Aris folds her tiny hands across her aproned lap and smiles. “If you need me, please poke me to get my attention!” she says in a peppy, high-pitched voice. “Just don’t poke me in a weird place! ” As if to deliberately defy her request, Taisei Tanaka, who is sitting next to me in a soccer jersey and jeans, lifts up Aris’ poofy skirt with a stick, revealing the ends of her black thigh-high socks and a glimpse of her blue panties. Aris screams at the top of her lungs. “Please stop! This kind of thing is not good!” Tanaka has every right to lift up Aris’ skirt. He is her creator, after all. Besides, Aris is not a real person; she doesn’t even really exist. She is an optical illusion, a three-dimensional projection of a brown-haired girl in a maid outfit who lives inside of a cube that looks like an oversized die. The cube has QR codes pasted on each of its sides that uses image recognition, motion-tracking, and other computer-generated data to project images into space when recorded with a webcam. I’m at the office of Geisha Tokyo Entertainment , the company that makes and sells the popular Augmented Reality Figure Aris. At first glance, it’s a cookie cutter Japanese workspace with long fluorescent ceiling lights and walls painted a sterile white. But the normalness ends there. The whiteboard by the entrance is covered with a 20-frame manga featuring egg-shaped characters in a comedy routine; a rack holding half a dozen guitars sits in the back corner of the room. Wigs and figurines line the rows of desks crammed into the 800 square foot or so space. As I look around the office upon arrival, one of the employees, a tall guy in a bandanna, waves at me with a didgeridoo in one hand and two stuffed Pokemon in the other. Three years ago, Tanaka, a lawyer-turned-engineer-turned-entrepreneur, quit his career as a game designer and gathered an all-star team of multi-talented people with Tokyo University pedigrees to start an outfit that would take “high-tech entertainment” to a whole new level. “When visitors come to Japan, they buy electronics, sing karaoke, watch anime, and play video games,” he says. “I’m trying to bring high-tech into that entertainment subculture.” The company’s first product was a flop &mdash it was a kooky cell phone game that sent players on missions to take photos of good-looking people on the street. The app used face recognition software to determine whether the subjects were really attractive or not. “It was pretty well known among media art circles, but we didn’t make that much money from it,” Tanaka tells me. Then, in March 2008, Tanaka saw a rerun of an anime called Denn? Coil on TV, and something clicked. “When the kids in the anime put on augmented reality glasses and see things that aren’t really there, I thought, I want to make those glasses.” When he talked to his colleagues at Geisha about this, they decided to take it one step further &mdash they would make a humanoid augmented reality pet. The technology was already out there &mdash university researchers had tested similar prototypes more conventional pets like dogs and cats. “We wanted to do something that would market augmented reality in a way that’s… meaningful. We were like, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could look up her skirt, or take off her clothes?” By April, the guys at Geisha had a prototype of Aris, and when the product hit stores in the fall, the first 3,000 units sold out within three days. At Geisha’s headquarters, Aris lives inside a computer screen in a makeshift living room in the corner of the office. Boxes of gadgets and books are stacked atop a tatami mat floor; there’s a sitting area with blankets and an exercise ball in front of a flat-screen TV and an old school A/C unit. Tanaka puts the augmented reality cube on the table, powers up the webcam, and clicks on a few links on his PC. I stare expectantly at the screen. All of a sudden, Aris tumbles out of the box, jumps to her feet, and starts chatting away. “Hi, I’m Aris!” she squeals. “I’m a genuine maid! Master, I am at your service!” Of course, Aris didn’t really tumble out of the box &mdash it just appears that way on the monitor. The Aris kit, which sells for about $100 online and at electronics stores throughout Japan, includes a special stick and cards, also with QR codes on them, that allow users to poke Aris, change her outfit, or give her gifts. Aris, the virtual maid, combines the fetishism of maid cafe culture with augmented reality technology and the futuristic storyline typical of modern anime. According to the backstory invented by Tanaka and his team, she is the daughter of a geisha and an inventor from the year 2025 &mdash due to the declining birthrate, the Japanese government has adopted a new policy that allows children to be created virtually and raised by humans. Once she appears via the webcam, Aris is the ideal sweet and subservient desktop companion &mdash she sweeps up virtual dust from your keyboard, pays you compliments, starts dancing like a cheerleader if you give her virtual pompoms, and whines flirtatiously when you flip up her virtual skirt or take off her virtual apron. “Everything about Aris is made according to my tastes,” Tanaka says. “I designed a character that I thought was cute &mdash her voice, her actions, everything.” Tanaka is currently trying to figure out how to incorporate haptic technology &mdash vibrations and motors that simulate the sense of touch &mdash into the next generation of Aris, so users could actually feel something on the tip of their fingers when they poke her. Geisha is a cool company &mdash it has the feel of a startup, or maybe a college dorm. Because of the small size, everyone here has multiple jobs, each one catered to his or her unique talents. When Tanaka knocks on a tiny soundproof door hidden behind a row of desks, a man in overalls and an afro steps out and chirps: “What are you doing??” in a perfect sassy old lady voice. Tanaka later tells me that he’s the voice actor and sound engineer for Geisha’s new comedic anime series called SakuranBoy DT, which is about a random, no-name provincial town in Yamagata Prefecture. The soundtrack and illustrations for the anime are also done in-house by employees who ordinarily keep books or fix servers. While Tanaka is showing me a clip from SakuranBoy on his computer, a man and woman both dressed as the blue-haired vocaloid Hatsune Miku come tumbling out of the elevator. They’ve just spent the whole day pole-dancing in a nearby park for a promo video for their newest product, an iPhone app that lets you play the imaginary character’s imaginary instrument in real life. When I smile at them in greeting, the man takes off his wig, bows slightly with his matted hair, white-caked face, and red lipstick, and then shuffles away to his desk. “He’s one of our designers,” Tanaka says, laughing. “Today, he’s a cosplayer.” Geisha has sold over 10,000 Aris figures and continues to make kooky, surprising products that don’t really fit into any existing category of entertainment. And while they make it seem like everything is just for fun, their ambitions are serious and grandiose. “We work in the spirit of prepping for an annual school festival,” Tanaka says, “But we plan on surpassing Nintendo in 20 years.”

