Sniper Elite V2′s hyper-realistic, surgically accurate KillCam feature takes you inside your victim’s body to see precisely how your bullet will end his life. Will gamers embrace the gore, or is the KillCam a step over the line?

The creators of Sniper Elite V2, a third-person World War II shooter released this week, know that the success of a modern video game comes down to the details. They worked closely with historians to nail the feel of 1945 Berlin, all the way down to the pattern of the wallpaper inside a typical German home. The typeface on the Nazi propaganda littering the crumbling virtual urban streets is Antiqua, the preferred font of the Reich.

But the primary subject of research for the team was more, shall we say, internal: what happens when a sniper’s bullet enters a human body? They consulted medical experts, ex-military snipers, photography of real-life gunshot victims and x-rays of bone fractures, gathering a mountain of data and funneling it into through the incredibly powerful software and hardware used to create today’s videogames. The final result: a realistic simulation they call the “KillCam,” in which the camera follows a bullet as it leaves the sniper’s gun, flies through the air, hits its mark, and invades the body–with all the bone-crushing, organ-bursting, blood-spewing destruction that entails.

I went to see Sniper Elite V2 demonstrated in a hotel suite in midtown Manhattan on a weekday morning. In the room were the same three people you see in almost every product briefing: a young PR girl with a notebook, for scribbling notes about me and my reactions, which is not as flattering as you’d think; a talky representative from the developer (this one was British, and named Tim Jones; he’s the head of creative for the developer); and a stoic engineer-type, a stocky guy from the publisher who stood behind the couch and spoke very little but was outrageously, effortlessly good at the game. Before the demonstration, Jones asked if I wanted to play. I declined, theoretically so I could better observe and take notes, but mostly because I am lousy at shooting games. The stoic engineer took my place. He would be the sniper. Later, during the demonstration of co-op mode, Tim Jones would provide his ground-cover.

Jones and stoic engineer played that cooperative mode in a burned-out Berlin in 1945. The game is fairly cleverly designed, as far as shooters go; it’s not a “shoot everyone in sight” sort of game–not a “run and gun,” said Jones–but one much more about stealth and strategy. This level found the players tasked with destroying a cargo truck, which in turn required several sub-tasks to set up the final shoot-the-truck sequence. They’d have to draw enemies away from the truck, plant explosive charges, and set them off (by, not entirely realistically, shooting the glowing red fuel caps around the outside of the truck). While going through that checklist, Nazis would need to be dispatched. The stoic engineer would pick off long-range targets, and Tim Jones would set traps and place bombs.

You’re killing people. And that’s a messy business.I was going to ask the players to show me the KillCam, basically the entire reason I was there. Th KillCam is triggered only when a particularly well-placed shot is fired, and I didn’t want to watch these guys play videogames like I did in middle school when I was bad at Battletoads and hanging out in friends’ basements. I didn’t have to worry. Within a minute, I saw it. The target: a mirror image of the stoic engineer’s own player, a Nazi sniper perched a few hundred yards away on the roof of an abandoned building, ducking behind a shard of concrete that once may have been a wall. The stoic engineer found his target, lowered the crosshairs expertly on the enemy–not directly on the enemy, but slightly above, because at this distance, the player has to adjust for the effects of gravity. (On expert levels, you also have to contend with wind, and the game features heart rate and breath-pattern meters–your shot will be more accurate if you shoot with a low heart rate and empty lungs.)

Immediately the game paused for the KillCam cutscene. Everyone stop what you’re doing and watch this.

The bullet exploded out of the muzzle of the Gewehr rifle, emerging in a bright, jagged flash. The camera pulled back as it began its flight through the air, then quickly swung to the side. You could see the bullet rotate, see the waves, like dreamy smoke rings, left in its wake. The music muted slightly. Then, up ahead, I saw the mirror-image Nazi sniper, directly in the bullet’s path. Time slowed down even more as the bullet approached its target. It’s a perfect head-shot, an achievement. The stoic engineer will receive a small digital trophy for this, an award that will pop up in the corner of the screen. The camera rotated back behind the bullet to follow it as it got closer and closer to the enemy. Then it reached the enemy’s face. Suddenly the Nazi’s skin peeled back, like a Venetian blind rolling up, snapping backwards over his skull. I saw the bare, perfectly clean bone, the teeth, grinning and eerie, the spinal column beneath with its visible path of nerves. The bullet splattered through the cornea, shattered the bones of the eye-socket and cheek, broke through the blood vessels at the back of the eye, burst backwards through the brain cavity and punched a hole in the back of the skull, its course realistically altered by its journey. Blood and bone shot upwards, outwards, backwards. The entire cutscene took maybe eight seconds.

