HireArt, a newly launched Y Combinator-backed company, is working to solve a major problem that all employers face today: resumes are bullshit. Job candidates often like to fluff up their experience, and sometimes they even outright lie about their abilities. Other times, potentially great employees are overlooked because they have unorthodox backgrounds that don’t match up with what an employer thinks they need in terms of experience. Sometimes these kinds of things are realized during the in-person interview. Unfortunately for many employers, they often don’t discover how much a particular candidate may have oversold themselves until they’ve been hired and can’t perform to expectations.

With its new applicant screening system, HireArt thinks it may have a solution: have the employees actually do the work first.

Here’s HireArt’s pitch in a nutshell: “You really can’t bullshit anymore.”

That’s per co-founder Elli Sharef, in explaining why the traditional resume system is broken.

Instead of asking applicants to talk about their experience, HireArt has them actually perform a series of tasks. For example, if an interview candidate claims to be an expert in Excel, an employer on HireArt might ask them to create an Excel model using a dataset they provide, then have them upload the completed file. Another employer may instead want to hear a creative’s pitch for a new product.

The idea for the company, founded by  Sharef, Dain Lewis and Nicholas Sedlet, three college friends from Yale, was inspired by their own experience in the corporate world, working at large corporations like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and a real estate company.

“We had varied experiences running interviews – some very good, some not so good,” explains Sharef. “We realized there was a need for a better way to interview, and a better way to make sure the candidates we were bringing on board were really the best candidates we could find,” she says. After doing research, the team realized that work samples were the best way to find the right people for the job.

Using HireArt, employers in need of filling a position can choose from HireArt’s online library of predefined templates, or can optionally create their own. Typically around four or five questions are chosen, specific to the job. For example, “create a marketing pitch” or “write out a business plan.” Basically, anything that requires the candidate to actually demonstrate, not just talk about, their skills is a good pick.

Candidates are then sent a link to the questions which they can fill out in their own time. The responses to the questions can include videos, file uploads and text responses, depending on the task. When complete, the employer has the option to review the responses on their own, or they can outsource that task to HireArt instead.

Using the company’s team of graders, which includes college professors and other industry experts working part-time to curate the responses, employers are given a set of top candidates who they could then choose to call in for the in-person interview.

Currently, HireArt has over a dozen clients testing the service to fill positions which include a head of marketing at a Silicon Valley startup, a junior operations manager at a London startup, a Fortune 500 company looking for summer interns, and more.

For the less technically savvy (like Baby Boomers and up), HireArt also provides technical support in using the system. Surprisingly, the company says that they’ve found these candidates are not all that intimidated by the technology, but are grateful for a chance to demonstrate their experience.

“There’s a distortion in the labor market in which some really qualified middle-career people are not employed or are under-employed right now,” Sharef says. These people see HireArt as an opportunity to actually prove their worth and their skills versus their younger counterparts, she explains.

But more importantly, a system like this encourages responses that don’t just involve taking a paper resume and turning it into a video version where a candidate repeats their work history and skill set out loud. This gives employers a chance to really understand the personalities of the candidates, how their minds work, and whether they’re up to the job at hand.

Sharef also notes that another problem with the traditional system is that it’s screening out a lot of the diamonds in the rough. Hiring “A players” is all that should really matter, but it’s often hard to do when you’re focused so much on a candidate’s pedigree (e.g. attended a top university, their previous position titles, etc.).

In the near future, HireArt also plans to further refine their predefined questions based on employer feedback as to how the candidate ended up performing on the job. In the long-term, the data generated by HireArt could even help universities better craft their curriculum to better reflect the real-world needs of employers.

The HireArt system is somewhat similar to another new startup called TakeTheInterview, which allows candidates to answer interview questions on video. While perhaps simpler for the candidates, there’s more work on the employers’ part to actually view all the responses they receive. Plus, candidates are only responding to questions on video  - which is just one aspect of HireArt’s service.

Pricing for HireArt is still being handled on a case-by-case basis. Employers can sign up for access here.

I had the distinct pleasure of bringing Mike Doughty, songwriter and author, into the TCTV studio to talk about his new book, The Book Of Drugs, his new album, Yes & Also Yes, and how the music business has changed during his long and tumultuous career.

