While traditional gaming via consoles or PC will continue to dominate, game streaming services are having a moment, offering an alternative way to play video games on the go or at home. Samsung Gaming Hub was released towards the end of June and allows 2022 Samsung Smart TV and Smart Monitor series owners instant access to an extensive library of streaming games from leading game streaming services. Today, Samsung announced it is adding Amazon Luna to its Gaming Hub platform, ushering in even more games into the service.
Amazon Luna was only recently made available to those in the US. Several different tiers are available, with the lowest costing $2.99 a month and the highest costing $17.99 a month. Some examples of tiers include a retro tier, a family tier, and even a tier with Ubisoft. There is also a free tier included with an Amazon Prime membership. Each offers a different assortment of games that change each month.
Previously, Samsung Gaming Hub partners included heavy hitters like Xbox, Nvidia, Google Stadia, Utomik, and others. With Amazon Luna becoming a partner, consumers will have more options, gaining access to over 250 or so additional games. While the number is impressive, Samsung Gaming Hub now has a total offering of over 1000 games. This is quite impressive.
Thanks to optimizations from Samsung’s Tizen software, Samsung Gaming Hub provides crisp graphics and solid performance. While you can play without a proper controller using your smartphone, Gaming Hub offers support for external hardware, which means you can also pair up your existing Amazon Luna controller to the service for the best experience. Gaming Hub users can seamlessly connect their Amazon Luna controller or other supported controllers without issues. Like magic, controllers automatically connect to each supported service without needing individual pairing. Gaming Hub will also support streaming media with services like Spotify and YouTube.
One of Australia’s greatest boxers, Johnny Famechon, has died, aged 77.
Born Jean-Pierre Famechon in France, he emigrated with his family to Australia at the age of five.
The son of a French lightweight boxing champion and nephew of a French and European featherweight titleholder, Famechon followed in their footsteps, skipping amateur boxing to begin his professional career at the age of 16.
With a fighting style based on quick movement, smart boxing and solid defence, he was described as “the classiest boxer in Australia” by the media.
In a nine-year career, he would amass a record of 56 wins (20 by knockout), six draws and five losses.
Famechon beat Les Dunn in 1964 for the Victorian featherweight title. He went on to win the Australian title and later the Commonwealth title in 1967.
He fought Cuban boxer Jose Legra at the Albert Hall in London and won a tough points decision to become the undisputed world featherweight champion in 1969, holding the belt at the same time as fellow Australian Lionel Rose.
Johnny Famechon won the world featherweight boxing title in 1969, and successfully defended it twice.(Getty Images: Express/A. jones)
Famechon would successfully defend the title twice, against former world flyweight and bantamweight champion Fighting Harada of Japan, who Rose had beaten to win the latter crown.
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The first fight was controversial as the referee first called the result a draw before changing it to a win for Famechon. He would win the rematch by knockout in early 1970 before retiring later that year after a loss to Mexican Vicente Saldivar.
His career made him a household name, and he was named Melbourne’s King of Moomba in 1970.
In 1991, he suffered life-changing injuries when hit by a car whilst jogging — before he was inducted into the World Boxing Hall of Fame in 1997.
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Former world boxing champion, Barry Michael, said Famechon overcame the odds to claim the world title in London.
“It was the universal world title then,” Michael said.
“To beat Jose Legra, Famo was a huge underdog and then he went and beat him convincingly.
“Then he went along and fought Fighting Harada and they had the draw in Sydney, which they later gave to Famo on a recount, then they fought again on Tokyo and he knocked Harada out [in the 14th round].”
Famechon was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1985.
In 2018, a bronze statue of Famechon was unveiled in his hometown of Frankston in Victoria.
He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in this year’s Queens Birthday Honors for significant service to boxing at elite level.
Surging populations of wild dogs and pigs are giving farmers a collective headache, as feral animal numbers continue to grow.
The NSW Farmers Association said members across the state had reported increases in both dog and pig numbers, while deer are also expanding their territory.
Then there’s the ever-present problem of feral cats, which the CSIRO estimates as being responsible for 1.8 billion native animal deaths each year.