“Nice shot,” says the talky representative. “Thanks,” mutters the stoic engineer. I’d see the KillCam several more times, would see “Vital Hit” bullets pierce vital organs in the chest cavity (heart, lungs, liver, kidney), break ribs, turn collarbones and pelvic bones into coarse fragments of bone, and, on one memorable occasion, would see a bullet strike a hand grenade the enemy wore on a belt. The grenade exploded, almost robbing us of the full force of the KillCam, the Nazi’s body reduced to pulp and shrapnel in the blunt force of the grenade, negating any need for an x-ray image of his death. (The name of this type of shot, for some reason: a “potato masher.”) Not as clean as the sniper round, but rarer. The talky representative was excited to explain to me what had happened. “Did you see that? He hit the grenade!”

“Wow,” I said.

* * *

What struck me most about seeing these guys play the game was how businesslike they were. Partly that’s because these guys are the creators of the game: they’ve played it, I’m sure, hundreds or thousands of times already. Nothing in the game surprises them. But there was no posturing, no “Fucking awesome, man!” when a Nazi met his grisly end, not even for my benefit. No high fives, no elbow nudges, no cheering, no grins. Instead, in between the talky representative’s steady monologue about the intricacies of Sniper Elite V2′s gameplay, which I mostly ignored, there was quiet cooperation. “Coming up the stairs on your left,” said the stoic engineer, who could see the talky representative’s avatar from his sky-high perch on the rooftops. “Cheers,” said the talky representative, as he set a tight-wire explosive trap, which the Nazis would trip when they reached the top of the stairs. Upon their explosion, the stoic engineer and the talky representative didn’t so much give a nod of approval. They moved away from the doorway, because the explosion, while effective, had given their position away. They weren’t watching an action movie. They were working.

And that’s part of the what makes Sniper Elite V2 so interesting. It is easily the most graphic, violent video game I’ve ever seen, but the violence is relatively realistic, not cartoony. The game has the dubious honor of humanizing Nazis more than any of the scores of WWII-era games, films, and books that came before it: these are not anonymous targets, dispatched from far away with the tug of the R-trigger: once you see testicles exploded, fingers severed, an artery slashed open by the force of your bullet, that you shot, from your own gun, you feel the effects of your actions in a way I didn’t expect. The original idea might well have been to create the most extreme, violent period shooter ever made. Blood! Guts! X-rays! But the effect is the complete opposite. You’re not yanking a cartoon ninja’s spine out of his body with your bare hands, or stabbing a shrieking purple alien with a glowing light-sword. You’re killing people. And that’s a messy business.

* * *

For all its talk of realism–the publisher has billed the game as “the most brutally realistic military sharpshooter out there”–there are serious lapses in realism throughout the game. It’s realistic until realism interferes with the fun of the game, at which point realism can be cheerfully abandoned. Having to monitor your heart rate, wind speed and direction, and the precise loss of altitude your bullet will experience due to gravity over distance? Those are realistic variables, and fun ones. But with rare exceptions, a shot to the torso will kill any target. An exploded kidney will drop a Nazi like a stone, just as dead as if he’d been shot through the frontal lobe. Shots to the wrists or knees will sometimes mean instant death, for some reason (although most times, a leg shot will topple the enemy, leaving him to scream for help from his comrades–whom you can then take down).

But the question of realism isn’t an easy one to answer–as a player, you don’t really have the option of trotting over to a Nazi you’ve just shot in the torso to see if the splinters of bone fragment from his ribcage have reacted in a realistic way to the effects of the cavitation caused by the bullet, or if the enemy is bleeding out from a shot to the femoral artery in an appropriate time frame. You get, at most, two seconds of the bullet entering the body, then it’s time to move on to the next target.

