When R.U.S.E. was first announced with a trailer showing to players battling it out on a giant touch table, we were skeptical. Then they showcased it at E3 on Microsoft’s Surface, and we were impressed. Now that multitouch gameplay is closer to coming home, as Ubisoft and Microsoft team up to ensure your fingers can do the walking in Windows 7.

“Making images interactive is at the core of the video game industry, and over the last few years we have been striving to make this interactivity as intuitive and direct as possible. Today, thanks to Windows 7 and its full multitouch support, the barrier between the player and the image has been removed: they become one”, said John Parkes, EMEA marketing director. “As a strategy game relying on a clean and intuitive interface built around the zoom, R.U.S.E. was the perfect candidate for Ubisoft to demonstrate how multitouch improves and streamlines the way games are played”.

Of course you’ll still need a touch-ready monitor, but hey, in a couple of years they’ll just be handing those out to people in the street.

CNN walks us through a number of experimental programs being tested by Homeland Security’s Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST.

The different systems check a person’s heart rate, breathing, eye movement, body temperature and, yes, fidgeting.

There are a number of different devices and technology involved in all of this detection, from thermal imaging to cameras used for eye tracking. But the most interesting to many of you will likely be the improvised fidgeting monitor.

Researchers took a Wii balance board — a device people stand on to interact with certain Nintendo Wii video games — and altered it to show how someone’s weight shifts. Studies are now under way to determine whether there is a level of fidgeting that would suggest the need for secondary screening.

Fortunately, the screening wouldn’t rely strictly on a person’s Wii Fit Age to determine if they’re a terrorist or not. Instead, screeners would look at all of the body signs before unjustly labelling a nervous flier a possible suicide bomber.

Will airports screen for body signals? Researchers hope so [CNN, thanks mjarantilla]

According to the Financial Times, Sony boss man Sir Howard Stringer will be announcing the company’s plans to invest in 3D LCD TVs at the IFA show in Berlin. And he’ll also be announcing Sony laptop computers, PlayStation 3 games and Blu-ray players that will be compatible with the technology.

With the PS3 already capable of playing 4D games, according to former PlayStation exec Ken Kutaragi, one has to wonder “Why the step back?”

Sony plans to put 3D televisions in homes by the end of next year [FT]

America’s Army, known for portraying a realistic take on today’s wars and United States military operations, is now bringing in new machinery that you’ll be able to play with… eventually. While you’ll only see the Fire Scout’s shadow on some of the games maps and hovering over grounded planes on others, the America’s Army team hopes to make it more interactive in future versions of the game, allowing you to “call upon the Fire Scout for intelligence and support.”

Mike Howell, business development manager for Army systems at Northrop Grumman’s Aerospace Systems sector, is thrilled to see the Fire Scout’s inclusion in the game:

“Fire Scout’s introduction in one of the most popular computer games in the world is an exciting venture for us. We are happy to support the U.S. Army with this educational tool that provides some insight into what it is like to serve in the U.S. Army.”

If this addition of the Fire Scout is any indication, we may be able to look forward to more realistic gadgetry in future versions of the game.

Northrop Grumman’s Fire Scout Featured in Popular America’s Army 3 Computer Game [CNN Money]

But the HD World does. A custom F-16 fighter simulator, it runs off 120 dual core PCs with 120 $US400 graphics cards inside them, all chained together.

All that processing power gets you 10,000 “entities” on screen at once, realistic explosion and destruction effects and “20-40 visual acuity”, which is apparently as close to photo-realism as current projector technology can manage in a situation like this.

Oh, and it all comes wrapped in a 180-degree screen, along with a fully authentic replica of an F-16 cockpit.

If it didn’t cost millions and millions of dollars, I’d already have one on order.

Ultra-HD Military F-16 Flight Simulator Runs on 120 PC Graphic Cards [Gizmodo]

The “Future Soldier 2030″ being planned at the Army’s Soldier Systems centre in Natick, Mass., is the subject of much oohing-and-ahhhing in today’s New York Post. The basis of tomorrow’s fighter is a “soldier as a system,” philosophy that more or less regards soldiers as battlefield assets like tanks or planes.