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Geisha: The Japanese company that turned a virtual French maid into a hit product

“That’s not going to happen.” In just five words, Buzz Aldrin casually broke my heart. Which is to say, the former astronaut-turned-rapper reminded me that despite the haze of nostalgia surrounding the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing, Aldrin is still very much an engineer, a logician who deals in pragmatic extremes. Not some romantic willing to dive into hyperbole or seemingly-pointless hypotheticals. The question prompting the above response seemed simple enough at the time: “If you could go back for another Moon walk or orbit Mars tomorrow, which would you choose?” A total softball question, I admit, but I’d just spent the last half hour listening to Aldrin mostly ramble and rehash much of what he’s already said about NASA’s failures, China, why we should focus on Mars , and more. Not all that surprising, considering Xeni found Aldrin relatively incoherent when she interviewed him a year ago . However, I had figured a simple question like this might ground us, get the 79-year-old legend reflective &mdash possibly even a little misty-eyed &mdash or at least waxing semi-poetic. After all, Aldrin took part in one of the most glorious spectacles ever captured on film, an event which garnered what was, at the time, the most-watched live TV broadcast ever (some 600 million viewers). Getting to the Moon is still the gold standard to which invention and engineering can frequently be compared &mdash i.e. “We’ve gone to the Moon, but I still can’t get cell phone reception in my home?” All I wanted was for Aldrin to utter something like: “Well, my boy, I’d orbit Mars, because it’s somewhere we’ve never been. And we should never stop pushing the limits of what’s possible.” etc. etc. Find out what he actually said, after the jump, along with more reflections with/of/from the man Snoop Dogg now calls “Doc Ron,” a shortened version of Aldrin’s nickname “Dr. Rendezvous.” photo by NASA via Boston Globe via Todd Lappin “I couldn’t go tomorrow even if I wanted,” Aldrin continued, “First of all there’s training. And we don’t have the capability to get there [Mars] just yet. Also, I’ve already had my turn. There’s a long list of people that deserve to go before me.” I understand his point, especially that last one. It’s a sentiment shared by many, like those involved with the Artemis Project which puts it this way: “12 men have walked on the Moon. When do you get to go?” Aldrin, too, has explored this idea with ShareSpace , a non-profit he founded to support the democratization of space tourism. Yet, at the same time, I didn’t need Aldrin to deconstruct why my question was improbable. I know it’s improbable, which is why I pressed on. “Right,” I replied, “But hypothetically, let’s say Richard Branson calls you up tomorrow and says, ‘I’ve got the tech; you won’t be stepping on anyone’s toes to go; where you travel is your decision…’ Which would you choose?” Alas, no dice. In the slightest. “Branson doesn’t have that technology,” Aldrin answered matter of factly. Then, seemingly realizing our conversation wasn’t going where I’d probably wanted, he added, “Look, I’m pretty literal; that’s all.” To be fair, other reporters have experienced this side of Aldrin. “We didn’t go there to have feelings or thoughts,” he recently told one journalist. “We went there to do things and to report on the things that we did.” Aldrin walking on the Moon. It’s actually a wonder I even got to speak with Aldrin. Never mind it was two days before he was set to embark on his “40th Anniversary Tour” &mdash which his publicist, whose official title is “Mission Control Director,” said was booked solid with interviews from 6am to 6pm. Instead, consider that for a number of years Aldrin was not only completely adverse to giving interviews, but lost in depression and alcoholism. As Susan Faludi recounts in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man , Aldrin’s rise and fall came rather quickly. On the Apollo publicity tour, he was introduced to the bittersweet nature of celebrity. At myriad public appearances, he and Armstrong faced a seemingly unending barrage of interviews, cameras, microphones and hordes of screaming fans. “People were crawling all over us…,” Aldrin once explained, “I was overcome by nausea and dizziness.”* By the time the decorated moonwalker left NASA in 1971, he’d “sunk in a morass of despair.” Over the years, the state of his career, a failed marriage and what he was going to do with his life all weighed heavily on him. He explores all of this quite candidly in Magnificent Desolation , and today he doesn’t seem to hold back in interviews, including this one. “I was done talking about all this,” he told me. “If I tried public speaking, I’d freeze up. But I’ve met and married a woman who has helped me. Now I’m taking on new challenges that 20 years ago I wouldn’t have. I realize I want to reach the younger generation; that’s why I’ve got a Twitter and a BlackBerry.” Before I even have a chance to ask him about Snoop Dogg, Aldrin wonders, quite proudly, and completely out of nowhere, “Have you seen my video?” He tells me he worked with professional voice coaches in preparation for the stunt. Previously, he appeared alongside Elton John to sing part of “Rocket Man,” a performance Aldrin admitted to me was “embarrassing.” While I appreciate his efforts, I’d be lying if I said Aldrin’s publicity push didn’t strike me as a somewhat transparent attempt to seem hip and, to put it more crassly, sell books. Of course, I’d also be lying if I didn’t give it up that Aldrin is a true renegade, worthy hero and a total badass. He has never shied away from venting that NASA astronauts were forced into early retirement, didn’t receive adequate compensation, and even more interestingly to me, aren’t given their due respect for their service. “Anyone who visits a foreign country on behalf of their government gets called an Ambassador,” he told me, “That’s why I’d like to be known as a Lunar Ambassador, the Honorary Lunar Ambassador… When China gets to the Moon, you don’t think those astronauts are going to be taken care of for life?” Does he sound bitter? A little. Does he deserve to be? I’d argue, yes . After all, despite the above points, the guy cannot escape the daunting estimate that 6% of all Americans still believe the Moonlanding to be a hoax . Considering he risked his life for science and his country, and having talked to him about this, I find that stat more sad and depressing than ever before. On the surface, it can certainly be amusing to watch what happens when his buttons get pushed. Like when Ali G famously asked Aldrin, “What was it like not being the first man on the Moon? Was you ever jealous of Louis Armstrong?” …or when conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel really got to Aldrin in 2002, prompting fisticuffs… “I got to a point where my emotions took over,” Aldrin explained when I asked him whether he regretted punching Sibrel. “There are people who have been misled and it’s not their fault, but they continue to believe otherwise. It’s not a good idea [to react by hitting someone], because there are legal matters that follow, but other people would thank me for doing what I did and taking a stand.” Aldrin’s footprint. Days later, I find myself navigating Aldrin’s web site , staring at snapshots of him through the years: Buzz posing with President Regan. Buzz with Liz Taylor. Buzz holding a bald eagle. As I come to the famous photo Aldrin snapped of his footprint on the Lunar surface (above), I remember his desire to be called the Honorary Lunar Ambassador. At the time, I had told him I’d happily call him whatever he wished &mdash both because I hoped to win favor with him and, well, I really do feel he deserves it. “Thanks,” he said, the realist in him taking over, “But I need the President or Secretary of State to call me that.” *When I spoke to Aldrin, I mentioned the statistic that 50% of all astronauts report feeling a perpetual state of nausea while in space. I asked whether that was his experience. It wasn’t. Ironically, it wasn’t until his return to Earth that that those symptoms became an issue for him.