Farmers say threats from feral animals such as wild pigs are growing. (Alex Ellinghausen)
Tweed farmer Neil Baker said there were shocking reports of livestock being attacked by feral animals.
“It’s really nasty some of the stories you hear, animals being ripped apart by predators,” Baker said.
“We’re really very concerned that these pests aren’t being properly controlled by some public and private landholders, and that’s giving them safe haven to breed and grow their territory.”
Dingoes and wild dogs can also pose a danger to livestock. (Robert Rough)
He said the rules around controlling pest animals were clear and needed to be enforced.
It is estimated that management of wild dogs by individual farmers and agencies costs $50 million per year and feral pig incursions cost the Australian agricultural industry upwards of $100 million a year.
NSW Farmers western division council chair Gerard Glover said there were a lot of feral cats appearing on cameras that had been set up across the region, and the expansion of deer into new areas would create headaches for motorists, but pigs and dogs remained the main concern for farmers.
Australian marsupial listed as endangered
“Cats and foxes typically prey on small native animals, which is a big concern, while deer present a new danger for people driving on country roads,” Glover said.
“Far and away though the pigs and the dogs are the most destructive, tearing up paddocks and fences, and attacking livestock.
“In my experience you need good, co-ordinated controls that everyone sticks to, otherwise you get these population explosions and the whole problem starts again.”
LURCHING RIGHT — Even before Donald Trump, Arizona Republicans had a soft spot for hard-liners. Think Evan Mecham and Joe Arpaio, or the party’s pre-Trump censorship of the late Sen. John McCain.
But what may soon be different after Tuesday’s elections is that with Kari Lake poised to win the gubernatorial primary alongside a stable of fellow election conspiracy theorists, there is no longer any traditionalist wing of the Republican Party in Arizona holding the line.
Not McCain or Doug Ducey, the outgoing Republican governor who went in for Lake’s more establishment-minded opponent, Karrin Taylor Robson. Not former Vice President Mike Pence, whose own trip to the state to help Robson — and oppose Trump — fell flat.
In some states where Trump’s endorsed candidates have lost primaries this year, including in Georgia, Nebraska and Idaho, institutionalists held on. But in one of the most critical swing states in the country — and in a place where Trump’s brand may be especially damaging in the general election and in 2024 — the old Republican establishment has been replaced with election deniers from the top to the bottom of the statewide ticket.
“I will call in a bit to talk about the doomsday ticket,” Barrett Marson, a Republican political strategist in the state, said today, when Nightly reached out to him to talk about the results. “Let me wake up and finish crying.”
A prominent Republican in the state had texted him a GIF of Thelma and Louise driving off the cliff.
Marson’s concerns are shared by mainstream Republicans in other states. But Arizona has an especially toxic relationship with Trump. The GOP during his tenure de el lost two Senate seats and a presidential election in the state for the first time since 1996. Trump-ism, as was painfully obvious to the GOP in Arizona in 2020, is a hard sell in Phoenix and its heavily populated suburbs.
Yet if Trump-y politics are difficult for the GOP in Arizona, that’s about all the state party has going now.
As of this evening, Lake, a former TV anchor who has said she would not have certified the 2020 election, had pulled ahead in the gubernatorial race. If her lead de ella holds, as Republicans in Arizona expect, she will now be the party’s standard bearer.
Then there’s state Rep. Mark Finchem, a celebrity in election conspiracy circles, who won his primary for secretary of state. Republican speaker of Arizona’s House Rusty Bowers, who was censored by the state Republican Party for testifying to the Jan. 6 committee about Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, got shellacked by a Trump-backed challenger who thinks the devil was at work in the 2020 outcome.
In the primary for state attorney general, Trump-endorsed Abe Hamadeh, another election denier — and a critic of “weak-kneed Republicans” — prevailed. And in the US Senate primary, Blake Masters, who maintains Trump won in 2020also won.
“The Trump-endorsed candidates ran the table,” said Stan Barnes, a former state lawmaker and longtime Republican consultant.
For Democrats, this was all good news.
Instead of inflation or education any of the other “traditional campaign issues that candidates normally discuss,” Barnes said, Democrats in Arizona this fall “get to talk about the Trump candidates. They get to talk about running against Donald Trump.”
