Audio in games has always been a bit of a cheat. In the earliest days of games, a simple pre-recorded sound was replayed when a gun was shot or step taken. Bit rates went up and the quality increased. Audio could be played in stereo to help isolate location of the sound. Games then added full 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound and binaural sound. They now even take into account the material of object collisions such as metal on concrete vs metal on carpet – but it’s not fully dynamic.
Moving forward, what if we could fully simulate sound in a dynamic virtual location? We could take into account how sound reacts with different materials, walls, and shapes in the environment automatically. The idea is not new – but the compute required was far too high for realtime games.
Vercidium has tried to re-create the idea using modern hardware. What is unique is the idea of using this system for visually impaired people. This isn’t an idea that is limited to virtual worlds, but what if alarms in real life had such visual projection (lasers, lights, etc). Interesting.
There’s also some interesting comments in the video discussion that can lead you down different implementations and ideas.
We often forget that major historical events were not instantanous with neat summaries and conclusions. They were messy and evolved. It took time to absorb what happened and make sense of it – especially tragedies.
Enter a quiet trend of re-living things in real-time. Some examples I’ve run across were NASA’s realtime Apollo lunar landing missions. Another, even more somber, would be the sinking of the Titanic. I think it’s important to realize that the sinking happened at 2am when people were asleep and were caught off guard. It only took 2 hours and 40 minutes from being fine to the deaths of the majority of the passengers. Experiencing it in realtime was surprising to me. It’s amazing how just about nothing seems really bad until the very end – something that financial markets often mimic. The signs of trouble are there for a long time before a very quick, shockingly violent end.
Twitch streamers are really getting creative. Besides completely AI generated content, others have been experimenting with viewer participation in unique ways.
Shindigs is one of the streamers really experimenting with new ideas. He’s streamed as a gun with eyes, a “biblically accurate angel McRib vtuber”, and a Costco hotdog. He also mixes real and animated footage. In one stream, Shindigs went “back in time” every time he died in Lies of P, eventually turning the broadcast into a radio play. He recently let characters play Christmas songs with chat and created music experiments live.
While playing Helldivers, he recently allowed his viewers the ability to use chat to type things in and they pop up in the stream like a helmet cam. The viewers quickly started riffing on numerous themes while he played.
I gave everyone in chat text-to-speech to roleplay as Helldiver HQ.
He created this effect using SAMMI, a stream tool that connects Twitch chat and Channel Point redemptions to Open Broadcast Software. With it, he created his Twitch plugin called ‘Bug Twitter’ that allowed this functionality. He also created a plugin called ‘strategems’ that uses OBS’s Advanced Mask. Viewers can use Twitch channel points to activate effects like distorting the screen to make it more difficult or ‘Australia mode’ that flips the screen upside down.
I gave Twitch Chat the ability to call down Strategems for Helldivers 2 streams.
These Strategems effect the stream layout in different ways.
He’s not the only one being creative. CardboardCowboy built a cartoon RPG world where the NPCs are played by Twitch chat with TTS (Text To Speech) complete with proximity-based audio that fades off as he moves away.
We are witnessing the evolution of content.
This streamer set up an cartoon world where chat controls NPCs with TTS.
The level of details is incredible, even the TTS audio is based on proximity so NPC's get quieter as the streamer walks away.
Young streamers on Twitch seem to be exploring a lot of extremely creative ideas with a more publicly interactive form of streaming. There’s likely an interesting balance between interacting with the viewers and yet maintaining some sense of cohesive sanity and avoiding trolls seeking to ruin the experience – but what they are doing and trying are wildly creative. Give it a look
It seems like this kind of technique that over-arches the generation from one topic to the next might be very useful in maintaining continuity relating to temporal stability.
The Dead by Daylight Twitch streamer Hens333 was curious about a streamer’s meteoric rise, and couldn’t figure it out. The streamer didn’t appear to have any decent content, didn’t seem very big in the community – but was getting massive viewer counts.
So, he dug into it and then went on a massive data deep-dive and believes he found what the internet dreads – that it could likely be a whole empire of fake views and purchased popularity – all to get lucrative sponsorships.
