Michmutters

What happens if you want to make a game about Gotham City but can’t center it around Batman? Easy! You tap the bench warmers. Warner Bros. has revealed the opening chapter of Gotham Knightsits action game DC heroes who aren’t the Caped Crusader.

Gotham Knightsfirst announced in 2020, is under development at WB Games Montreal, best known for the 2013 action game Batman: Arkham Origins. WB Games had previously shared a 13-minute gameplay clip featuring B-list DC antiheroes Nightwing and Red Hood. (Gotham Knights stars the Jason Todd iteration.) The most recent clip, which shows about 15 minutes of gameplay from the prologue chapter, focuses solely on Batgirl. Via IGNhere’s the clip:

IGN notes that WB Games is keeping the specific plot details under wraps, but it’s clear the four playable characters — Batgirl, Red Hood, Nightwing, and Robin — are reeling from the death of Batman. The opening mission focuses on Batgirl planning to infiltrate a facility, continuing the trail of a case Batman didn’t quite finish before he died.

Earlier footage of Gotham Knights teased a game that was heavy on collecting gear and navigating “the biggest version” of Gotham City, spurring concern that it’d be just another open-world loot grind. But the base gameplay shown off today, which doesn’t explore those aspects of the game, actually looks pretty sick. Who knows: Maybe this is another open-world game with a killer campaign that’s padded out by a ton of side-quest fluff.

There’s a grappling hook (hell yeah). Batgirl employs some Witcher-style “investigating,” meaning that you press a button to automatically illuminate a path of footprints that show you exactly where you need to go. Combat against cannon fodder looks both weighty and spry. As with approximately 90 per cent of all gameplay previews, the clip ends with a fight against a mini-boss. With a shield. And some blatant signs of sociopath.

It’s all very sumptuously rendered, though of course the arms race of graphical fidelity has rapidly approached the point of diminishing returns. Still, for those interested in behind-the-scenes development diaries, here’s a brief clip showing the motion-capture work put into the game:

Check out how we took our real life Knights into the Belfry with one more from #SDCC. #GothamKnights pic.twitter.com/JWedzBew5O

— Gotham Knights (@GothamKnights) August 1, 2022

Gotham Knights you had a bit of a rocky road to release. It was initially planned to launch in 2021 across console generations. Last March, WB Games delayed it to 2022. This past May, WB Games scrapped the last-gen versions. That same month, the developers fielded backlash for including a character bio for Batgirl that leaned heavily on troops (it has since been rewritten). Gotham Knights is slated for release on October 25 for Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC.

An appealing photo of a pizza or other menu item can help a restaurant increase sales – especially if the right filter is used, a new study suggests.

Photos high in color saturation make food look fresher and tastier to viewers, which increases their willingness to order the menu items, researchers found.

Color saturation refers to the intensity of the color in the image – the vividness and richness of the reds and greens and blues.

But how well color saturation works to make food appealing depends on the visual distance of the food in the photo – and even on whether consumers plan to dine alone or with others.

In the cutthroat restaurant business, these results provide a simple method to increase sales, said Stephanie Liu, lead author of the study and associate professor of hospitality management at The Ohio State University.

“On Instagram, it means using the ‘X-Pro II’ filter on your food photos rather than the ‘Earlybird’ filter,” Liu said. “It is not difficult and doesn’t cost a tell me, so it is an easy win for restaurant marketers.”

The study was recently published online in the Journal of Business Research.

The researchers did two online studies.

In one study, 267 participants were asked to imagine themselves browsing through options on an online food ordering platform.

They were shown photos of a poke bowl, a Hawaiian dish featuring chunks of raw, marinated fish, vegetables and sauce over rice. They were from a fictitious restaurant named Poke Kitchen.

Study participants were randomly assigned to view one of the four different photos with either high or low color saturation and either close or farther away visual distance.

The photos with high color saturation were edited with professional graphic design software to be 130% more saturated than the low-saturation photos. The up-close photos were 130% larger in radius and appeared closer to the observer than the more distant photo.

Participants were asked to rate how fresh the food in each photo looked, how tasty it looked and how likely they would be to purchase it.

The food in the more highly saturated photos looked fresher and tastier to participants, and that led them to be more likely to purchase the food, results showed.

But color saturation had a stronger effect when the food appeared more distant in the photos, Liu said.

“When the food is shown close up, it is already easy for viewers to imagine how fresh and tasty the food would be,” she said. “Color saturation is not as necessary.”

The second study involved 222 online participants. In this case, the participants were asked to imagine they were browsing Instagram and came across images of pizza from a fictitious restaurant near their home named Pizza City. They were shown photos either high or low in color saturation.

People in the study were also told they would either be eating alone or with family that night and were again asked to rate the pizza on perceived freshness and taste and on whether they would likely purchase the menu item.

As in the previous study, the food in the color-saturated photo was always seen as fresher and tastier and one that people would be more likely to buy. But that effect was stronger for people who were told they would be eating alone and weaker for those who would be eating with family.

“When people are eating with others, the social experience is a big part of what people look forward to,” Liu said.

“But when they anticipate eating alone, they focus more on the food itself. They want the food to be fresher and tastier and that’s why color saturation is more important in this context.”

These findings are more important now than ever before, with people ordering online and looking at photos to help them decide what to eat, Liu said.

“Restaurants have to post pictures of their food on social media and online ordering platforms,” she said.

“They should be paying as much attention, or maybe more, to the photos they post as they do to the text. Color saturation is one key element they need to focus on.”

Co-authors on the study were Laurie Luorong Wu of Temple University, Xi Yu of the City University of Macau and Huiling Huang of the University of Macau in China. Xi Yu and Huiling Huang are recent doctoral graduates of the hospitality management program at Ohio State.

Intel has announced its plans to launch Wi-Fi 7, the next generation W-FI Standard that is set to replace the current Wi-Fi 6E with double the data processing speeds reaching 5.8Gbps, support for up to 36 Gbps when working with data and more stable 6GHz bandwidth.

“We are currently developing Intel’s Wi-Fi ‘802.11be’ in order to obtain the ‘Wi-Fi Alliance’ certification, and it will be installed in PC products such as laptops by 2024. We expect it to appear in major markets in 2025 ,” Said vice president of Intel’s wireless solutions division Eric McLaughlin.

In addition, Wi-Fi 7 is set to be future proof, as it will be built ready to support bandwidth of up to 7GHz once the Federal Communications Commission opens it up.

“Wi-Fi 7 almost doubles the frequency bandwidth of 802.11ax (170 MHz) to 320 MHz and doubles the speed of Wi-Fi. Since there is more than a year left before the release of 802.11be, there is still a chance that we could improve the processing speed even further,” he added.

Apple on the other hand, is prepping for an imminent rollout of Wi-Fi 6E across their devices, long after it first started appearing in devices in early 2021. It was expected to be featured on last year’s iPhone 13 but is instead expected to launch with the upcoming iPhone 14.

Despite being late to the party, Apple’s rollout of Wi-Fi 6E will provide users with a massive upgrade in Wi-Fi speed, with access to the 6GHz spectrum and an increases speed to 2.6GBps over 2GBps from Wi-Fi 6. Whilst not even close to the doubling upgrade provided by Wi-Fi 7, its sure to bolster the connection speeds of the iPhones.

Currently, most Wi-Fi routers use under 50% of their total capabilities due to bottlenecking from firewalls, having multiple users on the same network and more. With Wi-Fi 7, Intel hopes to change that, allowing users to enjoy clearer and faster gaming, media streaming and overall connectivity.