It might be enough to keep Trump’s class of Arizona Republicans from ever taking office. On the other hand, the environment is so good for the GOP nationally this year that some or all of them may win.
For Republicans hoping for a post-Trump reform, that outcome may be even worse.
“I think the only way back is by humiliation at the ballot box, and the problem is the Democrats aren’t strong enough to do that,” said Bill Gates, a Republican Maricopa County supervisor.
Of the Republicans, he said, “I think they are electable, which is frightening.”
“The election last night was a catastrophe for the Arizona Republican Party,” Gates said, “and, I would argue, our democracy.”
Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at [email protected]. Or contact tonight’s author at [email protected] or on Twitter at @davidsiders.
— Indiana GOP Rep. Walorski, 3 others die in auto accident:The Indiana Republican was a senior House member, her party’s top member on the House Ethics Committee and a member of the Ways and Means Committee. Her communications director de ella, Emma Thomson, and Zachary Potts of the St. Joseph County Republican Party were also killed in the accident, the sheriff’s office announced, as was the driver of the vehicle that collided with theirs. Walorski’s death is a shock to the Capitol community, where two other sitting House members have died this year: Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) and Jim Hagedorn (R-Minn.) died within a month of each other earlier this year.
— Justice Department sues Peter Navarro for Trump White House emails:The Justice Department today sued the former Trump trade adviser in an effort to force him to turn over emails from his tenure in the White House. Navarro, who worked for the White House during the entirety of Trump’s presidency, had used “at least one non-official email account … to send and receive messages constituting Presidential records,” the Justice Department said in a court filing. Attorneys also accused him of “wrongfully retaining them” in violation of federal record-keeping laws, as Navarro did not copy the messages into an official government account, nor did he respond to the National Archivist’s initial request for the emails.
— Sinema requests changes to party-line climate, health care and tax bill:Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz), who has not weighed in on whether she will vote for the legislation, wants to nix language narrowing the so-called carried interest loophole, which would change the way some investment income is taxed, according to three people familiar with the matter. Cutting that provision would ax $14 billion of the bill’s $739 billion in projected revenue. Sinema also wants roughly $5 billion in drought resilience funding added to the legislation, a key request for Arizona given the state’s problems with water supply.
— Biden and Harris praise Kansas voters for defeating anti-abortion amendment:President Joe Biden today lauded voters in Kansas for rejecting a constitutional measure that would have stripped abortion protections from the state’s constitution. The failed Kansas amendment comes as the Biden administration makes a move to protect pregnant people who travel for access to reproductive care. Biden signed an executive order at today’s meeting that would examine ways to protect pregnant people who have to travel out of state for an abortion if their state bans it.
— Senate overwhelmingly backs NATO membership for Finland, Sweden:The Senate today voted overwhelmingly to admit Finland and Sweden to NATO, putting the military alliance on track for a historic expansion in response to Russia’s war in Ukraine. With 95 senators voting in favor, the defense treaty heads to President Joe Biden’s desk where he is expected to ratify it in the coming days, making the US the 22nd NATO nation to give its approval. All 30 NATO members are expected to complete the ratification process before the end of the year, in a signal to Moscow that the alliance will not shirk from deterring future Russian aggression. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) was the only senator to vote against the treaty.
DOWN TO THE WIRE — The European Union is making a final push to save the Iran nuclear deal, agreeing all negotiators for an unexpected and sudden resumption of talks on Thursday, three sources familiar with the situation told POLITICO.
The goal — as it has been for months — is to restore a 2015 deal that saw Iran agree to limit its nuclear ambitions in exchange for heavy sanctions relief, writes Stephanie Lichtenstein. The agreement has been all but dead since the US pulled out in 2018. Talks to revive it ran aground earlier this year.
Negotiators are now descending on Vienna to see if there’s any sliver of hope left. Diplomats will be present from the US, Iran, China, Russia, Germany, Britain and France, as well as the EU, which is acting as a mediator since Iran refuses to talk directly to the US
It is not yet clear how senior the present officials will be and how long the talks will last. Sources familiar with the negotiations played down expectations and cautioned that it was far too early to say whether the talks will be successful.