Doing a little napkin math, he is likely spending $1000-2000 per month for bot accounts based on his viewer counts. Why would you do this? Ego?
A quick look at his Twitch page clears it all up. Sponsorships. His Twitch page is littered with dozens and dozens of sponsors.
If all this is true, then it means he might be making $10,000’s per month on sponsors with only a $1000-$2000 per month outlay. Some note he isn’t even playing the games many times – just showing replays of previous sessions. One more highly suspicious data point is that just about ALL his youtube videos have less than 50 views:
The streamer in question is realzbluewater, and if he is doing this, he is likely committing criminal fraud by misrepresenting his actual viewer count to advertisers.
This could come with serious legal repercussions as well as criminal charges. He wouldn’t be the first. Charlie Javiceis now up on charges that she deceived JP Morgan about the number of actual users of her college financial planning company called Frank. They alleged that Javice even paid a data-science professor $18,000 for a list of more than four million fake student names. She claims JP Morgan simply didn’t do their due diligence. Right now, she’s up on Federal charges for securities fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy.
I personally believe there is a lot of the kind of fraud Javice is accused of. It’s been pretty much rampant by people on Forbes 30 under 30 list (more comically being called Forbes 30 doing 30 list). It’s also ridiculously easy. Purchasing views and reposts for any social media account is just a google click away. You can buy thousands of re-Tweets, Twitch views, Youtube views, fake comments, Instagram followers, Facebook upvotes – and just about anything else for just a little bit of money. Just google it and you’ll find tons of services that do all these things for under $50.
I sure hope realzbluewater is legit. If he’s not, he’s likely committing criminal fraud and could be sued by his sponsors and face jail time.
Twitch is likely not cracking down for 3 reasons. Firstly, they get ad revenue if the views or real or not. Secondly, even if they detect this, they can’t ban streamers when they detect bots swarming a channel or others could use those kinds of attacks to get streamers taken down or banned. Finally, the increase of numbers helps Twitch too. Twitch has been struggling financially and definitely could use all the viewers they can get – even if the majority of them are bots.
Just one more likely datapoint for the Dead Internet Theory. If this kind of fraud is becoming more rampant (and I believe it is), there is going to be a reckoning. Advertisers are going to start asking questions about fake numbers and realize they’re getting ripped off. When the reckoning starts, people better have long, clean records when the investigations begins – because the hosting sites will blame the streamers, and the streamers will likely be thrown under the bus.
Note to self: great business idea. Start a company that does user/data verification and fraud analysis services. When the day comes, everyone will want you.
About 15 years ago, people noticed that rendering virtual scenes with ray tracing was a lot like how sound propagates through an environment. Light rays travel through open spaces, hit objects and then reflect, refract, and bend. Sound waves follow many of the same principles.
What if you use the same ray casting methods to simulate sound traveling through an environment? Instead of standard hacks on sound to make something sound like it’s in a tiled bathroom or a big orchestra hall, you could accurately simulate it – reducing artist time. Simply play the sound and let the algorithm figure out how it should sound.
Not sure what other research has happened since. It was too computationally expensive for real time back then, but it was a cool idea and maybe we have the compute for it with today’s GPU’s.
This could make a fun little demo – flying through a cityscape with buildings that are constantly generated by AI – getting funkier and funkier as you go along
Instead of ear-splitting roar of an engine, this Tesla cybertruck quietly pulls as far as 2500-3500 diesel engines.
Honestly, it’s probably inevitable. I mean, trains use diesel-electric combo where the diesel engine powers the electric motors that do the actual pulling. If someone hooked a few train motors into a frame, slapped a auto/truck body on it and took it to a pull, it would likely out-pull anything out there…
In Sierra Leone, there is a step in learning to drive – playing a board game. The game is called The Driver’s Way and is a “Roll and Move” type game where players to roll traffic-light-themed dice and move model cars around a board. The game aims to teach learners the rules of the road in a more entertaining way than standard textbooks.
Makes me wonder if there’s an opportunity for a board or teen-oriented video game like this for learners – even children to learn how to drive, walk, and bike in shared traffic spaces. Maybe it could be structured like the Oregon Trail or something quite fun.