You may remember Doughty as the leader of Soul Coughing, a band that brought cerebral trip-hop into the mainstream and defined a genre of music that focused on organic rhythms and complex, often impressionistic lyrics. As a lonely white boy in the 1990s, I nodded along to Ruby Vroom and Irresistible Bliss while writing COBOL code to head off the Y2K bug.

Doughty is past all that now – his book details the various and virulent ways his band members undercut and ruined the experience and, in turn, tore Soul Coughing down around Doughty’s ears. With his criticism in the back of my mind, it’s easy now to see the cracks in the acid jazz/”Cool G” facade. Soul Coughing is gone and he’s now a strong and melodic songwriter. He writes odes to women with unsingable names and celebrates second chances, building a canon that is upbeat but nostalgic. You get the sense that Doughty has come out of those dark years a better man.

In this interview we talked about his current success and how he made it out of the music business alive. He cites Napster as his primary musical savior. After Soul Coughing split, Doughty found that his solo album Skittish ended up on the file sharing site where his fans shared tunes and actually sang along to unreleased music as he toured with just his guitar and voice. These shared files and his loyal audience ensured Doughty a second act, but on his terms.

You can watch the whole thing here but Mike Lazaridis is cracking up. Basically, in an interview with a BBC reporter, the co-CEO shuts down the the meeting after being asked about security concerns in India and the Middle East, saying that it’s an issue of “national security.”

As the CEO of what was once the premier smartphone manufacturer it must be hard to see mind – if not market – share shrinking in the business world and he just can’t seem to accept honest criticism in any environment, least of all a taped interview.

What does this mean for RIM? Well, not much right now. Blackberries will still rule the IT roost when it comes to end-to-end secure email. However, it must be hard for Lazaridis to watch his C-level friends carry iPhones and Android devices and leave their Blackberries in the hands of their assistants.

According to comScore, RIM dropped 5.4% in the smartphone race, landing it one step behind Android and above iOS. Last October RIM was #1. Now it’s #2.

Lazaridis has been giving all sorts of exciting interviews lately, playing the victim card in multiple occasions. For example:

“Why is it that people don’t appreciate our profits? Why is it that people don’t appreciate our growth? Why is it that people don’t appreciate the fact that we spent the last four years going global? Why is it that people don’t appreciate that we have 500 carriers in 170 countries with products in almost 30 languages?,” said Lazaridis.

Why, indeed. Maybe it’s because everyone has profits, growth, and globalization. RIM is just another phone company fighting a long and pitched battle. To hear Lazaridis, however, he’s ready to rest on his laurels.

John Dalrymple points out that all of this is coming a week before the launch of RIM’s Playbook, a make or break moment for RIM in the tablet arena. In short, he should shut up.

A great man once said that the path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. However, when you make it your mission to quash the naysayers at every turn, you look less like a victim and more like a victimizer.

Conventional wisdom says that it’d be a better idea to build a ladder to the moon than it would be to start a magazine in 2010. Apparently Best Buy disagrees. The retailer announced, some months back, that it would be starting a new video game magazine called @Gamer. (Pronounced “gamer”—ignore the @.) It hooked up with the good folks at Future, the same people who publish the World of Warcraft magazine, as well as Edge, PC Gamer, and Nintendo Power, to produce it.

I had the good fortune to talk to the magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, William O’Neal, and its Editorial Director, Julian Rignall, over the past few days to help get a better understanding of the magazine’s raison d’être. Hooray for random French phrases.

@Gamer is a monthly magazine that you’ll be able to find at your local Best Buy. The first issue, with a cover story on EA’s upcoming Medal of Honor reboot, is available now. Each issue features a number of coupons that can be used at Best Buy. $20 off this game, $10 off that one, etc.

It was put together in only around 40 days. I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with magazine production, but 40 days is really quite swift.

The first question you ask is, simply, “Why?” It’s not like there’s a dearth of video game information online, right?

“The goal of the magazine is to offer gamers an easy, digestible way to make purchasing decisions for games and accessories and things like that,” says William O’Neal, the magazine’s Editor-in-Chief. “A lot of what’s out there [magazines, blogs, etc.] caters to the same type of people, geared toward fairly hardcore people who are obsessed with minutiae to a certain degree.”