PERMISSION FOR FLYBY — Washington is on edge as China readies a series of provocative military drills set to kick off on Thursday in response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, writes Lara Seligmann and Paul McLeary. Beijing has threatened incursions into the island’s territory, and for the first time, conventional missile launches over the island.
The Chinese navy is positioning warships around the island, including its two aircraft carriers that have left port in recent days, in what officials described as a blockade. The Chinese defense ministry released a map of six zones surrounding the island where it plans to conduct the drills, some of which potentially overlap with Taiwan’s territorial waters. The live-fire exercises will begin at noon local time on Thursday and last three days.
Officials say they see China’s moves thus far as mostly bluster. But there are signs Beijing is planning more provocative military actions during the upcoming exercise. China has never before flown aircraft or launched missiles into Taiwan’s territorial waters — something that could happen during the drills, said Bonnie Glaser, an East Asia analyst at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
WALKING BACK — Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones testified today that he now understands it was irresponsible of him to declare the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre a hoax and that he now believes it was “100% real,” according to the Associated Press.
Speaking a day after the parents of a 6-year-old boy who was killed in the 2012 attack testified about the suffering, death threats and harassment they’ve endured because of what Jones has trumpeted on his media platforms, the Infowars host told a Texas courtroom that he definitely thinks the attack happened.
“Especially since I’ve met the parents. It’s 100% real,” Jones said at his trial to determine how much he and his media company, Free Speech Systems, owe for defaming Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis. Their son Jesse Lewis was among the 20 students and six educators who were killed in the attack in Newtown, Conn., which was the deadliest school shooting in American history.
At one point, Heslin and Lewis’s lawyer Mark Bankston informed Jones that his attorneys had mistakenly sent Bankston the last two years’ worth of texts from Jones’ cellphone. Jones had previously testified in a deposition that he had no texts on his phone about the shooting. “Do you know what perjury is?” Bankston asked Jones.
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image: The new approach determines a user’s real-time reaction to an image or scene based on their eye movement, particularly saccades, the super-quick movements of the eye that jerk between points before fixing on an image or object. The researchers will demonstrate their new work titled, “Image Features Influence Reaction Time: A Learned Probabilistic Perceptual Model for Saccade Latency”, at SIGGRAPH 2022 held Aug. 8-11 in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
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Credit: ACM SIGGRAPH
What motivates or drives the human eye to fixate on a target and how, then, is that visual image perceived? What is the lag time between our visual acuity and our reaction to the observation? In the burgeoning field of immersive virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), connecting those dots, in real time, between eye movement, visual targets, and decision-making is the driving force behind a new computational model developed by a team of computer scientists at New York University, Princeton University, and NVIDIA.
The new approach determines a user’s real-time reaction to an image or scene based on their eye movement, particularly saccades, the super-quick movements of the eye that jerk between points before fixing on an image or object. Saccades allow for frequent shifts of attention to better understand one’s surroundings and to localize objects of interest. Understanding the mechanism and behavior of saccades is vital in understanding human performance in visual environments, representing an exciting area of research in computer graphics.
The researchers will demonstrate their new work titled, “Image Features Influence Reaction Time: A Learned Probabilistic Perceptual Model for Saccade Latency”, at SIGGRAPH 2022 held Aug. 8-11 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The annual conference, which will be in-person and virtual this year, spotlights the world’s leading professionals, academics, and creative minds at the forefront of computer graphics and interactive techniques.
“There has recently been extensive research to measure the visual qualities perceived by humans, especially for VR/AR displays,” says the paper’s senior author Qi Sun, PhD, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at New York University Tandon School of Engineering.
“But we have yet to explore how the displayed content can influence our behaviors, even noticeably, and how we could possibly use those displays to push the boundaries of our performance that are otherwise not possible.”
Inspired by how the human brain transmits data and makes decisions, the researchers implement a neurologically-inspired probabilistic model that mimics the accumulation of “cognitive confidence” that leads to a human decision and action. They conducted a psychophysical experiment with parameterized stimuli to observe and measure the correlation between image characteristics, and the time it takes to process them in order to trigger a saccade, and whether/how the correlation differs from that of visual acuity.
