Star Acting Chief Executive Hogg Resigns

Doucet sees possibilities for more game-centric ways of using that, to detect ghosts in a game, for instance. "It's always important that these things are not just gimmicks or one-shot things, but can be built upon," he says.

Some of Doucet's early experiments with the adaptive triggers showcased surprising levels of realism. "We had a demo we didn't put in the game, but it was a hand. You could kind of open and close it," Doucet says. The hand would be able to grab different objects and crush things like glass balls. You could also pick up a fish.

A lab to showcase magical possibilities While Astro's Playroom is clearly made to entertain PS5 owners, Doucet's team has used its experiments to showcase ideas for developers, too, as part of their role exploring how to make the most of Sony's new hardware. 

Sadly in February it was revealed Pager had died and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) lodged a complaint with the US Department of Agriculture, alleging several counts of animal abuse between 2017 and 2020, involving test monkeys owned by Neuralink.
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Musk shared news of the Halloween event on Twitter, no other details were included, but it follows rumors that Neuralink has offered to buy its rival Synchron, which recently completed the first brain-chip in a human.
They claimed the macaque monkeys, housed at a University of California Davis research facility, were subject to experiments that amounted to torture, with evidence of rashes, self-mutilation and brain hemorrhages seen in documentation.

Neuralink is reportedly looking to explore a deal with Synchron that successfully implanted a chip into a severely paralyzed ALS patient in July, four people who work or have worked at Neuralink told Reuters Monday.

Elon Musk announced his Neuralink is hosting a ‘show and tell' progress event on October 31, which will be the first progress update since the world watched a brain-chipped monkey play a video game with its mind in April 2021 - this animal later died during testing.

'I cannot put in enough words my gratitude to you, and how much I owe to you. We will miss you so, so much. Thank you for everything my friend. I am sending all of my love to you and all of your family.'

A playground of demos "A lot of games usually come from a narrative or a desire to tell a particular story. And in our case, the story is all about the mechanical device and its possibilities," Nicolas Doucet, Creative Director at Sony's Japan Studio, says about Team Asobi and how it made Astro's Playroom.

Team Asobi was sent its first DualSense prototypes back around early 2018, says Doucet, when the group was still busy making the PlayStation VR game Astro Bot Rescue Mission (which is one of my favorite PSVR games of all time). A dedicated DualSense team split off and started brainstorming clever things the controller could do.

There aren't that many PlayStation 5 games that make the most of the DualSense feedback and triggers at the moment: Sony's Spider-Man: Miles Morales uses the subtle haptics a lot as a type of Spidey-sense, but not necessarily to transform gameplay. But those moments could come. It might take developers like Team Asobi to show the way, especially when a possible PSVR 2 arrives.

Gaming hardware that reaches out and surprises is pretty rare. Usually, it's Nintendo's domain: the detaching, docking, transforming Switch, or the Wii's free-wheeling controllers. The Oculus Quest and PlayStation VR are pretty astonishing. Add to that list the PlayStation 5's magical new version of its controller, now called DualSense instead of the older DualShock designation. 

"We started going out to third-party publishers, developers who also work on PlayStation or plan to make PlayStation games, which is why [we made] some of the choices we made about the tech demos," says Doucet. "We had one where you could bounce a ball and the ball could be a basketball, football, volleyball, ping pong ball. And they were all different expressions by the way they were bouncing back and the way the trigger would behave. And we did that because, we thought, well, we're not making a sports game. But you know, there are people where the ball physics and ball behavior is quintessential to the experience. So let's have this kind of demo and see how far we can push out and that goes up to them. And they can sort of get inspired."

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The PlayStation 5 is a graphically overloaded console with lots of potential, but its standout feature is clearly the upgraded DualSense. Launching Astro's Playroom, the game preinstalled on the PS5, you get a showcase of what it can do. Its triggers stop and start to make it seem like you're gripping ledges or pulling back bowstrings. Walking across ice, the controller tinkles and taps just perfectly to make it seem like I can feel the crunchy surface. The DualSense's vibrational haptics really do create moments where I can almost touch the game.