The forgotten pioneers of computer animation

Everyone remembers ReBoot. It's hard to forget the show's lead character -- a bright blue 'guardian' named Bob -- and his fight to protect a city inside a computer. The computer-animated series premiered in September 1994, months before Pixar stunned theatergoers with Toy Story. It was a groundbreaking show that allowed its creator, Mainframe Entertainment, to pursue similar projects like Shadow Raiders and Transformers spin-off Beast Wars.

Today, many believe that Mainframe was the only company to debut a computer-animated TV show in 1994. But that's incorrect. The Canadian studio had a European peer called Fantôme ("ghost" in French), which developed an equally important and pioneering series called Insektors.

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Lunaz is electrifying beautiful but unreliable classic cars

Few would question the beauty of classic cars from the 1950s and 60s. Unfortunately, these vehicles are increasingly rare on British roads as they fall into disrepair or become a treasured possession that is only driven on weekends, after hours of meticulous maintenance in a private garage. David Lorenz, however, is desperate to keep classic cars on the road. He's driven them for years, knowing full well they'll probably break down every six months. "It didn't really bother me," Lorenz said. "I could laugh it off and say it was part of the experience of owning a classic."

One particular mid-drive malfunction stung, though. Lorenz recalls sitting on the side of the road, in the freezing cold, with no vehicular heating to keep him warm. Breakdown services showed up 90 minutes later. "My brain was going 'How do we change this?'" he said. In that moment, Lorenz realized that classic cars would eventually become too hard to fix and, therefore, inaccessible to his daughter Luna's generation. "She's just not going to [own] these types of vehicles," he thought. "Because people will not continue like this."

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One fan’s struggle to fix the worst game in Sonic history

The 2006 reboot of Sonic the Hedgehog was supposed to be a turning point for the blue blur. It was the character's first outing on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 hardware, and Sega clearly wanted to make an impact. The game, simply titled Sonic the Hedgehog (commonly referred to as Sonic 06), was a visual leap forward for the franchise and offered three playable characters, including telekinetic newcomer Silver, with separate but interwoven story lines.

But the game was a massive flop. Critics slammed the ambitious but poorly written story, which combined time travel, all-powerful gods and a post-apocalyptic future filled with nothing but fire and abandoned skyscrapers. They hated the finicky controls, too, as well as the uncooperative camera system, agonizingly long load times and glitch-riddled levels. Patient players were rewarded with a passable-at-best blend of platforming and action as well as open-world zones that were barren and seemingly half finished.

Oh, and it was also the game that had a universally hated kiss scene between Sonic and a human princess.

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Wandering the Quiet Digital Halls of Habbo Hotel

"I'm Unicorn_farts and welcome to your official Habbo Intelligence Agency Training Session!"

I was in a strange room filled with black couches, ebony walls and various elevators trapped behind glass gates. It would have felt like a bank or government building were it not for the ice-cream stand and Easter memorabilia, which included a giant rabbit plush and some egg-shaped statues with human-sized chicks inside.

Many spaces in Habbo, a virtual world created by Finnish developer Sulake, feel like this one. The platform is loosely modeled after a hotel, but its user-designed chat rooms span a broad set of themes. Jungles, high schools and coffee shops -- they're all in here.

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Inside the virtual production of ‘The Lion King’

The new Lion King movie is visually spectacular. A two-hour remake that frequently defies belief. Pride Rock is, of course, a fictional place but in director Jon Favreau's film it feels eerily real. The creatures, too, move just like they would on the plains of Africa. They're utterly believable until they talk and sing to one another about family, responsibility and the circle of life.

Disney has been remaking its animated classics for some time now. But The Lion King, which hit theaters on July 19th, sets a new benchmark for what's possible with computer-generated animation. The secret behind it all? An experimental form of filmmaking that, through VR, allows studios to shoot virtual sets with old-fashioned direction and analog camerawork.

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Do Micro Four Thirds cameras have a future?

