The AR Drone blows my mind on so many levels — iDevice app remote control quadrocopter with remotely-accessed onboard cameras? Augmented reality video game dogfights? And this amazing tech is only around $300?

Clearly we are already living in the future.

This piece by Saatchi & Saatchi, Italy, was done not to promote Rovio’s Angry Birds, but instead to help promote T-Mobile’s smartphone network. Seems a bit off-brand to mooch so heavily from an awesome game with only a tenuous tie-in to T-Mobile, but if pro sports players can appear in ads, why not giant ballistic birds?

Regardless, the impact on the crowd shows that it succeeded on at least some levels.

In the beginning there was joystick movement with a button, and it was good. From there, controllers have added more joysticks, and more buttons. Aiming. Motion capture. even Audio.

But now, with all of these combined with a 6″ touchscreen display, the possibilities for Wii Games (and computer interfaces) just got even more interesting as seen in just a few of the tech demos shown here.

Tactile interaction and drawing? Seeing a baseball game from both players’ perspective simultaneously? Seeing not only where your golfer is standing, but where the ball is lying on the ground in front of you? Aiming with picture-in-picture sniper clarity? Cool.

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This is a great interview with Dave Gondek of IBM conducted by Engadget. It covers a lot of the algorithms and capabilities that a machine like Watson needs to communicate with people. They also touch on how difficult it can be for a machine to understand the rules and varying contexts in a game like Jeopardy.

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Could use a bit of tightening up on the timing but this is a fun stop-motion lego piece that any NES enthusiast should enjoy.

Hand-tweened facial mapping and 3D animation has always been one of the hardest things to make convincing. There’s just something… human… that can’t be easily recreated in a virtual character. Especially not in the lower-polygon meshes used by 3D gaming.

However, thanks to some of the latest facial actor capture technology in play at Rockstar Games, all of that is changing like never before as seen here in the upcoming L.A. Noire game.

via Devour

Bringing the Molehill API to Flash seems to have really kicked things up a notch with regards to fluid interactive 3D with immersive environments and reflection mapping.

Dogicorns are perhaps a distant cousin of the mythical Cheetocorn. That didn’t stop us from finding this game to be by far to be the best “branded content game starring fabio, unicorns, laser-guided exploding kittens and flying mustaches” ever.