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Netflix just divided in half: "Netflix" is now streaming only, while the DVD-by-mail service is now an entirely separate service called Qwikster

This is dumb.

The price hike Netflix underwent back in July aroused a sort of media-centric kerfuffle, despite the fact that the tech media, of all people, were surely aware that the ludicrously low prices Netflix was charging could not possibly stay so low if Netflix was to expand. (The same problem applies to music services like Spotify, Rdio, and MOG.) Aside from the day long eye-rolling about a raise in price, I doubted at the time that there would be any significant problem for Netflix down the road. Their service, especially compared to, say, cable TV, is insanely cheap, and I assumed people would grumble and then get used to it.

Apparently not, because this morning, Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, sent out an email to subscribers notifying them of a pretty significant change: Netflix will entirely separate the streaming and the DVD-by-mail services. And not like they were before: the DVD-by-mail service is getting a new name, a new site, and will show up on your monthly statement as a separate bill.

This move doesn't solve anything, doesn't alleviate the woes of any of the crazies who cancelled their subscription to Netflix (which, might we say again, is amazing, and an amazing deal) over a four-dollar price hike. It simply makes it more difficult to have both a streaming and DVD service--and as many of the content providers (TV conglomerates like Viacom, movie studios) are being very obstinate about licensing content for streaming, a lot of movies and TV are still only available on discs, so it's not crazy to want both services.

Why does Netflix want to separate its streaming from its DVD service so completely? It's not for the customer. The DVD-by-mail service is dying slowly, and Netflix has made a whole mess of changes, some obvious and some not, to encourage people to think "streaming," and not "red envelopes," when they think "Netflix." And that's fine, but this separate services thing seems like a lot more trouble than it's worth just for some clear-cut severance.

Before the change, if you wanted to play, say, The West Wing, which you probably do because it's amazing, you'd go to Netflix, search for "the west wing," and find that, oh no, it's not available for streaming, but you can rent it on DVD. Easy! Now, if you did the same thing, Netflix would tell you "this title is not available." Then you can go over to Qwikster and search, if you remember that you pay for two separate services. Oh, also, ratings and reviews (which are pretty important, especially for Netflix's recommendation algorithms) will also be entirely separate, even when the exact same title is available both for streaming and on disc.

This isn't the end of the world, and I don't want to make it a bigger deal than it is. But here's why this is annoying: it is totally unnecessary. Aside from some psychological benefit of separating the DVD and streaming services in the customer's mind more thoroughly, there is no benefit to doing this, and it definitely makes using these services in tandem less convenient. Hastings did toss in a legitimately nice upgrade: Qwikster will also rent video games for Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360. That is great! Very exciting! But there's no reason that couldn't have been integrated with the streaming service as well.

Is this a reason to abandon Netflix? No. Of course not, don't be ridiculous, I don't know why you'd even ask that rhetorical question that you didn't even really ask. But come on, Netflix. Focus on getting more content and stop worrying so much about what the tech press (yeah, I know) writes. The one big benefit I see from this is that it'll be easier, in the future, to ignore what's going on with the DVD service as fewer and fewer people care about it--though I do wonder why this move is coming after the price hike and not before, and why it seems so oddly haphazard (Netflix didn't even bother to secure the @Qwikster Twitter handle, which is currently occupied by a stoner with lousy grammar). Let's just hope this is the last shake-up, and we can all go back to streaming episodes of Roseanne instead of venturing outdoors.

[Netflix]

On his blog, which is endearingly named Eyeborg, Spence has posted a new twelve-minute video. He travels around the world, talking to those endowed with the cutting edge of cyborg-dom. Matter of fact, it's not too different from our recent feature, State of the Bionic Art, except Spence investigates the specific real-life counterparts to the crazy-futuristic prostheses and cyborg parts featured in the new Deux Ex game. It's a pretty cool video, game plugs notwithstanding--any video that features a man saying "I am now filming your bionic hand...with my bionic eye" has a way of getting in our good graces. Check out the video below, though a warning that there are a few images that might not be kind to those with weak stomachs.

We'll keep you up to date on Eyeborg--his site teases that there will be more to come on the making of his prosthetic camera-eye in the coming days.