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Buzz Aldrin: Engineer, Rapper, Heart-Breaking Realist

Movie makeup and special effects wizardy is very much a study and exercise in materials science. Since the dawn of film, artists have been been toying with synthetic appliances, pigments, and all kinds of organic matter. Through the years, new materials, digital tools and rendering software, like ZBrush , have boosted efficiency and creativity. Rick Baker , the legendary makeup artist behind films like An American Werewolf in London , Thriller , and those Eddie-Murphy-fat-guy films, isn’t a purist when it comes to adopting new technologies. He’s stated very clearly that he embraces the use of CGI because it can accomplish what’s literally impossible &mdash even for him. And yet, for the upcoming film The Wolfman , starring Benicio Del Toro (pic above), the guru of gore decided to go old school. As an homage to makeup artist Jack Pierce, who created the effects in the original film from 1941, the Academy Award-winning special effects master decided to ditch silicone and other newfangled materials for the stuff of yesteryear &mdash foam rubber, acrylic teeth and yak hair. Yes, yak hair , which Pierce used along with kelp to transform Lon Chaney into the o.g. wolfman. So how does Baker’s wolf compare? Not sure. The film was originally due in April, got bumped to November. Color me curious to see the transformation and F/X, but concerned about everything else. Previously: Horror movie makeup of 1933 - Boing Boing Wiccan teen suspended for wearing make-up - Boing Boing Crazy makeup kits are the ultimate transformer gadgets A Visual History of Cosmetics Gadgetry Free Halloween skin for Shuttle KPC owners - Boing Boing Gadgets

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Movie Makeup Tip: It’s OK To Go Old School