They validate the model, using data from more than 10,000 trials of user experiments using an eye-tracked VR display, to understand and formulate the correlation between the visual content and the “speed” of decision-making based on reaction to the image. The results show that the new model prediction accurately represents real-world human behavior.
The proposed model may serve as a metric for predicting and altering eye-image response time of users in interactive computer graphics applications, and may also help to improve design of VR experiences and player performances in esports. In other sectors such as healthcare and auto, the new model could help estimate a physician’s or a driver’s ability to rapidly respond and react to emergencies. In esports, it can be applied to measure the competition fairness between players or to better understand how to maximize one’s performance where reaction times come down to milliseconds.
In future work, the team plans to explore the potential of cross-modal effects such as visual-audio cues that jointly affect our cognition in scenarios such as driving. They are also interested in expanding the work to better understand and represent the accuracy of human actions influenced by visual content.
The paper’s authors, Budmonde Duinkharjav (NYU); Praneeth Chakravarthula (Princeton); Rachel Brown (NVIDIA); Anjul Patney (NVIDIA); and Qi Sun (NYU), are set to demonstrate their new method Aug. 11 at SIGGRAPH as part of the program, Roundtable Session: Perception. The paper can be found here.
About ACM SIGGRAPH ACM SIGGRAPH is an international community of researchers, artists, developers, filmmakers, scientists and business professionals with a shared interest in computer graphics and interactive techniques. A special interest group of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s first and largest computing society, our mission is to nurture, champion and connect like-minded researchers and practitioners to catalyze innovation in computer graphics and interactive techniques.
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.
Cricket Australia is worried a pandemic-induced dive in the number of first-time cricketers could lead to a “missing generation” of kids taking up the sport around the nation.
Key points:
Cricket Australia is concerned by a 10pc drop in first-time participants for the 2021-22 season
It is feared the pandemic will create a missing generation of cricketers
Tasmania has bucked the trend, with numbers growing 40 per cent on pre-COVID levels
Its annual cricket census for 2021-22 has revealed a 10 per cent drop in participants in the organisation’s Blast programme, largely caused by closures to centers in major cities as a result of COVID-19 lockdowns.
“It’s absolutely something that is a worry for us,” James Allsop, who heads up the community arm of Cricket Australia, said.
“It’s something we are mobilizing around as part of the new strategy that we’re about to launch in the next couple of years.”
A year of new, young cricketers have been lost, according to Allsop, and cricketing authorities are desperate to ensure it does not happen again for fear of losing a generation of budding batters, bowlers and fielders.
“We’ve lost one year. I’m really confident we’re not going to lose two years,” Allsop said.
“But we might have lost some kids as six-year-olds but we can get them back as a seven-year-old.”
Allsop pointed to Cricket Australia data which underscores the importance of attracting first-time cricketers at a young age.
Ninety per cent of participants play for the first time before the age of 12, according to the data, and, last year, 70 per cent started before the age of nine.
“Cricket is probably unique from other sports in that you do have to come in at an early age to develop those skills,” he said.
The cricket census paints a positive picture on the whole. (Getty Images: Kelly Barnes)
First-timers aside, the cricket census paints a positive picture, in spite of more than two years of disruptions to community sport.
Club cricket has grown. Junior club registrations rose by 5 per cent on the year prior, and six per cent compared to pre-pandemic levels.
Senior club registrations have risen, too, by 5 per cent.
The number of girls registered for junior club cricket lifted too on pre-COVID levels.
A big reason the sport has been able to grow despite the pandemic is timing. Winter sports like AFL and NRL were hit harder by state-based lockdowns.
“There’s no doubt we’ve been really fortunate with seasons and obviously the lockdowns in winter haven’t affected us as much from a club participation point of view,” Allsop said.
“But nonetheless, our big markets were still in lockdown in October, November.”
Registered participation overall is still down 16 per cent since before the pandemic, something attributed mostly to the impacts on indoor cricket and school competition.
Tasmanian bucks the blast trend
While the Blast program has suffered in bigger metropolitan areas such as Melbourne and Sydney, it has actually grown in Tasmania, according to Cricket Australia.
The census showed Blast in Tasmania grew 40 per cent on pre-COVID levels.
