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The movie adaptation of horror game franchise Five Nights at Freddy’s is just a few months away from its October 27 debut, and like many video game films, production on it has been in the works since at least 2015. Now, with Jason Blum (The Purge, Split, M3GAN) producing it, it’s finally got a release date, though it… Read more... View the full article

Developers Infinity Ward and Raven Software have introduced new anti-cheat tech that’ll troll Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2.0 hackers in a hilarious way: introducing hallucinations that only cheaters can see. Read more... View the full article

As we near the 10-year anniversary of Final Fantasy XIV’s transformative A Realm Reborn reboot, there’s perhaps never been a better time to hop into the only blockbuster MMORPG to rival World of Warcraft’s popularity and resilience. And it’s never been cheaper to do so thanks to a whopping 50 percent discount on PC… Read more... View the full article

Shortly after the news broke that the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection is heading to the Nintendo Switch, we also learned that the collection was coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and even PC. However, the ensemble’s Steam page has gently chilled the excitement: The games will not support mouse and keyboard… Read more... View the full article

Last week as part of the latest Nintendo Direct broadcast, the company behind the Mario games announced that in 2024, Princess Peach will be headlining her own game for the first time in 18 years. No title was announced for the game and few gameplay details can be gleaned from the brief teaser, but I’m already hoping… Read more... View the full article

I would rather not liken Master Detective Archives: Rain Code to the games its creative team is best known for, but I can’t help it when Spike Chunsoft and Too Kyo Games’ latest murder mystery sure does invite the comparison. Like Danganronpa before it, Rain Code is a murder mystery from the mind of Kazutaka Kodaka,… Read more... View the full article

The MCM London Comic Con is held twice a year, but for this gallery we’ll be looking at the most recent event, which went down in late May. Held at the ExCeL London convention centre, it drew a ton of cosplayers, and we’ll be featuring some of our favourites in this gallery. Read more... View the full article

This is Ghost Bike, a new game announced earlier today. It’s being developed by Messhof (Nidhogg), and will be published by Annapurna. As the headline says, I think it’s important we all sit down and watch this. Read more... View the full article

2023 is continuing to be a weird one as Epic revealed that the bus from its free-to-play battle royale super-hit Fortnite is actually a Transformer. Read more... View the full article

Dear reader, I hope you’re in the mood to possibly suss out artificial humans from real ones, because there’s a new Blade Runner game on the way from Annapurna Interactive. Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth will be the first game in the series since 1997’s Blade Runner on PC, and it will also be Annapurna Interactive’s… Read more... View the full article

During Annapurna Interactive Showcase on Thursday, we got a look at Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi’s fun-looking new puzzle game about a child perpetually stuck in a T-pose. Read more... View the full article

If you want more visuals from gaming’s very own Loch Ness Monster, that of course being the followup to Half-Life 2: Episode Two, I have some good news for you. Following DidYouKnowGaming’s recent video on canceled Valve games, the YouTuber has released a huge collection of high-resolution concept art that was… Read more... View the full article

Elden Ring may be a tough open-world RPG that requires precise timing and ongoing dedication, but the enemies don’t scale in difficulty with you. So if your progress ever hits a wall, it’s technically possible to take the easy way out and simply grind your character into having better stats than whatever challenge is… Read more... View the full article

Would you buy an expensive console just for one video game? Probably not. However, according to Sony, about 1 million PlayStation owners only play Call of Duty. That’s it. Nothing else. Read more... View the full article

BlizzCon 2023, a massive celebration of Blizzard games like Overwatch, World of Warcraft, and Diablo is back in-person for the first time in four years, and offering two very different paths to enjoy the ceremonies. For the first time ever, you can watch the livestream in its entirety for free, but if you want to go… Read more... View the full article

A powerful world boss in Diablo IV has been slain in only a dozen or so seconds. And while that’s impressive enough on its own, it’s even more amazing that it was basically one very powerful Necromancer that wiped out this usually hard-to-kill baddie. Read more... View the full article

OK, PC gamers, Steam’s annual Summer Sale is here. The event is active through July 13 at 1 p.m. ET and, as one of Steam’s biggest discount sessions, it covers a ton of best-selling indie and AAA games, like Dead Cells (now $12) and Sekiro’s GOTY edition (now $30). Read more... View the full article

This past weekend I played a beta version of Mortal Kombat 1. I was part of an “online stress test” organized by NetherRealm Studios so the team could prepare the servers ahead of the game’s official launch. To quickly sum things up: So far, so good. Read more... View the full article