You yourself are remarkably bulletproof–you can take several direct hits before having to duck behind cover and heal up, which you will, automatically. You’ll score “two-in-ones” fairly often, in which you’ll kill two enemies with a single bullet. In the real world, that shot is referred to as a “Quigley,” a reference to a 1990 Tom Selleck movie. It’s extremely rare.

The AI are smart enough to locate you due to sound, but hiding for a few seconds will send them back to their regular rounds, where they seem not to notice that they have to step over the bodies of their fellow soldiers who were shot by a hidden sniper moments before. “Oh well, back to the patrol!” It’s not tremendously more complex than the stealth mechanics of Sly Cooper, which is a decade-old game about a cartoon master thief raccoon and his two friends, a turtle and a hippopotamus.

* * *

You still get extra points for hitting a vital organ.The motives for creating this element of the game are murky, by necessity. It would be sort of untoward and unnecessarily confrontational for Jones and the other representatives from Rebellion and 505 Games to be vocal about the awesomeness of shooting somebody in the kidney and watching it rupture. Jones said it would be false to claim that the “visceral ‘wow’ factor [...] wasn’t a big factor in our decision to design and implement it that way.” Sniping feels like a relatively mechanical way of killing someone–you’re removed from the act itself, separated by distance and the glass of the scope, making adjustments for wind and gravity and angle in the same way you adjust the steering wheel to keep your car in its lane. “It does force players to reflect on the fate of their enemies in a way that many other games gloss over,” he said.

He also referred to the KillCam, in a sort of action-movie, U.S.-Army-recruiting video way, as a “heroic death sequence” for the fallen enemy. That’s just one of a whole mess of ways to approach the game–in your gut, you may think it’s noble, or you may think it’s brutal, or, as much of the chat on messageboards shows, you may think it’s awesome.

The messageboards are full of comments like this: “It’d be cool if they’d allow for a replay kill-cam, with a rotatable/zoom-able camera with editing tools and the ability to upload your videos to [Xbox] Live/PSN for others to watch.” Or excited folks who “just got [their] first nut-shot.” For them, the KillCam is just a new gore-delivery system, the latest in a long line of mildly transgressive evolutions in gaming violence. Shooting games are a dime a dozen, and as much as Tim tried to insist to me that what really sets Sniper Elite V2 apart from the pack is its stealth mechanics, I know better. Stealth isn’t new. Watching your bullet puncture a lung from the inside, that’s new. The trailers lean heavily on the gore. And no matter how educational or perspective-altering the KillCams are, you still get extra points for hitting a vital organ.

Reviews so far are mixed, but all mention the KillCam. The GameSpot review calls the KillCam shots “gruesome and gratifying” and “delightfully gory,” and says “they never get old.” The Official Xbox Magazine review uses the phrase “buckets of red awesomesauce.” GameInformer’s Tim Turi self-identifies as a “gore hound,” but even he notes that “some of these kills made my stomach twitch a bit.”

Mine too.

Are all the stories about seamless Wi-Fi switching and Google Street View wardriving getting you down? Is your WPA2 password, well, “password”? Fear not, worried Wi-Fi lovers; researchers from Institut Polytechnique Grenoble and the Centre Technique du Papier have you covered — literally — with their spiffy Wi-Fi blocking wallpaper, charmingly called “Metapaper.”

The silver triangle snowflake-esque design may or may not be your cup of tea, but the French publications L’Informaticien and The Connexion report that it’s actually the wallpaper’s secret sauce. The geometric shapes are coated in conductive ink made with silver particles that block three separate Wi-Fi frequencies. If you don’t like it, the creators say slapping a layer of more eye-friendly wallpaper over it won’t damage its signal-blocking capabilities. Tin-foil hat types may even want to coat the walls in Wi-Fi-blocking paint before applying the Wi-Fi blocking wallpaper to get twice the protection, or, er, something.

Now, Wi-Fi-blocking wallpaper has been done before, but this one has a couple of key characteristics that set it apart from its competitors: price. Other Wi-Fi-proof wallpaper costs an arm and a leg but when the Finnish company Ahlstrom launches this product next year they expect it to cost “equivalent to that of a classic wallpaper mid-range.”

Smartphones work perfectly fine with the wallpaper, too — texting, calling, mobile data and all. Only a handful of Wi-Fi frequencies are blocked.

