Category: Technology

Nearly two months after Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick announced the company would finally begin bargaining its first union contract with the Game Workers Alliance at Raven Software, staff at Blizzard Albany, currently working on Devil IV, say the publisher is back to trying to union-bust. They accuse Activision Blizzard of rehiring the law firm Reed Smith to undermine their own organizing effort rather than voluntarily recognize the company’s second union.

“Instead of following Microsoft’s lead and committing to a labor neutrality agreement, Activision has made the clear and conscious decision to deny us our basic labor rights while once again spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a union-busting firm,” Albany Game Workers Alliance , which is organizing for things like better pay, healthcare, and work/life balance, among other issues, wrote in a press release Wednesday. The group says Activision Blizzard is re-enlisting the help of Reed Smith, an organization that offers “union-avoidance” services, in a “futile effort” to “delay recognition.” As the workers tell it, Reed Smith intends to urge the National Labor Relations Board to deny the individual QA group’s right to unionize.

When asked for comment, the Call of Duty publisher didn’t say why it had rehired the law firm Reed Smith or how much it was paying, but it did confirm it would once again push for a studio-wide vote on unionization. “Given the significant impact this change could have for roughly 150 people in Albany (formerly Vicarious Visions), we believe every employee in Albany who works on Diablo should have a direct say in this decision; it should not be made by fewer than 15% of employees,” company spokesman Rich George wrote in an emailed statement.

It went on:

The team based out of the Albany location is an integrated group that shares a focus on the same game franchise and works on related game features and functionality. These employees share significant commonalities in their work and maintaining cohesiveness throughout the complex game development and production process is essential.

Screenshot: Reed Smith

This is the same playbook the company rolled out last time when Raven Software first sought to unionize. First it integrated QA staff directly into other disciplines within the wider studio and later it argued that for this and other reasons the entire studio should vote on a union rather than just those in QA who already overwhelmingly supported it. Ultimately the NLRB sided with the workers, but it still delayed proceedings by months.

In the meantime, Activision Blizzard worked with Reed Smith, an international firm that boasted on its website at the time of helping companies avoid and fight unionization. It even kept a PowerPoint Presentation on its website that included slides about how unions sought to exploit lazy workers and strategies for persuading workers that unions were a bad idea. That presentation has since been removed.

Activision Blizzard’s renewed fight against unionization comes just two months after Microsoft, currently set to acquire it for $US69 ($96) billion, announced it would remain “neutral” on union efforts moving forward. Part of a campaign to get regulatory approval for the biggest tech acquisition in history, it seemed like it might signal a new playbook for Activision as well. Apparently not. The deal is expected to close before June 2023.

Various new features will make virtual reality safer and easier to share with your friends, according to an early glimpse at the PlayStation VR2 user experience.

A recent blog post shared by Sony revealed what we can expect when going hands-on with the upcoming next-gen VR headset, including several screenshots of the device in action. Safety appears to be a core focus, with the new see-through view letting you check your surroundings without removing the headset. Here, the embedded front cameras on the PlayStation VR2 kick in to produce a grayscale image of the play area. By pressing the headset’s function button or accessing the Control Center, you can swap between viewing the game, and viewing your surroundings.

An extension of the PlayStation VR2 see-through view is a feature other VR units have had for a while: the ability to customize your play area. With the embedded cameras and PS VR2 Sense controllers, you can scan your room to set precise play boundaries. During gameplay, the system will warn you when approaching boundaries, which is helpful for avoiding damage or causing harm to yourself and others. The original PlayStation VR was limited in this regard, so it’s good to see this has been addressed with the PS VR2.

Streamer centric

PlayStation VR2 content creators and streamers will no doubt enjoy the added ability to natively broadcast footage from a PS5 camera, too. This feature lets creators stream both the gameplay and their reactions simultaneously to platforms like Twitch. With prior hardware, this required an external workaround. It sounds like the PS VR2 will make sharing your VR gaming sessions easier than ever.

Sony also reiterated some of the PlayStation VR2’s technical aspects. For example, games in VR Mode provide a 360-degree virtual environment to play in, where content is displayed in a 4000 x 2040 resolution – 2000 x 2040 pixels per eye – in HDR at either 90Hz or 120Hz. Alternatively, Cinematic Mode lets you view non-VR content on a virtual cinema screen. Here, you can enjoy non-VR media at 1920 x 1080 with the option of 24Hz, 60Hz or 120Hz refresh rates.

As for when you can expect the PlayStation VR2 to launch? Sony hasn’t confirmed a release date yet, although there are plenty of whispers indicating a late-2022 or early-2023 launch window.

Everything Sony has revealed about the PlayStation VR2 looks promising. Safety features that bring it up to speed with competitors, and more content creation potential are good ideas indeed. Now all that’s left is to confirm its availability and the all-important price tag.

Read more gaming news on GadgetGuy

Oppo has released the Oppo A77 5G smartphone that offers a stylish design, an impressive camera system and a long-life battery and a price tag under $500.

It will be available in two versions – 4GB RAM with 64GB storage ($449) and 6GB RAM and 128GB storage ($499).

The device has a 6.56-inch 90Hz screen with a resolution of 1612 x 720 and up to 600 nits of brightness.