Surfers have been catching massive waves at Pillar Point in Half Moon Bay, CA since the 1960s. The first legitimate contest was held in 1999-2000, but what most of us know as Mavericks didn’t launch until 2004 with the help of big wave rider Jeff Clark . Unlike the Kentucky Derby or March Madness, Mavericks doesn’t happen every year. It was a no-go in 2007 and again this past season. Why? The problem isn’t a lack of big swells, but whether the perfect one will rock Pillar Point during the contest waiting period (Jan. 1 - March 31 in 2009) — and then predicting the if and when so everyone can get in place. The 24 surfers who compete at Mavericks are given 24-hours notice to show up. Extending the waiting period and tethering the surfers to Mavericks wouldn’t be fair since they make their living traveling to contests all over the world, says Keir Beadling, who co-found Mavericks Surf Ventures with Clark. Plus, the arrival of late spring welcomes gray whale migration and seal pups, which results in crowded waters. So how do you forecast one of the most celebrated big wave contests in the world? “It’s no longer a secret where you have three puffs of smoke announcing who the next Pope is gonna be,” says Beadling, “You definitely couldn’t hold a contest of this magnitude — 50,000 spectators in person and another 1+ million on webcast — and get mobilized in time if it weren’t for all the technology.” The short answer: datahead surfer Mark Sponsler (surfing Mavericks above). Find out how a former quality engineer and product manager at Kennedy Space Center moved to the west coast, started dropping in on big waves, tuned into data, founded Stormsurf.com , and currently crunches more than 2 terabytes of swell data per year. photo by Doug Acton , provided by Mark Sponsler The Road to Mavericks In the early 1980s, Florida native Sponsler was surfing and working at Kennedy Space Center, where he did a 15-year stint. A self-described “bithead,” he started to get weather curious. Back then, though, hobbyists and surfers had a heck of a time obtaining any real, tangible data. “When I first started trying to put stuff together, there was no Internet,” he says, “There were no publicly-available [wave] models. You’d get in your car and drive to the National Weather Service office, and try to make sense of some charts they had posted on a wall.” Around 1984, NOAA began installing some of its first weather buoys. A big leap forward for generating potentially-solid swell data. Yet, the best Sponsler could do — aside from driving back to that office — was to listen to NOAA weather radio. And even then, he’d only get a rough idea of what was going on to then try to extrapolate the oceanic tidbits in surf terms. By the time Sponsler’s wife got a job opportunity in San Francisco, he had already caught the big wave bug paddling out in Hawaii. Looking for a change, they moved out west and never looked back. Soon after, he’d not only befriended Mavericks legend Jeff Clark and tackled Mavericks, but Sponslor became a “power user” of the early 90s Web. NOAA and CDIP continued to anchor more buoys updated with fancier sensors. New and improved weather satellites launched. Universities and institutions started to create and freely distribute waveand weather models . And with that great, big data dump, of course, began Sponsler’s efforts to mine as much as possible. In the 90s, Sponler started forecasting surf Mavericks via email blast (he still takes daily calls from any one of the 30 big wavers he calls the “traveling gypsies floating around the planet chasing surf”). As the list ballooned in size, a web site started to make more sense. Plus, he wasn’t satisfied with the way much of the disparate data were being presented online. He started coding. The Next Wave of DIY Forecasting Launched in 1998, Stormsurf operates today with just three par-time employees, not including Sponsler, whose day job is as a tech product manager at a major health care provider. His back-end, he admits, isn’t state of the art, but it gets the job done. He’s running four, 3.0 ghtz single core boxes each with 1 GB of RAM. Ancient by today’s standards — and he knows an upgrade is due — but for the past five years his application servers have run just fine maxed out at 100% CPU, at probably 50% of every minute they’re running. The total throughput — the raw GRIB files and various other data he downloads specific to wave/weather models and flash output — is roughly 1.5 GB per model run four times a day. That’s 6GB a day or 2.16 terabytes every year to forecast worldwide. Not jaw-droppingly-impressive if you’re a Google or Microsoft, but a far cry from driving to the NWS office to stare at 2D charts tacked up to a wall. What are Stormsurf’s servers crunching? The main components are wind speeds, wave models and the Jason-1 satellite. The wind speeds are provided by satellites that pass over twice a day, offering