For years, photographers and industry pundits have predicted the demise of the Micro Four Thirds (MFT) camera system. Many believe that the smaller sensor has been superseded by APS-C cameras and the ever-growing lineup of full-frame mirrorless shooters. "Not suddenly, but slowly over the course of the next couple of years," photographer and author Tony Northrup said in a YouTube video last October. The upload, which attracted more than 200,000 views, triggered a wage of counterarguments from prominent MFT users like Peter Forsgård, Joseph Ellis and others. Six months later, there's still no consensus.

MFT was co-developed by Olympus and Panasonic in 2008. The pair wanted a compact alternative to full-frame DSLRs that still offered excellent image quality and the versatility of interchangeable lenses. The result was a system with a smaller sensor that didn't require a mirror box or pentaprism to operate. That enabled companies to build smaller, lighter camera bodies and a vast library of pocket-size lenses. Before long, MFT was known as the perfect compromise for people who wanted to shoot beautiful images without the bulk and hassle of a full-frame DSLR kit.

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How Panic Button became masters of the Switch port

The Switch is a remarkable little machine. Part handheld and part home console, the device is home to some wonderful Nintendo-made exclusives such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey. It's also home to some rock-solid ports, including Rocket League and the Nazi-slaying Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. These versions are visibly inferior to their PS4, Xbox One and PC counterparts, with murky textures and adaptive resolutions that frequently hover below 720p. Still, they are undeniably impressive, offering the same ferocious gunplay and bombastic humor whether you're playing at home or the back of a bus.

The wizards behind these seemingly-impossible ports? Panic Button, a developer in Austin, Texas with less than 50 employees. It's an unusual specialty -- some companies, such as Bluepoint Games, have earned a reputation on their ability to remake and remaster classic titles such as Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection and Shadow of the Colossus. Few, though, are able to match Panic Button's skill at bringing so-called 'triple-A' games to effectively tablet-grade hardware.

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How KaiOS claimed the third-place mobile crown

In December 2015, Mozilla announced it would be abandoning Firefox OSas a smartphone platform. Many assumed the company's withdrawal would kill any hope of a mobile operating system built around the open web, rather than a combination of native apps and tightly-controlled storefronts. In the last few years, plenty of "alternative" smartphone platforms, including Ubuntu Touch and Windows 10 Mobile, have faded into obscurity, too. Jolla has struggled on with Sailfish OS, but it's never felt like a true challenger to the Android and iOS duopoly.

Three years later, a surprising competitor has emerged: KaiOS. The relative newcomer, which makes feature phones smarter, is already running on more than 80 million devices worldwide.

How did it grow so big, so quickly? With a little help from Firefox OS.

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Yuri Suzuki mimics 'The Sound of the Waves' with surf data

Yuri Suzuki was hunched over a MacBook Air with a "Fuck Brexit" sticker on the lid. He opened Magicseaweed, an ocean-monitoring website for surfers, and searched for a few spots along Spain's northern coast. "It's quite amazing to see the super-precise data we can get," he muttered, turning the screen toward me. I nodded as the sound artist, designer and musician scrolled past endless tables listing hourly wave height and speed, wind and temperature conditions. These numbers, he explained, weren't holiday research but the secret behind his latest and most ambitious art installation, The Sound of the Waves.

You can find the project inside London's Stanley Picker Gallery, a few hundred yards from the Kingston School of Art. In a white, high-ceilinged room, 11 motorized rain sticks stand on camera tripods, rotating at a seemingly random rhythm. Sometimes, they move as a group, but usually one or two shift while the others stand still. When they tilt, a collection of beads cascade through their cylindrical innards, mimicking the sound of the ocean lapping against the shore. It's a calming experience that encourages you to close your eyes and visualize the White Cliffs of Dover, or the glassy waters surrounding the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

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How Dandelion is making geothermal heating affordable

Millions of US citizens still use oil and natural gas to heat their homes during the winter. Many would like to switch to geothermal, a cleaner and ultimately cheaper system that leverages the natural temperature of the earth. A few feet below the surface, the soil sits at a reliable 50- to 60-degree Fahrenheit all year round. Pipes known as 'ground loops' push round a special antifreeze solution that absorbs this constant temperature in winter and disperses unwanted warmth in the summer. A large indoor heat pump uses the mixture to boil a refrigerant fluid; the resulting gas is then compressed to higher temperatures and distributed around the home.