Developer Yager Development has announced that its free-to-play multiplayer shooter The Cycle: Frontier will go offline forever on September 27. The developer gave a few reasons for the shutdown, including an interesting one: Cheaters ruined the experience for everyone involved. Read more... View the full article

Back in May, it was announced Final Fantasy XVI would be banned in Saudi Arabia. Officially, it was because developer Square Enix refused to alter scenes in the game for the territory, which led to rumors and speculation that the 16th game in the long-running RPG series would have explicit gay sex scenes, which… Read more... View the full article

No one likes a spoiled surprise. But if you’re Battlestate Games, developers of the indie extraction shooter Escape From Tarkov, then you really, really, really don’t like it. Recently, the dev has threatened to ban anyone who datamines or even shares datamined content from the game. The threatens haven’t gone over… Read more... View the full article

On Thursday, fans of the hit Nickelodeon cartoon, Avatar: The Last Airbender received an adrenaline shot in the arm by way of an announcement trailer for a new action-adventure game set in the universe that’s due out later this year. Unfortunately, its gameplay looks a bit bland, and the trailer doesn’t reveal enough… Read more... View the full article

Polish horror game developer Bloober Team told Engadget it’s leaving the psychological horror subset—a genre that defined all of its biggest titles, like Layers of Fear and the cyberpunk title Observer—far behind. The studio is currently responsible for the (impossible, diehard fans say) task to remake Silent Hill 2… Read more... View the full article

Niantic is shuttering its Los Angeles studio and is moving away from in-house game development. As such, the Pokémon Go studio is laying off 230 employees, shuttering NBA All-World and cancelling its upcoming Marvel: World of Heroes. Read more... View the full article

