one on almost every corner, it was crazy! Reading about the mini-wells/nodding donkeys [the above-ground part of ] is one thing, but actually seeing them in people’s backyards was incredible." These photographs gave the developers and artists a more personal look at what living in Los Angeles at that time was really like, especially as the Spence Collection spans several decades, capturing the evolution of the great sprawling city and its surrounding areas--the filming of Ben Hur, the construction of Dodger Stadium and Disneyland, and the organic evolution of Los Angeles's peculiar downtown-surrounded-by-independent-communities layout.
We've compiled , courtesy of UCLA. They capture a Los Angeles long gone, but one that gamers are now able to experience. There's even a black-and-white mode in the game, to really get that film noir feel--and get that much closer to these amazing source photographs.
Video: A Built-In Eye Tracker Makes A Projection Screen You Can’t Look Away From
The pico projector is motorized, so as the camera tracks a player’s line of vision, the view of the gaming world shifts to follow their gaze. It does not require them to hold anything, or have anything attached to them. The students have tested the system with a first-person shooter game, which this system seems perfectly suited for, as well as a flight simulator where the player controls the pitch and roll of an aircraft by moving their head.
In this early stage of development, players have to sit precisely in front of the eye tracker in order for it to work. Not to mention the display looks a little meager at this point. However, with time and a little work, this system could allow for the next generation of Kinect-like gaming to be even more immersive.
[PicoProjectorInfo via Engadget]
Turning Microsoft’s $150 Kinect Into a $50,000 Piece of Surgical Equipment
Engineers and scientists have been working for years to fix the inherent lack of touch sensitivity that goes along with using surgical robots. The sense of touch is tremendously important to a surgeon; without it, you could easily nick an artery or drag along bone without realizing it. The solution is to implement some kind of force feedback, kind of like a more detailed version of the rumbling or vibrating you feel while playing videogames. That led this group of University of Washington graduate engineering students to one of our favorite pieces of gaming hardware, the Microsoft Kinect.
To add force feedback, surgeons need a highly detailed, live-updating, 3-D scan of whatever is being sliced and/or diced. That equipment is normally exceedingly expensive, done with CT scanners or what have you, but the UW team lit on a much cheaper and easily hacked substitute: the Kinect. The Kinect senses 3-D environments by spitting out thousands of tiny infrared dots and then measuring the rebounding light--exactly what they need for this purpose, and at the price of $150. The Kinect has other advantages as well: They can assign "off-limits areas," around, say, vital organs, so the tools can't venture in and cause undue damage.
Before the Kinectified robots are actually used in surgery, some adjustments will have to be made. The Kinect's relatively low-resolution 640 x 480 cameras will have to be upgraded, and the sensors will have to be scaled down to focus on the comparatively small area of surgery (compared to, you know, the giant living room the Kinect normally requires). But the team definitely plans to move forward--after all, a few simple upgrades will still make the contraption both cost-effective and really cool.
You can check out our ongoing coverage of Kinect hacks here, and don't forget to read our guide to setting up the Kinect.
iPod Touch accounts for 38 percent of iPhone-compatible devices
Using a bit of clever math, app maker and market analyst firm has determined that about 38 percent of all 120 million reported iOS device sales are iPod Touches.
The company got the value by subtracting the 59.6 million iPhones and 3.2 million iPads sold through June (figures presented in Apple’s SEC filings) and the estimated July and August iPad and iPhone sales of 12 million — a combined 74.8M iPads and iPhones sold to date — from the 120 million total iOS devices that have been sold to date. The 120 million figure was announced in Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ seemingly annual on Wednesday.
Jobs said the iPod Touch had become the number one mobile gaming platform — above the Nintendo DS and Sony Playstation portable — during the same presentation. Apple in the quarter ending June 26.
It looks to be in an even better position to advance into the portable gaming market with some new hardware. The new iPod Touch boasts Apple’s A4 processor, as well as a gyroscope, and front- and rear-facing camera. Apple will also release iOS 4.1 sometime this week, which brings the Game Center — a multiplayer gaming platform for iOS — live.
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A Video Game Controller that Stimulates with Hot and Cold Sensations
An experimental new video game controller just revealed at this week’s SIGGRAPH conference includes a pair of thermoelectric panels on each side of a controller. Those surfaces heat or cool rapidly in reflection of what’s happening in the game, offering players a new sensory connection to what’s happening on the screen.
The controller temperature doesn’t swing wildly – less than 10 degrees in either direction in just five seconds – but apparently a small sensation is all that’s needed to add a rich layer of sensory experience to a virtual reality environment. No word on whether any major console makers are eyeballing such technology, but the idea is pretty cool. After all, remember how thrilling it was when our gaming peripherals started vibrating?
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