Dream Zero: NVIDIA’s latest paradigm where a robot “dreams” its success in a world model before executing the motor commands in reality [[06:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y8aq_ofEVs&t=372)].
Jim Fan, who leads the embodied autonomous research group at Nvidia, returns to AI Ascent to argue that robotics is entering its end game — and that the playbook is already written. He walks through what he calls \.
Thirteen years ago, I sat down with a filmmaker who had spent his life warning us about a future we are now living inside.
Godfrey Reggio is the director of Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi, the Qatsi trilogy. Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi word. It means life out of balance.
In our conversation, he said something I have never been able to shake:
“It’s our behavior that determines the content of our mind. We become what we do. We become what we see. We become the routine that we are a part of.”
Read that again. Slowly.
Now look at your phone. Look at your feed. Look at the average screen time of the people around you, including yourself.
The same way you might play Dragon Quest and rush to assemble a tribute in RPG Maker, players have been making their own old-school adventures in ZQuest for decades. The results range from the quaint to the damn near authentic, and the cream of the crop is collected on a database-slash-forum called PureZC. It’s a visually lean, community-driven treasure trove the likes of which I didn’t think existed on the internet anymore. Custom games, all of which are called “quests” and disseminated as.qst files to be plugged into ZQuest, are split up into a few genres: Metroidvania, NES-style, dungeon romper, randomizer, and so on.
Like Venezia and Clark said, you can go a long way without writing so much as a line of code (though the option is there, should you opt to push the engine beyond its normal scope using the ZScript language). A fan favorite metroidvania quest from 2024, The Deep, features puzzles that incorporate shadows and fog, conveyor belts, a hookshot like you might remember from A Link to the Past, and all sorts of other novelties.
It’s easy to see how it took home the gold in a community contest, but all the more intriguing when you learn it did so in a “non-scripted bracket” and was built in just over three weeks. Bigger, multi-year endeavors like Lost Isle and The Hero of Dreams are lengthy and fully-featured games in their own right—projects that, if you squint, look and feel remarkably like unreleased Game Boy Advance games. While the quests are diverse, numbering over a thousand, reverence for the 40-year-old Nintendo series is the one thing that makes it all cohere.
Recently, Michael Hall, a doctoral candidate in the Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Program, was invited to present his work exploring representation in gaming, “Dawnbreaker, the Curious Case of Decolonialism and Colonialism in Final Fantasy XIV, Dawntrail,” at the Popular Culture Association National Conference.
This new expansion for Final Fantasy XIV takes place in what is very clearly the Americas. While the story decenters on the individual, putting more focus on community and tradition, it also puts conquistador armor in the Native American expansion.
“Gaming has an issue with representation of non-Western cultures, and it’s good to point that out through a critical lens,” Hall said. “Representation can be done, both poorly and well.”
Following reports of recurring DRM checks, Sony clarifies that digital games only require a single online verification to confirm ownership in a new statement.
It’s been a very long time, but the wait is finally over. If you’re not familiar with it, VirtuCamera by The Weird Byte is a real-time camera motion capture mobile app, originally released in 2021. It now returns with its biggest update yet, featuring a full-screen viewport, a redesigned user interface, and, most importantly, support for Android, as well as compatibility with newer versions of Blender, Cinema 4D, Maya, 3ds Max, and Houdini.
You can now use it with Blender 5.1, 5.0, and LTS 4.5, Maya and 3ds Max 2026 and 2027, Houdini 21, and Cinema 4D 2026. On top of that, you can also build your own integration using the PyVirtuCamera Python API.
More features are also planned for the near future, including joystick support, custom script handling, and slider presets for commonly used values. Support for Unreal and Unity is “definitely possible”, according to the developers, “it depends on demand, how the app evolves, and where we focus next”
Japanese entertainment company Toei has established Toei Games, an in-house publishing label.
The company aims to make its games business a new pillar alongside its film, television, and events divisions.
Toei Games will initially release titles on Steam, entering the PC market. The company plans to expand soon to home consoles such as the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox.
China is revolutionizing gaming with a real-world battle royale set in a shopping mall. Players experience augmented reality combat, using only their phones…
A team from The University of Texas at Austin reviews recent advances in dilute noble metal films for infrared optics and plasmonics: https://bit.ly/4s9XHKR
To address a growing need for a sub-wavelength and nanophotonic optical infrastructure to support quantum applications, dilute noble metals provide a high-optical-quality approach for nanophotonics at long wavelengths.
With further research, their potential applications can even include mid-IR sensing, optoelectronics, and quantum photonics at long wavelengths.
The infrared optical response of noble metals is traditionally considered perfect electrical conductor (PEC)-like due to the noble metals’ exceptionally large electron concentrations, and thus large (and negative) real permittivity. While PEC-like behavior is ideal for a broad range of applications, for instance mirrors, gratings, and wavelength-(and macro-) scale resonators and antennas, the utility of noble metals for nanoscale (sub-diffraction-limit) physics at long wavelengths is limited. However, in ultra-low volume (dilute) metal films, such as those with nanometer-scale thicknesses or lithographic dilution (subwavelength perforation), the thin films’ sheet conductivity is massively reduced, enabling light to penetrate and interact with the films much more efficiently. This avails the infrared of a host of opportunities for noble-metal-based plasmonics, with the potential for nanoscale (deep subwavelength) confinement and strong light-matter interaction, otherwise prohibited with noble metals in this wavelength range. In this perspective, we review the recent advances in dilute metal films for near-and mid-infrared photonics and plasmonics, and discuss the advantageous properties of these optical thin films for potential applications in sensors, detectors, sources, and nonlinear and quantum optics.