Now for the bad part: if you just coat your walls in the stuff, Wi-Fi signals could leak out through non-covered surfaces. That’s fixable, but the fix entails covering your roof, floor and windows with the wallpaper. Sitting in a dark room may be boring, but hey, at least your home network will be safe from Google’s prying eyes.

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Image credit: L’Informaticien

Here’s how Nobuhiro Takahashi and the University of Electro-Communications describe this project: “‘SHIRI’ is a buttocks humanoid robot that expresses various emotions with organic movement of the artificial muscles.” It’s designed to respond to slaps, caresses, and finger-pokes. It is super weird.

The artificial posterior is comprised of a silicon skin and a “rigid urethane skeleton,” in a full-scale size. Mostly it looks like each “cheek” is a little red airbag, with modulating pressure that gives it its reaction. There’s a microphone embedded to detect pressure–not sure how that works, exactly, but it can certainly differentiate between different kinds of pressure. A poke, slap, and caress were all demonstrated, and the actuators change the pressure of the cheeks to respond in kind to each one (including, like, quivering in fear).

It may not be as elegant as the string quintet robots or Herb the robotic butler, but Shiri (Japanese for “buttocks,” obviously) serves the highest purpose of all: starring in a weird YouTube video to amuse us for a few minutes.

[via Kotaku]

The New York Court of Appeals just ruled that “viewing” child porn online is not the same as “possessing” it. But is the idea of “possessing” a digital file outdated?

In a ruling yesterday, the New York Court of Appeals dismissed several counts of possession of child pornography charged to college professor James D. Kent, after a computer he brought to university IT for anti-virus service was found to contain child pornography in its browser cache.

For those specific counts–he’s still going to jail on other, related charges–Kent was found to have not committed an “affirmative act” such as downloading, saving, or printing the image files in order to “possess” them; rather, they were passively saved by his browser in its hidden cache.

This may sound like a minute technicality, but it’s in fact a revealing comment on the way we consume today’s web. It all comes down to one very new problem: the concept of what we “possess” online is based on the increasingly outdated concept of the digital “file.” What happens to the law in a streaming, cloud-connected world? A world where here are no more “files”?

Throughout internet history to date, there has been a distinct difference between viewing and possessing. Looking at a Far Side cartoon on a Geocities web page is different than printing it out and thumb-tacking it to your cubicle door. Simple. But as connections have sped up, hardware has gotten faster, and the internet on our phones has become equally if not more usable than the one on our computers, that line has all but disappeared. When you have constant, high-speed and portable access to the entire internet–text, photo, video–why do you ever need to download it?

Child porn is an extreme example, but many of us are guilty of breaking the law with more innocuous, but still illegal, material. Copyright violation is much more common–rampant on the web, even–and the laws surrounding it are murky at best, contradictory and useless at worst. You can buy a used CD or book in a shop or off of Craigslist, performing a perfectly legal transaction. You can lend your friend a CD or book for free, also perfectly legal. But try to do the same general act online, using something like BitTorrent? You’ll find yourself on extremely shaky legal ground, in which you may or may not be eligible for a fair use exemption, may or may not be prosecuted, and may or may not be convicted. And that’s for downloading actual files, which is much simpler to paint as “possession” than something like streaming.

We’re moving to a time when we may not ever have to “download” anything, at least by the old definition (which is actually just copying a file from one place to another). What about streaming? Though streaming is technically downloading–you’re just watching it in real time as it downloads, and then neglecting to keep the file once you’re finished–the law views “downloading” as possession, and streaming as something…else. Copyright holders see a difference here too–there’s a reason it costs more to “purchase” and download a movie on iTunes than “stream” it via your monthly Netflix subscription. But Netflix, Hulu, Rdio, and Spotify, plus MegaVideo, Videoweed.es, and all the other “streaming” services, legal and illegal, are the future–and when you can stream a song or video from anywhere, with any device, in full quality, doesn’t that count as “possession”? Isn’t it just a technicality that you can’t point to a file on your computer?