The key, Allsop explained, was that the program traveled to different communities, targeting a variety of multicultural and socio-economic backgrounds.
Allsop said Cricket Australia’s strategy over the next five years would see it look to become more flexible, “opening up more opportunities to play Blast cricket”.
“So rather than a center only opening up at a club on a Saturday morning, we’ll work with them to open up on a Friday and Monday night and a Saturday,” he said.
“Last year, we’ve had a hiccup but I’m really confident we’ll turn it around in the next 12 months and beyond.”
A gunman is reportedly on the loose after four people were injured in a shooting in rural North Queensland.
Emergency crews were called to a property in Bogie – a small outback mining town in the Whitsundays near Collinsville – at 8.45am on Thursday morning.
Police are still at the scene and have urged members of the public to avoid the area as the incident is still unfolding.
An emergency declaration was made at 11.30am under the Public Safety Preservation Act with boundaries encompassing Sutherland Road, Normanby Road, Mount Compton Road and Starvation Creek.
“One male has been located some distance from the property and is currently being treated for a gunshot wound,” Queensland Police said.
“Police are currently conducting emergency operations in the area and requesting members of the public and aircraft to not attend the location.”
Opal Ridge Motel staff member Elly Colls told The Guardian she was alerted to the incident at 11am.
She said when she received the call from another local she thought she should lock up her house as she didn’t think they had found the shooter.
It is understood the shooting happened at a remote location and there are issues getting there.
Bogie’s population was 207 people, according to the latest census data.
Queensland Ambulance Service reportedly sent eight crews to the scene.
In a now deleted tweet, RACQ CQ Rescue helicopter said it was “responding to reports of four people injured in an alleged shooting west of Collinsville”.
A RACQ Central Queensland spokesperson told the ABC earlier they understood the shooter was still at large.
Peter Navarro, the oft-combative former Trump adviser already facing a fall trial on charges of contempt of Congress, was sued by the government Wednesday over his refusal to turn over private emails he allegedly used to conduct White House business during the Trump administration.
Navarro, according to the court papers filed by the Justice Department on behalf of the National Archives, “has refused to return any Presidential records that he retained absent a grant of immunity for the act of returning such documents.”
The lawsuit charges the economic adviser “is wrongfully retaining Presidential records that are the property of the United States, and which constitute part of the permanent historical record of the prior administration.”
A lawyer for Navarro did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
More than 1,000 election-worker threats reported in past year, official tells Senate committee
The court filing says the controversy surrounding Navarro’s emails began when a congressional committee reviewing how the government handled the coronavirus pandemic discovered that Navarro, who often played an outsize role in the Trump White House’s public discussion of the pandemic response, had used a private email account to conduct government work. From the National Archives’ point of view, those emails were official government records.
After more than a month of discussions about the subject with government lawyers, Navarro’s attorney told officials that they estimated between 200 and 250 documents could be considered presidential records.
Separately, Navarro has sparred repeatedly with government officials since his arrest in June on charges of contempt of Congress for allegedly refusing to provide testimony or documents to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
Navarro publicly denounced the agents who arrested him, and is due back in court next week as he prepares for a November trial on contempt charges. Another former Trump adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, was convicted last month in a similar case.
It is very exciting to get caught up in the narrative around the metaverse, Livewire co-founder Indy Khabra told this week’s Mumbrellacast, yet the reality is 17 million Australians are already gaming regularly, and his and co-founder Brad Manuel’s company is working with brands on “practical outcomes”.
“I think metaverse, and the word metaverse is so overused at the moment,” he said. “When we speak to brands, it’s very much around practical outcomes and what we can actually achieve by connecting them to the gaming community and the gaming ecosystem.”
Manuel and Khabra
“When you think of the suite of solutions that we provide brands and our clients, it actually starts right to the point of research and understanding what the consumer crossover is for that brand, and really then leaning into an objective view of what the KPIs and outcomes for a brand is.
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“Predominantly, that’s starting to look at things like customer lifetime value and brand affinity, brand loyalty, but also that could be into more tactical areas and gaming as a gateway to that new set of audience you can actually achieve, whether it’s building a long term strategy to be gaining user acquisition or market share or being defensive. You can actually create that within this new space.”