[Eyeborg]

Swedish startup 13th Lab is implementing a computer vision technique called Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), which constructs a 3-D map of a local environment in real time and calculates the current position within it. The result is a new iPad app called Ball Invasion (get it here), wherein the camera’s view becomes a playing field. Instead of advanced robotic sensors and controls, the app just needs the camera and other sensors native to mobile devices.

This is quite a feat, and a potential new avenue for augmented reality. Unlike most AR systems, it doesn’t require previously known markers to trigger the virtual display — it can augment any environment, previously seen or unseen, simply by using the iPad2’s camera.

The goal of the game is to shoot malicious balls hiding in the real world, which becomes part of the playing field — you can bounce virtual items off the actual walls, for instance. The video below shows it in action.

SLAM was developed to help robots determine where they are, by looking around and building a 3-D model of their environment and then determining their place in it. It’s a tough chicken-or-egg problem and one of the most complicated topics in robotics sensing, but, as GigaOM points out, 13th Lab has figured out how to compress this complex capability into a consumer device. So far, it’s only possible with the iPad2’s powerful dual-core A5 CPU, 13th Lab says (though they probably haven't tried using the next-gen quad-core Kal-El yet).

13th Lab’s overall goal is far broader than 3-D games: they want to build a 3-D toolkit for other app developers, according to GigaOM. Ball Invasion is simply the first example.

This type of technology could conceivably be used for many other things, from architecture design to augmented-reality tours. For now, though, this game seems pretty fun:

[via Slashdot]

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 James Ellroy. It required Robert Spence. A Los Angeles photographer, Spence was the subject of a recent profile in Air and Space Magazine, and was Rockstar's secret weapon in re-creating the city.

Click to launch the a side-by-side gallery 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" Nikon D3s, 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 one type of oil well] 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 a gallery of some of Spence's photographs, 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. Take a closer look here.

It’s safe to say MMOWGLI won’t look like a massive multiplayer round of Black Ops or Counter Strike. ONR isn’t looking for players that are particularly adept at collecting frags with a virtual rifle, but rather for minds from academia, the defense industry, government organizations and other defense- and naval-related fields that might produce solutions to a set of difficult problems. Like how to defend a growing swath of a major shipping lane from determined bandits in small, fast boats.

But it's also looking for suggestions from the larger crowd, as the game is open to anyone who wishes to sign up. Gameplay is more like tweeting. Log in and two text boxes appear. One asks what new resources could turn the tide in the fight against Somali piracy. The second asks what new risks could arise that would transform the piracy situation. You get 140 characters to answer each.

Players then vote on each other's suggestions and, if they wish to, make suggestions to improve them. The more "yea" votes a player gets, the more points he or she stacks up. There are three rounds, one week per round. By the end of the game the ONR hopes to know two things: how it might solve the Somali piracy problem, and whether or not MMOWGLI actually works. If it yields successful solutions to the piracy scenario, it could be applied to a variety of difficult global problems in the future.

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]

While sales of video games in physical stores is declining, the amount spent online on digital goods for games is skyrocketing.

Market researcher NPD said today that gamers spent $2.6 billion to $2.9 billion on digital online goods, such as downloadable games on the consoles and social network games on the PC. The new data should ease fears that the video-game business is declining as a whole, while supporting the notion that games are becoming even stronger as an industry by transitioning to broader business platforms beyond the old boxes-in-stores model.

Gamers still spent $3.7 billion on console and PC games purchased in physical stores in the first half of 2010.

The digital goods figure includes revenue from used games (which are often bought online, but can also be bought in stores), game rentals, subscriptions, full game digital downloads, social network games, downloadable content, and mobile game apps. In other words, NPD is including its best estimates on the full bucket of the game industry, including its fast growing parts such as Facebook and iPhone games.

Dollars spent on physical retail items such as hardware, software and accessories still accounts for the majority of the total consumer spend. But when you factor in digital content, the total consumer spend is 40 percent larger than new physical retail sales alone.

“Our expanded research coverage allows us to assess the total consumer spend  across the growing number of ways to acquire and experience gaming, including social networks,” said Anita Frazier, analyst at NPD.

NPD does its research through point- of-sale and consumer research tracking.

[photo credit: lolcatpics.com]

Tags: Facebook games, iPhone, mobile games, Social networks, video games

Companies: NPD

People: Anita Frazier