Robots are moving goods in warehouses, packaging foods and helping assemble vehicles — when they’re not flipping burgers or serving lattes. How did they get so skilled so fast? Robotics simulation. Making leaps in progress, it’s transforming industries all around us. Robotics Simulation Summarized A robotics simulator places a virtual robot in virtual environments to test the robot’s software without requiring the physical robot. And the latest simulators can generate datasets to be used to train machine learning models that will run on the physical robots. In this virtual world, developers create digital versions of robots, environments and other assets robots might encounter. These environments can obey the laws of physics and mimic real-world gravity, friction, materials and lighting conditions. Who Uses Robotics Simulation? Robots boost operations at massive scale today. Some of the biggest and most innovative names in robots rely on robotics simulation. Fulfillment centers handle tens of millions of packages a day, thanks to the operational efficiencies uncovered in simulation. Amazon Robotics uses it to support its fulfillment centers. BMW Group taps into it to accelerate planning for its automotive assembly plants. Soft Robotics applies it to perfecting gripping for picking and placing foods for packaging. Automakers worldwide are supporting their operations with robotics. “Car companies employ nearly 14 million people. Digitalization will enhance the industry’s efficiency, productivity and speed,” said NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang during his latest GTC keynote. How Robotics Simulation Works, in Brief An advanced robotics simulator begins by applying fundamental equations of physics. For example, it can use Newton’s laws of motion to determine how objects move over a small increment of time, or a timestep. It can also incorporate physical constraints of a robot, such as being composed of hinge-like joints, or being unable to pass through other objects. Simulators use various methods to detect potential collisions between objects, identify contact points between colliding objects, and compute forces or impulses to prevent objects from passing through one another. Simulators can also compute sensor signals sought by a user, such as torques at robot joints or forces between a robot’s gripper and an object. The simulator will then repeat this process for as many timesteps as the user requires. Some simulators — such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim, an application built on NVIDIA Omniverse — can also provide physically accurate visualizations of the simulator output at each timestep. Using a Robotics Simulator for Outcomes A robotics simulator user will typically import computer-aided design models of the robot and either import or generate objects of interest to build a virtual scene. A developer can use a set of algorithms to perform task planning and motion planning, and then prescribe control signals to carry out those plans. This enables the robot to perform a task and move in a particular way, such as picking up an object and placing it at a target location. The developer can observe the outcome of the plans and control signals and then modify them as needed to ensure success. More recently, there’s been a shift toward machine learning-based methods. So instead of directly prescribing control signals, the user prescribes a desired behavior, like moving to a location without colliding. In this situation, a data-driven algorithm generates control signals based on the robot’s simulated sensor signals. These algorithms can include imitation learning, in which human demonstrations can provide references, and reinforcement learning, where robots learn to achieve behaviors through intelligent trial-and-error, achieving years of learning quickly with an accelerated virtual experience. Simulation Drives Breakthroughs Simulation solves big problems. It is used to verify, validate and optimize robot designs and systems and their algorithms. Simulation also helps design facilities to be optimized for maximum efficiencies before construction or remodeling begins. This helps to reduce costly manufacturing change orders. For robots to work safely among people, flawless motion planning is necessary. To handle delicate objects, robots need to be precise at making contact and grasping. These machines, as well as autonomous mobile robots and vehicle systems, are trained on vast sums of data to develop safe movement. Drawing on synthetic data, simulations are enabling virtual advances that weren’t previously possible. Today’s robots born and raised in simulation will be used in the real world to solve all manner of problems. Simulation Research Is Propelling Progress Driven by researchers, recent simulation advances are rapidly improving the capabilities and flexibility of robotics systems, which is accelerating deployments. University researchers, often working with NVIDIA Research and technical teams, are solving problems in simulation that have real-world impact. Their work is expanding the potential for commercialization of new robotics capabilities across numerous markets. Among them, robots are learning to cut squishy materials such as beef and chicken, fasten nuts and bolts for automotive assembly, as well as maneuver with collision-free motion planning for warehouses and manipulate hands with new levels of dexterity. Such research has commercial promise across trillion-dollar industries. High-Fidelity, Physics-Based Simulation Breakthroughs The ability to model physics, displayed in high resolution, ushered in the start of many industrial advances. Researched for decades, simulations based on physics offer commercial breakthroughs today. NVIDIA PhysX, part of Omniverse core technology, delivers high-fidelity physics-based simulations, enabling real-world experimentation in virtual environments. PhysX enables development of the ability to assess grasp quality so that robots can learn to grasp unknown objects. PhysX is also highly capable for developing skills such as manipulation, locomotion and flight. Launched into open source, PhysX 5 opens the doors for development of industrial applications everywhere. Today, roboticists can access PhysX as part of Isaac Sim, built on Omniverse. The Nuts and Bolts of Assembly Simulation With effective grasping enabled, based on physics, the next step was to simulate more capable robotic maneuvering applicable to industries. Assembly is a big one. It’s an essential part of building products for automotive, electronics, aerospace and medical industries. Assembly tasks include tightening nuts and bolts, soldering and welding, inserting electrical connections and routing cables. Robotic assembly, however, is a long-standing work in progress. That’s because the physical manipulation complexity, part variability and high accuracy and reliability requirements make it extra tricky to complete successfully — even for humans. That hasn’t stopped researchers and developers from trying, putting simulation to work in these interactions involving a lot of contact, and there are signs of progress. NVIDIA robotics and simulation researchers in 2022 came up with a novel simulation approach to overcome the robotics assemble challenge using Isaac Sim. Their research paper, titled Factory: Fast Contact for Robotic