I realize that many of you are by definition “hardcore.” Lord knows if you spend even two minutes on this site that you’ve clearly demonstrated an interest in technology and gaming and whatnot far above and beyond that of the average man on the street. But that’s the very problem: there’s so much out there for us, the hardcore, that the guy who goes to the mall once or twice a month and looks around the new release aisle in Best Buy doesn’t really have anyone to turn to.

“Not everybody wants to read a 3,000-word exposé on Cliff Blezinski,” says O’Neal. “Some people just want to know whether or not the next Gears of War will be awesome or not.”

Julian Rignall, the Editorial Director, calls the magazine “boiled down.”

Hardcores may read it just because they read everything all the time, but casuals may see the magazine on the rack at the store and say, “A new Medal of Honor? I didn’t know that.”

For the record, I like to read 3,000-word exposés on this or that. That’s why I subscribe to Edge magazine, which is primarily known for its fanciness. And I am nothing if not a fancy man.

Best Buy, you say? We all know my storied history with the company, but how do the suits there affect the content of the magazine? Do they sit in smoke-filled rooms and demand that Game X be on the cover even though the magazine’s editors want Game B?

No.

“We dictate what we want to do, and that’s that,” he says. “The people at Best Buy who we actually deal with—and we on the editorial side of things don’t really deal with Best Buy too, too much—are pretty hardcore gamers, it turns out. They realize that the magazine will only be beneficial to Best Buy if it’s seen as a legitimate gaming outlet. Gamers can figure that out a mile away.”

Rignall agrees.

“They all have a gaming background, all understand gaming, all understand magazines,” he says. “They really ‘get’ the fact that if we’re just a shill magazine, saying that every game is great, then nobody will buy the magazine. They understand that the editorial side of the magazine is over here, and that the little Best Buy bits [the coupons and whatnot] are on that side over there. There’s a clear division.”

As you might expect, the magazine doesn’t focus too much on everyday news. You won’t see articles about how Tetsuya Nomura bought a new pair of pants, or that a GameStop in Peoria broke the street date of a game by 17 minutes. You will see big news, if only because there’s the expectation that the people reading @Gamer, again, aren’t spending every waking hour reading game news online. “Oh, they’re making a 3D Nintendo DS? Cool!”

Based on the first issue, there’s a healthy mix of previews and reviews, both of which are kept fairly brief. Again, no 3,000-word articles on the new Sims 3 expansion. @Gamer doesn’t get down like that, to use vernacular from 1989.

The Internet! I asked the guys how they planned to use the Internet, if at all. (You’ll note that @Gamer is already taken on Twitter. Mm.)

O’Neal says that the primary focus of the magazine will be on just that: the print magazine. There may be online content, but it’s a magazine above and beyond everything else.

Rignall described it a little further.

“There may be an online component in the future but it doesn’t need to be huge,” he says. “We [Future] already have one in Games Radar. The Web site will probably be a little more bloggy, a little more conversational. A sort of ‘Here’s what we’re playing this week,’ that kind of thing. But it won’t be a news source or review source.”

No, that’s what the magazine is for.

I had myself a bit of a field trip yesterday, going over to Reebok’s fancy gym on Columbus Avenue in New York to try out their new ZigTech shoes. The name alone implies, well, tech, which would explain my presence there. Bonus: I got to interview former UFC light heavyweight Chuck Liddell. Truly an awesome day.

Let’s talk a little about the shoes first: you cannot eat them. I know they look absolutely delicious, but I have confirmed that they are not, in fact, edible. Sorry.

Their raison d’être is that zigzag line you see alongside the bottom. The idea is to transfer the energy that would otherwise be lost as you place your heel onto the ground toward the front of your foot, giving you, quite literally, an extra spring in your step. I have been waiting some 30 hours to write that last sentence.

Reebok had us do some light exercise drills to get a “feel” for the shoes, and I didn’t injure myself or any of my colleagues in the process, so that’s a plus. I’m not exactly a “shoe expert” or anything, but they didn’t feel heavy or awkwardly weighted or anything like that. Presumably with additional training I’ll be able to leap over tall buildings in a single bound!

The shoes are available now for around $100, which is about the average price you can expect to pay for these type of shoes.

Most importantly, I did, in fact, get to interview Chuck Liddell at the event. It was pretty amazing, and I’m very happy that I finally got to see the mohawk in person.

Without further ado…

CrunchGear: What do you make of the new Reebok ZigTechs? Have you been using them for a while? They seemed pretty cool for the hour we used them this morning.