Installing the necessary equipment is expensive, however. Dandelion, a company that started inside Alphabet's X division, is trying to make geothermal cheaper and easier to install. While not the most eye-catching technology, especially compared to electric cars and sea-cooled data centers, it's arguably one of the most important for the environment.

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‘Super Mario Flashback’ is a stunning pixel art fan game

If you fancy playing some classic Mario, there are plenty of ways to go about it. You can buy a tiny NES or SNES Classic, for instance, or subscribe to Nintendo's Switch Online service. There's also Super Mario Maker, legally grey emulation and, of course, the original cartridges if you own a NES, SNES or modern console equivalent like the Analogue Super NT. In the not-too-distant future, though, there might be another way to get your fix of Nintendo nostalgia: a beautiful fan game called Super Mario Flashback.

The 2D platformer will reinterpret levels from many different Mario games. These include the original Super Mario Bros. and three-dimensional adventures such as Super Mario 64. Some platform and enemy layouts will be familiar to people who have played the original games. Others will be subtly tweaked or completely revamped to surprise players or provide a different challenge.

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'Ugly' is a stunning short built on glitch-riddled simulations

Ugly is a film built on beautiful contradictions. The characters have odd, blocky proportions and stumble around like a group of drunk boxers. The town, too, is comprised of weirdly angular cars, buildings, bicycles and trash bags. There's a consistency to the art style, though, that resembles origami and the papercraft video game Tearaway. And the lighting, a stunning mixture of pastel pinks and blues, gives every frame a warm, inviting sheen. It's an unusual, attention-grabbing blend that feels both charming and unsettling at the same time.

The aesthetic mirrors the story, which follows a wild tomcat, Ugly, and its friendship with a Native American chief called Redbear Easterman. At first, the world seems like a bleak place full of hurtful humans who want to bully the one-eyed creature. In one scene, for instance, a group of firefighters spray Ugly with a hose while a building burns to the ground behind them. Redbear sees the value in all life, though, and helps Ugly dream of a flourishing forest filled with creatures that float serenely through the air.

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How Aardman made a WWI game look like an oil painting

Most video games set in the First or Second World War shoot for gritty realism. In Battlefield 1, for instance, there's an extraordinary amount of detail in every uniform, firearm and mud-filled trench. It's the visual fidelity, paired with addictive combat, that draws players in.

11-11: Memories Retold is different. The story-driven experience, set during the last two years of World War I, has a painterly art style inspired by artists such as Claude Monet and Joseph Mallord William Turner. Every scene is created with tiny brushstrokes that slowly move, transform and dissolve. As you move the twin protagonists forward, the paint will change again to reflect your position in the level. If you're standing on a street in Paris, for instance, the building at the end might be represented with a single dab of paint. Move closer, however, and it will become a larger object composed of many more strokes.

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Inside Google’s plan to build a smart neighborhood in Toronto

On the Sidewalk Labs website is a 200-page document explaining its vision for a smart neighborhood in Toronto. It's packed with illustrations that show a warm, idyllic community full of grassy parks, modular buildings and underground tunnels with delivery robots and internet cabling inside. The text describes "a truly complete community" that's free of cars and committed to reducing its carbon footprint. Underpinning everything is a network of sensors that can monitor noise, traffic and pollution, collecting the troves of data required to understand and improve the city's design.

Flipping through the pages, it's easy to see how the company -- an offshoot of Google parent Alphabet -- was chosen to revitalize the Lake Ontario waterfront. The lengthy pitch document, however, is just a taste of what the area might become. It's a dreamy but meticulously thought-out mood board summarizing what Sidewalk Labs has been pondering for the past two years. Reading it cover to cover, you can get lost in the scale and ambition of such a project. Most companies would struggle to execute just one aspect of the plan: autonomous transit, for instance, or buildings that can be quickly and cheaply repurposed depending on the time of day or needs of the city.