almost 100% oceanic coverage. The satellites, including NASA’s QuikSCAT , can predict wind speed to within 2-3 knots. The next step is to input the raw figures into several of the aforementioned wave models, which extrapolate a predicted wave height. (I’m simplifying the models which take into account huge swaths of data like seafloor mapping ) The last main component is Jason-1, which helped generate its first image in 2002. As the satellite polar orbits the Earth multiple times a day, it beams down radar into the center of a storm to calculate the wave height — down to an accuracy of 6 inches. From there, as a swell approaches, Sponsler turns again to those buoys to provide secondary confirmation. NOAA has 991 buoys worldwide, but for Mavericks the most vital ones are those off the coast (duh). Armed with solar panels, computers, accelerometers, and directional sensors, the buoys measure the sea height, swell height, heave and throw of the ocean, and the energy distribution across entire frequency spectrum (from 3 seconds up to 40 seconds). If there are multiple swell trains hitting at the same time, the spectrum will help Sponsler identity it. The buoys uplink continuously to satellites so the data can be downloaded to a central processing center in Maryland, which then chews everything in real-time so it can post to the Web. Those 1s and 0s are distributed in multiple formats, including the raw ASCII text flat files Stormsurf chops into bite-size chunks to run in parallel, and then construct its own buoy reports, which detail current conditions, provide historical surf height and chart out barometric, air and water temperature over time (for surfers or aspiring weatherheads who want to learn). Passing buoy after buoy, too, the swell continues to disseminate new figures. With buoys positioned miles out and then right off shore ( #46012 for Mavericks), Sponsler can tune his forecasts up to 24 hours in advance (a short-term forecast can be delivered 2-3 weeks out; we’ll get into long-term below). With swell forecasting, one of the biggest unknowns is the wind, especially at Mavericks. Typically, the best surf at Mavericks occur with a dead calm. A light onshore or light northern breeze up to 15-20 knots is doable, but less ideal. Offshore, is another story: “The waves moving so fast, jacking so fast that any offshore wind basically sends you airborne. You never make it to the bottom of the wave,” says Sponsler, “Most people want 4′ and offshore, but if it’s offshore at Mavericks, you’re just gonna die.” Long-Term Voodoo: Will Mavericks Happen in 2010? In a word: probably. This past winter, Sponsler says he knew the contest was a longshot by early January. Some huge swells were hitting the break in October/November. By the time the contest window opened, though, the seas had calmed dramatically and the forecast was grim. “It was like a lake.” The big issue: El Nio & La Nia . 2009 saw what Sponsler and other Mavericks surfers are hoping is the end of a 3-year La Nia. During an El Nio year, warm water builds up off the coast of South America and enhances the Jet Stream in the North Pacific, therefore instigating big winter storms. During La Nia, you get the opposite — colder water off the coast, which suppresses storm development. For Mavericks, you also want big storms, strong low pressure developing on the International Date Line pushing in towards the west coast of Alaska, but not too close. El Nio is good for that, but once you hit the core of winter, the storms can get driven right into the coast, which isn’t good for surf. Needless to say, the list of atmospheric variables is vast and nature is fickle. For long-term forecasting (3-6 months out), Sponsler says the data only go so far, too. He examines everything obsessively, but for the time being, can arrive only at a probability for the number of storms, not some decisive moment for a certain storm hitting a certain beach. Thus, he calls the long-term forecast the “domain of artistry, voodoo and witch doctor sort of stuff.” Sponsler says we’re right on the cusp of an El Nio year. Just another few weeks, and he should know for sure. Provided the current patterns hold, including the relative activity of the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO), the ducks will be in line to potentially serve up another season of contest-worthy. Either way, he’s never quick to pull the trigger either direction. “This is not an exact science,” Sponsler reminds me, “Whenever you go and declare it dead or alive, then something will always happen. It is nature; it does it’s own thing.” image by ISIphotos , with permission from Mark Sponsler Previously: Tide Widget vs. Watch [Verdict: Save Your $] Will a state-of-the-art wetsuit make me enjoy surfing in freezing … Programmer Hanging 10 on a Kuka Robot Soma AirBag: Full of Hot Air? HOWTO Learn To Shape a Surfboard (Step 1) Surfing a Tsunami - Boing Boing