Chuck Liddell: I’ve been using them for a while, yeah. They’re really cool. I have a bunch of shoes, actually. My girl was making fun of me because of how many shoes I have. I really like ‘em. They’re comfortable, they seem to be working, seem to be helping me move.

CG: Do you use a lot of hi-tech items in your training, or are you more a back-to-basics kind of guy?

Liddell: Define hi-tech.

CG: I don’t know. It’s like, you watch TV late at night and there’s so many fancy devices and gizmos out there that promise to make you Superman overnight or whatever…

Liddell: We do a lot of old school stuff. Old school, new school… I mean, it depends on how you want to see it. For us, we’re trying to emphasize the explosive, explosive power over time, you know? I don’t care how much I can lift in one shot. I want to be able to pop, to be able to knock a guy out in less than five minutes. When he [the opponent] catches one of them, I want it to be able to put him to sleep. It’s a different kind of thing.

CG: We’re a tech site, so I guess I have to ask a couple of tech questions…

Liddell: Tech? Well I’m probably not gonna be too helpful there…

CG: Do you have an iPhone? That’s pretty much the extent of it as far as I’m concerned.

Lidell: I have an iPad.

CG: Oh, do you?! Really? Do you like it?

Liddell: Yeah, actually, we’ve been using it quite a bit. ["We'' refers to Chuck and his girlfriend, who was sitting next to him. You'll recall that they were in that Reebook viral video exercising in the nude.] We have it up here somewhere.

CG [to his girlfriend, who's now jumped into the conversation]: Oh, really? I just asked him if he has an iPhone or an iPad, and he’s the first person I’ve met that actually has an iPad. So it’s weird, not exactly the first person you’d expect to have one.

Liddell’s girlfriend: Yeah, we have it…

CG: What’s your favorite App? Do you guys watch Netflix or whatever on it?

Liddell’s girlfriend: Yeah, we just did! [laughs]

Liddell: Hey, you’re pretty good! [laughs]

CG: Wow, OK.

Liddell’s girlfriend: Oh, my gosh!

OK, let’s stop the interview for a second to explain what just happened here. As we were all laughing at the absurdity of me guessing exactly how they use the iPad, the little table we were sitting at collapsed. Yes, collapsed, like a house made of hay. Hence Liddell’s girlfriend gasping “Oh, my gosh!” Luckily I was able to catch the table before it fell all the way to the ground, thus preventing a terrible tragedy. Here’s the audio of that part, simply for the lulz…

Audio: I think the table’s broken…

About a minute or two goes by while the table is fixed. I am a hero; clearly I should try out for The Ultimate Fighter next year.

CG: Wow, so you have an iPad, that’s amazing. Did you wait in line for it or do you have connections somewhere?

Liddell: I had a friend pick it up.

CG: Oh, I see. OK, well… I see you’re on the Twitter. Is that really you on there, or is it a manager or publicist or whatever?

Liddell: Yup, that’s me.

CG: OK, so fans can be all, “Hey, what’s up?” and that’s you on the other end of the line.

Liddell: I answer a lot of questions on there, but sometimes they’re pretty dumb. They’ll ask real personal questions, you know, like, “Hey, where do your kids go to school?”

CG: What a horrible question…

Liddell: Yeah, you know? Or, “What happened to that girl you dated from Bakersfield?” Do I really want to cover that in public? No.

CG: Right. I did see a bunch of people asking you about Tito and your thoughts…

Liddell: Yeah, I’ll send that back. That’s what the fans want. Usually I like to retweet—when people talk shit about me I’ll retweet that. It’s fun to watch the responses, people come up with pretty creative responses.

CG: Well, people are real brave on Twitter.

Liddell: On Facebook I had a guy bugging me, bugging my daughter. It’s like, are you serious? He kept saying stuff about wanting to fight me. Talk all the shit you want, tough guy. But, come on…

CG: Do you still have people, when you go out to bars and whatnot, do you still have people saying dumb stuff like, “Oh, I bet I can take you, just give me five minutes…”

Liddell: No, no. I’m pretty easy-going anyway, so you’d have to be a pretty huge dick to bother me. Most guys who would do that tend to be friends of mine, so I don’t know what that says about me. I mean, I worked at bars for a long time, so I’m pretty good at diffusing situations before they become a problem, you know? I know exactly what to say to escalate something, but I know exactly what to say to get rid of something.