Despite the hype surrounding the metaverse over the last 12 months, research from Ipsos in May found that only 44% of Australians are familiar with it, and Khabra said that while it is easy to get caught up in the appeal, it is still “in the early days of what the end vision is”.
“I think keeping it practical in outcomes is going to be a better use case for campaigns, and most importantly, the outcomes of campaigns that brands are trying to activate against.”
He said it is a two-way narrative, “not only for brands and marketers but also for consumers because the user experiences have to be there also”.
“You don’t necessarily want to build something that only ten people are going to show up in, and then all of a sudden it’s staying stagnant and there’s a heap of investment that’s been put into it. So there is definitely a balance that needs to be struck.”
While staying modest about the vast amount of opportunities in the gaming space, which Livewire has seen partner with gaming giant Activision Blizzard, and most recently Uber Eats, it has also launched offices in London, Singapore, and Mumbai, already in its short existence.
Livewire recently signed a deal with Uber Eats
Manuel spoke about what can be expected in the next five to ten years for Livewire, and marketing in gaming more generally, which already has a consumer base of 3 billion globally.
“I think we’ll see more and more brands really authentically woven into games, but not just from an advertising point of view. We’ve seen some bad examples already, probably some how not to do it, but their idea and the concept is right.”
“A game like Apex Legends or a Cyberpunk or any game that’s based in a world where advertising currently exists or previously existed, the game creators actually make fake ads, fake worlds, fake shops, fake stores, and fake products, because a modern day world doesn’t actually feel accurate without products.
“So I think we’ll see more global and regional partnerships of how this will integrate into games, and also how publishers will upgrade their technology to be able to regionally cut and segment deals the same way they would for like sports LED screens where they overlay it with different graphics and pieces.”
Catch the full conversation with Manuel and Khabra on this week’s Mumbrellacast.
Further details of Matt Lodge’s exit from the Broncos have emerged as the front rower braces to face his former side when Brisbane battle the Roosters on Thursday night.
The Broncos agreed to pay up to $1 million of Lodge’s salary to facilitate his departure from Red Hill, a move that came under intense scrutiny at the time.
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“You try not to be critical of Brisbane as a former player but I don’t think we can believe anything that’s coming out of that place at the moment,” Brent Tate said on ‘NRL Tonight’ in the wake of Lodge’s exit to the Warriors.
“Kevvie came out and said they’d stay and if Matt Lodge goes, honestly, I think clubs are built on trust and at the moment there doesn’t seem to be that at that club.
“There’s different messages coming from all different people within the ranks and I hope for Matt Lodge’s sake he gets to go to a club because he’s been so up in the air and I know how difficult that would be for a player who plays on passion and emotion.”
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Matt Lodge left Brisbane in 2021. (AAP Image/Darren England)Source: AAP
Now though, a report from news corp has revealed more details on Lodge’s exit while chairman Karl Morris also explained why Brisbane was willing to chip in to speed the process up.
“Matt Lodge was a redemption story and it was great to have him back,” Morris told news corp.
“He did all the tough work he had to do while playing for Redcliffe to get back into the NRL. He completely gave up the drink and was a model citizen while he was with us.
“For whatever reason, culturally, it didn’t work with him and the new coaching staff and we decided to part ways.
“Kevvie wants a certain type of player and person at the Broncos and he just didn’t suit the type of team Kevvie was trying to build.”
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Major “Reboot” need for Knights – Buzz | 01:08
the news corp report claims that Lodge’s character was not the best match for what Walters was trying to build at Red Hill, with suggestions he cut corners at training.
Lodge is also said to have been sprayed by one Broncos official for his attire around the club.
But speaking to news corp ahead of Thursday’s game, lock forward Pat Carrigan was full of praise for his former teammate.
“Lodgey always plays well and I’m sure he will step up against us, I’m excited for him,” he said.
“He’s a halfback in a front-rower’s body, he’s actually a very smart footballer and he taught me a lot about the game.
“I am grateful for a lot of the stuff Lodgey did for us younger blokes here. He gave us that introduction to first grade. We had some good battles on the training ground so he will be up for this one and we will be too.”