The primary difference between downloading and streaming–or the transferring of physical objects like CDs–is the possibility of distribution. If you listen to an album at a friend’s house, you are enjoying copyrighted material you did not pay for, but you don’t have the ability to distribute it. According to this thought process, unless you have a file–a JPG, an AVI, an MP3, an EPUB–you can’t distribute it, and are therefore not in possession of the property. But when everyone has access to the same material on the internet, does that really matter? If you have the links to a hundred illegal files and can distribute those links, does it matter that you don’t have the actual files? You can share them just as easily as if you did. Why bother saving a copy of an image to a hard drive? Why not just view it from any of the bazillion devices that can view images online? Is bookmarking the same as saving? Are you in possession of an image if you’ve just left yourself directions for how to find it again? These are questions we need to think about, but the basic new fact we need to contend with is the same:

The file doesn’t matter anymore.

If you need proof, take a closer look at an iPhone or iPad. Try to find the .mp3 file of the song you’re listening to, or the .txt file of the note you just wrote to yourself. You can’t. Because files and folders? Those are the past.

* * *

This comes up more than you’d think. The recent kerfuffle amongst publishing types regarding Instapaper, Readability and other service that take longer articles from any site, strip them of anything but the text, images, and video (including ads, which pay for the content) and send them for easy reading on the device of choice, is a good example. Choire Sicha over at The Awl explained it well here, but this is another murky area. Are Instapaper and its ilk illegal? If they are, and the materials snipped by it are in violation, when is a user “in possession” of that illicit material? Is “saving” something to your Instapaper queue the same as downloading, or possessing? If you read it on Instapaper’s site, there’s no file you can point to–it’s just some text on a server somewhere that’s been formatted for you on the fly when you pointed your browser toward it. You don’t have it.

This seems like the kind of concept we’re all semi-comfortable with when it applies to stuff we as users want people to have access to, like the new Santigold album. We like being able to stream it from SoundCloud, or from Rdio, or “watch” videos containing the songs and a still image of the album cover on YouTube. We’ll even fight for it! We’re okay with things being legal but of questionable financial help to content creators (Rdio), sometimes legal and sometimes not (SoundCloud), or convenient but totally illegal and likely to get pulled down at any moment (YouTube). We’ll stick black bars on our Twitter avatars to protest (admittedly awful, overreaching, potentially disastrous) legislation that attempts to stop us from doing these things! But what about stuff we really don’t want people to have access to?

If “possession” just means that you have some material or a copy of the material, for access any time, then we need a serious rethinking of that term and the laws that rely on it. And if “distribution” can mean both sending an email with child porn in an attachment and simply sharing a link where the same files can be found and downloaded, we’ve got to rethink the legality of those two very different actions–because they have the same result.

Right now, a shrewd copyright violator or child pornography enthusiast could completely obey the law while taking advantage of illegal material everywhere. I’m not sure if there’s anyone in any current legislature who’s capable of understanding and tackling the problem of writing laws that actually protect and govern in a to-the-minute way, which is what we need when talking about technology. But it’s serious business, and we need flexible, modern thinking to avoid being outsmarted by regular, everyday people using the internet in regular, everyday ways.

Overnight Sony has announced their first LTE enabled smartphones for the Japanese market; the Sony Xperia GX and Xperia SX. While the GX, or at least a variant of it, will be coming to an international audience at some stage this year. The same cannot be confirmed for the SX, although we do hope the Xperia SX will be joining the GX in international waters soon.

The Sony Xperia SX is the world's lightest LTE smartphone

Specifications wise, the Xperia SX takes the crown of being the world’s lightest LTE smartphone, weighing just 95 grams. Other specs include a 3.7 inch Reality Display with the Mobile BRAVIA Engine and a 1.5 GHz dual core processor. While a specific processor is not mentioned, chances are is it is the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 to enable LTE connectivity. There will also be 8 GB of internal storage (there better be a MicroSD slot) and a 8 MP camera.

While the press release mentions a "full HD experience" we are fairly certainly it will "only" be 720p

If the S in SX stands for small than the G in GX stands for gigantic. While not quite matching the size of the Samsung Galaxy Note or other recent Android flagships the GX has a 4.6 inch HD Reality Display. The press release mentions that it will “deliver a full HD experience on the big screen”, something that is most likely to be a error in translation.  It will also like have the same 1.5 GHz dual core processor found in its smaller sibling while internal storage is bumped to 16 GB. The camera takes control at a whopping 13 MP and if Sony’s previous phones are anything quality will be impressive.

Both the Xperia SX and GX will both launch with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich without any hardware Android buttons, be made available in black and white and come to the Japanese market this summer.