CG: So your fight now is with Rich Franklin on June 12 at UFC 115 in Vancouver. Did training camp for that start, and when?

Liddell: It has. It began…

Liddell’s girlfriend: April 1st.

Liddell: Yeah, April 1st is when I actually started camp, but I had a kind of mini-camp when we were filming the show [The Ultimate Fighter season 11].

CG: And that was taped a few months ago, right?

Liddell: Right. We taped that beginning in January and finished up in early March. Then I took a couple of weeks where it was just regular workouts, just to sorta relax a little bit, sorta cool off a little bit. But I’m back in right now. I’m 219 pounds right now, and my goal was 220 by May 1st, so I’m doing good. So I’ve been in shape for a while.

CG: What’s your typical training day? Do you get up for a light jog, or…

Liddell: It depends on the day. Sundays are my day off. Mondays I usually wake up, get a good stretch in, get some sprints in. Then I go work out, then I come back and wrestle. Tuesday I usually go and spar, then at night I’ll wrestle. Wednesdays it’s light, like a hike or yoga whatever just to get my body moving. Thursdays I’m back in. Friday it’s a swim then two workouts.

CG: So an all-day thing. Now, has anything changed that you’re fighting Rich Franklin and not Tito Ortiz?

Liddell: Well, he’s a southpaw, so that changes some things. I do a lot of strategy, so… training partners, sparring, it gets tweaked a little. But it’s a similar fight for me because I’m gonna make him strike with me. He doesn’t have the take-downs to take me down. He’s a better striker than Tito.

CG: What do you make of what Anderson Silva did the other day? A lot of people online were saying, you know, “Oh, he’s this-and-that.” I mean, I’m not a professional fighter, so I’m really not comfortable criticizing someone like Anderson Silva.

Liddell: You know, if he [Silva] was going to clown him [Demian Maia], I would have preferred he try to fight him for three rounds then clown him for the last two, not clown him from the get-go. If you want to clown him for a little bit in the beginning because you felt he disrespected you, fine, but then go and knock him out. But it’s a hard match-up, those guys were trying not to get knocked out. But still, you can’t clown and then run out of gas. I would have liked to see him go after him for two or three rounds, and if he wasn’t out by then then try to clown him. But I don’t know, I don’t know what happened.

CG: It was weird, I guess is the best word to describe it. I guess the last question is, how long do you see yourself fighting in the UFC? Are you gonna keep fighting till [UFC President] Dana White sits you down and says, “Look, stop.” [White had tried to get Liddell to retire last year.]

Liddell: I’m going to keep going till I feel like I’m ready to stop. I still love what I do, I can still beat anybody in the world.

CG: If Dana says “Alright, you’re done,” would you ever consider fighting outside of the UFC, or is that your home?

Liddell: That is my home. We’ll argue back and forth. But at this point, I’m out to show him that I’m back, I’m re-dedicated. I took some time off, I got the fire back and I’m training hard. He’ll see, he’ll see me fight. It’s a fight-by-fight thing for him. But he’ll see, so long as I’m ready to go and I’m healthy he’ll let me go. I think he’s pretty excited to see me back training.

CG: OK, well they’re telling me to get out of here so thanks for your time.

Liddell: Yup, take care.

(Note: I don’t know why Liddell’s picture is in the gallery below; it’s just supposed to be photos of the shoes. Oh, wait, I do know why it’s there: because the software we use is complete garbage.)

Most gadget do-it-yourselfers have stories of an idea that didn’t quite work out. Maybe the prototype never functioned properly. Or maybe a competitor introduced a similar piece of gear into the marketplace first.

But how many gadget geeks can say that they were stymied by a cult, a laser, and legislative changes?

Of course, rock guitar legend Ace Frehley is no ordinary gadget guy.

Frehley’s first album in 20 years is released today as the long-awaited Anomaly hits stores and various outlets like iTunes. It’s a return to the form that made Frehley’s 1978 solo record the most successful of the four simultaneously released KISS spinoff albums. But Anomaly isn’t just a retread of that seventies disc. Instead, it features new techniques from Space Ace such a dropped tunings and a surprising amount of acoustic guitars and clean tones.

Known for his innovative guitar special effects, Frehley has always dabbled in gadgets and electronics. His father was an electrical engineer who passed on a love of circuitry to the young guitar player.