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HOWTO Predict Surf at Mavericks [Hint: Data]

Filed under: Gadgets , CES , I.C.E. , Ford Click the image above to view a video of the new SYNC system after the jump At the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show ( CES ) Ford announced that three new features would be included on the next iteration of the SYNC system: traffic data, GPS-guided directions and the ability to snag information from the web through the user’s data/GPS/Bluetooth-enabled smartphone to display or read weather conditions, sports scores and other information through the stereo. On May 26th, the upgrade will be made available to all current 2010 Ford, Lincoln and Mercury owners (you download the update to your PC, then transfer it to the SYNC system through a thumb drive) and all new 2010 models will be equipped with the upgrade from the factory. But as Ford CEO Alan Mulally promised, there’s more on the way. Ford and Microsoft plan to continually update SYNC, and according to Charlotte Fisher from Ford’s Design and Technology team, “every six to eight to twelve months we’ll be delivering new services.” One of the possible features Ford could include on future iterations of SYNC is streaming internet radio, and Fisher confirmed that Ford is currently “talking with Pandora .” Can you say XM-killer? Hit the jump to watch a video of the new system in action. Continue reading Future Ford SYNC upgrade could include Pandora streaming Future Ford SYNC upgrade could include Pandora streaming originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 18 May 2009 19:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink ?|? Email this ?|? Comments

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Future Ford SYNC upgrade could include Pandora streaming

Filed under: Gadgets , Etc. , Tech , Audi , Lifestyle Audi is obviously looking forward to being in the coming Gran Turismo 5. After all, the Quattro company has created a website to promote its car on the N?rburgring in real life and in the game, and it interviewed GT5 mastermind Kazunori Yamauchi about what fans can expect. Yamauchi-san revealed that the game is going to offer not only more vehicles, more online features, and increased detail, but it will also include night racing, damage rendering (previously confirmed), and weather changes. If you watch the Audi R8 Meets Gran Turismo 5 video, one of the game developers even talks of one day providing weather reports for an entire 24-hour race, and you can read the interview with Yamauchi-san by clicking on a PDF link here . The graphical and gameplay additions are surely welcome and long overdue, and could return GT5 to the head of the racing sim pack - whenever it finally gets here… View Poll [Source: GT Planet ] REPORT: GT5 to get weather changes, night racing - and yes, damage rendering [w/POLL] originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 13 May 2009 11:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read ?|? Permalink ?|? Email this ?|? Comments

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REPORT: GT5 to get weather changes, night racing - and yes, damage rendering [w/POLL]

Two chairs enter…two chairs leave. In fact, I’m sitting my fat ass on one of the two chairs we reviewed right now: the Herman Miller Embody , a fine chair that only wobbles a little after running it into a wall. But I’m only sitting on it because I had to take the other chair, the Steelcase Leap , downstairs to do some more shooting for this video. So which chair should you buy? Honestly, they’re both so much better than a typical office chair it’s difficult to pick, but if I were paying real money and not just begging review samples off of the manufacturers, I’d be hard pressed to pay nearly twice as much for the Embody, even if it is fantastically weird in looks. (Especially in the showcase cream-and-orange livery.) Also, for the record, yes, this is the very best Clarkson impression I can do. And yes , it disturbed me that it isn’t that different from how I normally talk in these things. Would you like to download this as a “file”? Okay . [mp4]

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Boing Boing Video review: Top Chair? Herman Miller Embody and the Steelcase Leap