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The Finns who refuse to give up on Sailfish OS

Wander the halls of Mobile World Congress and you'll notice a theme on almost every phone manufacturer's stall: Android. Google's operating system has slowly suffocated every "alternative" adversary including Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch and Windows Phone. But in the middle of hall five you'll find an unlikely holdout -- Sailfish, a quirky mobile platform by Tampere-based developer Jolla. Walk by the company's stall and you'll find a small group of Finnish employees eagerly showing off the few phones that run their swipe-based software. They're grinning like children, which is no surprise given the hell they've been through to get here.

Most people know Jolla for its quirky 'other half' phone. It was the first hardware to run Sailfish OS -- a continuation of the MeeGo platform that Nokia abandoned for Windows Phone -- and boasted swappable backs that could add new hardware features and themed software. Jolla hoped brands would build backs for their most devout fans — a Real Madrid cover, for instance, might come with custom wallpaper, ringtones and an app for watching matches -- but few embraced the idea. Still, the hardware was intriguing because of the operating system it shipped with. In a sea of Android conformity, Jolla stood out.

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Designing the technology of ‘Blade Runner 2049’

There's a scene in Blade Runner 2049 that takes place in a morgue. K, an android "replicant" played by Ryan Gosling, waits patiently while a member of the Los Angeles Police Department inspects a skeleton. The technician sits at a machine with a dial, twisting it back and forth to move an overhead camera. There are two screens, positioned vertically, that show the bony remains with a light turquoise tinge. Only parts of the image are in focus, however. The rest is fuzzy and indistinct, as if someone smudged the lens and never bothered to wipe it clean.

Before leaving the room, K asks if he can take a closer look. The blade runner -- someone whose task it is to hunt older replicants -- dances over the controls, hunting for a clue. As he zooms in, the screen changes in a circular motion, as if a series of lenses or projector slides are falling into place. Before long, K finds what he's looking for: A serial code, suggesting the skeleton was a replicant built by the now defunct Tyrell Corporation.

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How the internet embraced a 'Simpsons'-'Akira' mashup

In the spring of 2013, Ryan Humphrey was lying on his bedroom floor, searching for inspiration. He had been looking for a way to contribute to the Simpsons Drawing Club, a blog on Tumblr dedicated to unofficial fan art. Run by a tight-knit group of illustrators, it featured colorful, funny and occasionally terrifying depictions of Bart, Homer and the rest of the Springfield populace. Humphrey wanted to be a part of it.

He had, at one point, considered an original story about Ralph Wiggum and a dead body that could somehow talk back to him. But he didn't see himself as a comic book artist and slowly cooled on the idea. Suddenly, he spotted a copy of Akira, "Volume 1" in his room. Inspiration struck like a thunderbolt. He would redraw parts of Akira, the iconic Japanese manga series written and inked by Katsuhiro Otomo, but with characters from The Simpsons. By blending the two worlds, he would create something not only truly bizarre and unexpected but also stylish and instantly recognizable.

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The real-time motion capture behind ‘Hellblade’

In a makeshift changing room filled with Disney Infinity figures, I strip down to my boxers and pull on a two-part Lycra suit. It feels tight, and the top half shimmies up toward my waistline as soon as I stretch or stand up straight. How anyone is able to act in this thing is a mystery to me. Sheepishly, I gather my belongings and trot back to the motion capture studio that sits at the end of Ninja Theory's offices in Cambridge, England. Inside, a couple of engineers scurry about, prepping cameras and cables.

For years, movie and video game studios have used mocap to bring digital characters to life. From detective Cole Phelps in L.A. Noire to the powerful Caesar in Planet of the Apes, the technology has delivered some truly moving, actor-driven performances. Normally, however, motion capture scenes are processed by an animator hours, days or weeks after they've been captured on set. It's a time-consuming process, and one that involves some guesswork. In a sparse, lifeless room, directors are forced to imagine how a take will look in the final sequence.

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