Assembly, outlines a set of physics simulation methods and robot learning tools for achieving real-time and faster simulation for a wide range of interactions requiring lots of contact, including for assembly. Solving the Sim-to-Real Gap for Assembly Scenarios Advancing the simulation work developed in the paper, researchers followed up with an effort to help solve what’s called the sim-to-real gap. This gap is the difference between what a robot has learned in simulation and what it needs to learn to be ready for the real world. In another paper, IndustReal: Transferring Contact-Rich Assembly Tasks from Simulation to Reality, researchers outlined a set of algorithms, systems and tools for solving assembly tasks in simulation and transferring these skills to real robots. NVIDIA researchers have also developed a new, faster and more efficient method for teaching robot manipulation tasks in real life scenarios — opening drawers or dispensing soap — training significantly faster than the current standard. The research paper RVT: Robotic View Transformer for 3D Object Manipulation uses a type of neural network called a multi-view transformer to produce virtual views from the camera input. The work combines text prompts, video input and simulation to achieve 36x faster training time than the current state of the art — reducing the time needed to teach the robot from weeks to days — with a 26 percent improvement in the robot’s task success rate. Robots Hands Are Grasping Dexterity Researchers have taken on the challenge of creating more agile hands that can work in all kinds of settings and take on new tasks. Developers are building robotic gripping systems to pick and place items, but creating highly capable hands with human-like dexterity has so far proven too complex. Using deep reinforcement learning can require billions of labeled images, making it impractical. NVIDIA researchers working on a project, called DeXtreme, tapped into NVIDIA Isaac Gym and Omniverse Replicator to show that it could be used to train a robot hand to quickly manipulate a cube into a desired position. Tasks like this are challenging for robotics simulators because there is a large number of contacts involved in the manipulation and because the motion has to be fast to do the manipulation in a reasonable amount of time. The advances in hand dexterity pave the way for robots to handle tools, making them more useful in industrial settings. The DeXtreme project, which applies the laws of physics, is capable of training robots inside its simulated universe 10,000x faster than if trained in the real world. This equates to days of training versus years. This simulator feat shows it has the ability to model contacts, which allows a sim-to-real transfer, a holy grail in robotics for hand dexterity. Cutting-Edge Research on Robotic Cutting Robots that are capable of cutting can create new market opportunities. In 2021, a team of researchers from NVIDIA, University of Southern California, University of Washington, University of Toronto and Vector Institute, and University of Sydney won “Best Student Paper” at the Robotics: Science and Systems conference. The work, titled DiSECt: A Differentiable Simulation Engine for Autonomous Robotic Cutting, details a “differentiable simulator” for teaching robots to cut soft materials. Previously, robots trained in this area were unreliable. The DiSECt simulator can accurately predict the forces on a knife as it presses and slices through common biological materials. DiSECt relies on the finite element method, which is used for solving differential equations in mathematical modeling and engineering. Differential equations show how a rate of change, or derivative, in one variable relates to others. In robotics, differential equations usually describe the relationship between forces and movement. Applying these principles, the DiSECt project holds promise for training robots in surgery and food processing, among other areas. Teaching Collision-Free Motion for Autonomy So, robotic grasping, assembling, manipulating and cutting are all making leaps. But what about autonomous mobile robots that can safely navigate? Currently, developers can train robots for specific settings — a factory floor, fulfillment center or manufacturing plant. Within that, simulations can solve problems for specific robots, such as palette jacks, robotic arms and walking robots. Amid these chaotic setups and robot types, there are plenty of people and obstacles to avoid. In such scenes, collision-free motion generation for unknown, cluttered environments is a core component of robotics applications. Traditional motion planning approaches that attempt to address these challenges can come up short in unknown or dynamic environments. SLAM — or simultaneous localization and mapping — can be used to generate 3D maps of environments with camera images from multiple viewpoints, but it requires revisions when objects move and environments are changed. To help overcome some of these shortcomings, the NVIDIA Robotics research team has co-developed with the University of Washington a new model, dubbed Motion Policy Networks (or MπNets). MπNets is an end-to-end neural policy that generates collision-free motion in real time using a continuous stream of data coming from a single fixed camera. MπNets has been trained on more than 3 million motion planning problems using a pipeline of geometric fabrics from NVIDIA Omniverse and 700 million point clouds rendered in simulation. Training it on large datasets enables navigation of unknown environments in the real world. Apart from directly learning a trajectory model as in MπNets, the team also recently unveiled a new point cloud-based collision model called CabiNet. With the CabiNet model, one can deploy general purpose pick-and-place policies of unknown objects beyond a tabletop setup. CabiNet was trained with over 650,000 procedurally generated simulated scenes and was evaluated in NVIDIA Isaac Gym. Training with a large synthetic dataset allowed it to generalize to even out-of-distribution scenes in a real kitchen environment, without needing any real data. Simulation Benefits to Businesses Developers, engineers and researchers can quickly experiment with different kinds of robot designs in virtual environments, bypassing time-consuming and expensive physical testing methods. Applying different kinds of robot designs, in combination with robot software, to test the robot’s programming in a virtual environment before building out the physical machine reduces risks of having quality issues to fix afterwards. While this can vastly accelerate the development timeline, it can also drastically cut costs for building and testing robots and AI models while ensuring safety. Additionally, robot simulation helps connect robots with business systems, such as inventory databases, so a robot knows where an item is located. Simulation of cobots, or robots working with humans, promises to reduce injuries and make jobs easier, enabling more efficient delivery of all kinds of products. And with packages arriving incredibly fast in homes everywhere, what’s not to like. Learn about NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Jetson Orin, Omniverse Enterprise and Metropolis. Learn more from this Deep Learning Institute course: Introduction to Robotic Simulations in Isaac Sim View the full article