Some of this “system’s” features include a HUD inside the helmet; voice commands that unlock a weapon or set it to less-than-lethal force, a powered exoskeleton to increase a soldier’s movement endurance and even “neural prosthetics” and “drugs that aid cognitive ability.” The Army allows that those enhancements might be “controversial now, but perhaps ubiquitous in 2030.”

I suppose it’s only a natural evolution, the Army’s designs somewhat trailing the epochal history of combat games; from flight sims to drone aircraft, FPSes to cyborg soldier.

Soldier of the Future [NY Post, and graphic; thanks randlsa]

Big, fancy LCD and plasma TVs are just wonderful for 360 & PS3 games (well, most games). But for older games – and by old, we mean old – they’re not so hot. And this is why.

This write-up by NFG (of the selectbutton forums) goes into astonishing detail on just why fixed-resolution displays aren’t up to the job of displaying retro games the way they were meant to be displayed.

See, old cathode ray tube sets (ie your old TV) could handle the resizing of pixels – which is what your old 8-bit & 16-bit games were made of – just fine. But newer TVs need to digitally “fudge” the picture, and the way they go about fudging it results in a distorted, often ugly image. As you can see above.

Sure, this won’t matter for 90% of you (who probably don’t even notice anything wrong), but if this kind of thing gets your goat up, the full run-down is below.

Aspect Ratios, Scanlines and Modern Displays [via GSW]

CCP has announced plans to phase out the current Classic Client for EVE Online in favour of a new system that could require users to upgrade for the first time in a decade.

The dual-client nature of EVE Online in its current form allows players with more modern PC technology to enjoy spectacular graphics, while an older Classic Client allows the game to be played on pretty much any system from 1998 onwards. It’s a great system for stubborn PC gamers who haven’t seen the inside of an electronics store in 10 years, but not so much for CCP, who have to basically create all graphics twice every time they add something to the game. Not anymore.

Starting with the launch of the next expansion, EVE Online: Apocrypha, CCP will discontinue support for ShaderModel 1, replacing the Classic Client with the new Premium Lite Client, which uses downsampled textures from the Premium Client, allowing the company to cut their graphics work by half.

After that, CCP is looking at possibly discontinuing support of ShaderModel 2 with the Winter 2009 expansion.

So how many people will be affected by these changes?

We know this will affect some players out there. What we don’t know is exactly how many. We estimate that about 95% of all subscribers currently have hardware that is SM2 compatible. We further predict that in q4 this year over 97% of subscribers will have SM3 capable hardware. This means that an estimate of anywhere from 3%-5% of current subscribers would have to update their computers or graphics cards to be able to continue playing.

Seriously? 3-5% of EVE Online players are running on computer systems from the previous century? Maybe we should start a video card drive for these poor unfortunate souls.

i can totally run that on my Amiga [EVE Online via 1UP]

Prof Stone said: “If our research proves that it works come 2009 we will start trying it out on real soldiers.

“It could be rolled out across all the services. It would be Brit soldiers who would benefit.”

He explained: “In very basic layman’s terms it is a computer game with smell.

“The smell system we are currently conducting research into is very new.

“We are looking into whether it is worth doing, to introduce smell into our games training. We need to make sure it is going to help troops and is not just a gimmick.

The scientists are also looking into defence mental health, with Prof Stone adding: “Smell is so closely linked to emotion and memory, it’s something that we need to take seriously.

“We have got a number of virtual environments already in place and are now adding smells to it to see what effect it has on training.”

Prof Stone also thinks the device could be up for sale for the general public in a number of years.

As Kieron Gillen of Rock, Paper, Shotgun noted, we can hope this technology makes its way to a wider audience, “if only as it’ll allow us to claim that a game stinks in a more literal sense.”

British soldiers could be trained on a computer game with smell [The Telegraph via Rock, Paper, Shotgun

An input audio data stream comprising speech is processed by an automatic censoring filter in either a real-time mode, or a batch mode, producing censored speech that has been altered so that undesired words or phrases are either unintelligible or inaudible.

Personally I would prefer one that replaces offensive speech with happier phrases, but technology can only go so far. “Daddy, he called me a mother hugging rainbow pony!” Of course he did son. Of course he did.

Microsoft gets patent for real-time f-bomb bleeping [Ars Technica - Thanks Brandon!]