It has a sleek design with straight edges and a thickness of just 7.9mm.

And despite its narrow design, the Oppo A77 5G is also durable after undergoing more than 130 reliability tests and more than 320 quality tests to make sure the device can handle the real-life day-to-day wear and tear.

Part of this testing was dropping the smartphone 28,000 times from a height of 10cm on all sides and 32 drops from 1m.

The device has an IPX4 rating to make it water resistant and safe to use it in all weather conditions.

The Oppo A77 5G as a 48-megapixel dual camera that is smart enough to make your portrait shots even better using a proprietary algorithmic process with eight areas of customization and 100 levels of intensity for each which can smooth out your skin and soften fine lines so you’ll always be looking your best.

Also onboard is AI Scene Enhancement which can automatically recognize various scenes like a sunset, a blue sky or a grassy field and optimize the image to give you the best result.

The Oppo A77 5G is powered by the next generation MediaTek Dimensity 810 SoC (system on a chip) which has eight cores made up of six efficiency 2.0 Ghz Cortex-A55 cores and two 2.4Ghz Cortex-A76 performance cores along with a Mali-G57 MC2 graphics chipset.

The other strength of the device is its battery life and the A77 5G has 33W SuperVOOC charging technology along with a 5000mAh battery which can be fully charged in just 68 minutes.

And a quick five-minute charge is enough to offer one and half hours of YouTube video streaming.

The Oppo A77 5G with 4GB RAM + 64GB storage is priced at $449 and can be purchased from Oppo’s Australian online store an Officeworks.

The Oppo A77 5G with 6GB RAM + 128GB storage is priced at $499 and is available from JB Hi-Fi, Big W, Australia Post, The Good Guys, Bing Lee, Harvey Norman and Woolworths.

The 21st century equivalent of the souped-up hot rod, a modded PC packed to the gills with glowing LEDs and other over-the-top adornments can be a unique way to show off your wild personality, or now even your Zen-like temperament , with a new PC case featuring a tank on top you can turn into a fully-functional and relaxing aquarium full of fish.

Chinese PC case maker MetalFish has recently added the Y2 Fish Tank Chassis to its lineup, which gets straight to the point when it comes to the case’s most marketable feature. Tom’s Hardware crunched the numbers on the case’s dimensions, which put its size at about 27 liters in total, although it appears as if the upper aquarium portion occupies about half of that, and if you go the fish route, you won’t be sticking any components in that 13.5 liter tank.

The Micro-ATX Y2 Fish Tank Chassis can accommodate a Micro-ATX or Mini-ITX motherboard inside its 1.5mm thick aluminum body, as well as a single 2.5-inch drive, a pair of 90mm fans, a graphics card up to 22cm in length (although a 20cm option is instead recommended), a 90mm tall CPU cooler, and a 1U or Flex ATX power supply. It also features colour-adjustable LED lighting inside the case, controlled by an included remote.

The aquarium up top is made from 5mm thick glass panels, with a 3mm thick panel of acrylic on the bottom keeping all the water and wildlife separate from the PC components below. A strip of LED lights arching over the aquarium’s open top provides daylight-simulating illumination, while an included pump and filtration system draws power from the PC case below using a USB connection.

The most obvious question that comes to mind with a creation like this is whether or not the excess heat from the PC can be used to keep the aquarium water warm, and, in turn, if the water in the aquarium can be used to help keep the PC running cooler. But with a price tag of around just $US75 ($104) for the Y2 Fish Tank Chassis in China, it doesn’t seem like MetalFish has gone the extra engineering mile to create a mutually beneficial symbiont relationship between the PC components and the aquarium. It’s just an over-the-top PC design that’s all but impossible to move or reposition once the fish move in.

Samsung announced Wednesday that it’s bringing more than 250 games to the Samsung Gaming Hub through the Amazon Luna streaming-based gaming service. The company is making these titles available on its 2022 Samsung smart TVs and M-series smart monitors.

The Korean tech giant first announced the Samsung Gaming Hub at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year and began rolling it out to its 2022 smart TVs and smart monitors since June 30. The Tizen-powered software already has games available from services like Xbox, NVIDIA GeForce NOW, Google Stadia, and Utomik. With the addition of Amazon Luna, users now have access to more than 1,000 game titles. The Gaming Hub also offers players to connect their YouTube, Spotify, and Twitch accounts to access media during gameplay.

“Beginning today, Luna users can also link their profiles to the Samsung Gaming Hub and continue to play on Samsung’s 2022 television models. Using the Samsung Gaming Hub’s controller passthrough technology, gamers can choose to play their Amazon Luna titles with a Luna Controller or with any other supported Bluetooth controller,” Samsung said in a press release.

If you don’t have a Bluetooth controller, you can play games with your smartphone, too.

Amazon launched its cloud-based gaming service to US-based users in March, after testing it in smaller pools starting in September 2020. Prime subscribers have access to some free games every month through Prime Gaming Channel, but if they want more they can subscribe to the Retro Channel for classic games ,and channels from game studios like Jackbox and Ubisoft that cost anywhere from $4.99 to $17.99. Luna’s services are not limited to your TV, so you can also play these games on your phone, tablet, PC, or Mac as well.