“I think it was in my blood,” Frehley says. “My dad told me that when he was young, he used to make his own batteries. I just inherited his curiosity and his know-how.”

Frehley started by taking apart radios around his Bronx household and when he picked up the electric guitar in his early teens, the instrument soon provided an outlet not just for his musical interests but also his electronic interests.

“I couldn’t put the gear down,” he remembers. “I’ll never forget the day I got my first amplifier that had reverb. I was just so fascinated by it. All the elements were ripe because I loved music, I loved tinkering around and the electric guitar allowed me to do that.”

As his proficiency with the instrument grew, Frehley started modifying the pickups on his guitars, maximizing his amplifiers, and even experimenting with his famous special effects, including the famous smoking axe that was a staple of Frehley guitar solos in the seventies and continues to be a highlight of his performances today.

“The original smoking guitar was nothing more than a smoke bomb inside the volume control compartment of a Les Paul,” Frehley says. “But that ended up screwing up all the volume and tone controls and the pickups. So I got together with one of the engineers on the tour and he built me another box with a lighter in it and we worked out a switch. I didn’t use the rhythm pickups, so we used the volume and tone controls from the rhythm pickup to trigger the bomb and pull back the trap door there that allowed the smoke to come out of it. It’s been an ongoing process and I’ve been perfecting that, making it smaller, more effective.”

Frehley’s massive amount of success in the seventies and early eighties era of KISS enabled him to dabble in computers and other gadgets long before they were fixtures in homes across America.

“My first computer was a Radio Shack,” he recalls. “I think it had 4k in it. That was ’75 or ’76 maybe. Next one I got was an Apple II with 64k. And I’ll never forget the day I went to a computer store up in Connecticut and they had the extension card to bump it up to 128k. That was a big day for me.”

Today, Frehley uses Macs and also has a few PCs networked together for rendering chores. He was responsible for some videos of his bandmates morphing into each other during the 1998 KISS tour for the album Psycho Circus and he has recently been “screwing around” with graphics and modeling software from Maya and Carrara.

He carries a laptop and a BlackBerry to cover his electronics needs on the road. And Bose Computer MusicMonitors allow him to listen to high quality tunes while traveling. “I mean, for the size of the speaker, they’re the most amazing little speakers I’ve heard,” Frehley says.

Frehley intends to debut some brand new special effects as he tours in support of Anomaly. He’ll also be bringing along a new signature series Gibson Les Paul guitar, rumored to be a blue sunburst with lightning bolt accents.

But what about the failed gadget attempt? The one with lasers and all that?

“I had a fiberoptic running through the neck of my Les Paul that connected to a high-powered laser to blow things up,” Frehley laughs. “Right around that time, Blue Oyster Cult had blinded someone with one of their lasers so new legislation came out that limited the amount of wattage you could use in a laser on stage. That was the advent of using rockets in the guitar neck. It was supposed to be a laser beam and then I just went to fireworks.”

For more information, check out Frehley’s website.

Photos credit: Kevin Britton

Dearest CrunchGear readers: I recently had the honor and privilege of speaking to Karen Dyer, who is not only the voice of Sheva Alomar, from Resident Evil 5, but who also did said character’s motion capture. I hope you enjoy it on this day, our day of freedom.

Obviously, “K” is for Karen, and “N” is for Nicholas. With that…

N: Well, first off congratulations. Resident Evil 5 was a big hit. It sold something like 4 million copies.

K: That’s what I hear!

N: Excellent. But before we get into the game, I just wanted to bring up something I saw on your bio. It says here you’re known for your circus skills, and I just wanted to say how that awesome that is. And I wanted to ask, where do you study that? Because I don’t know if your average community college offers that type of training.

K: You might get a juggling course, but maybe not everything that I do. I’ve actually been doing a bit of circus stuff for a while. I’ve been doing fire eating, breathing, twirling performance, stilts, juggling, walking ball, and aerial. It started off just kind of knowing the right people and hanging out with them, and then getting involved with different circus troupes and doing a little bit of circus myself. Now I’ve kind of created this alter ego, Eva La Dare, that I get to use as my sexy circus outlet, if you will. [Note: Here's a video of Eva La Dare in action. I'd say it's mildly NSFW because she's eating fire in a sort of exotic dance setting.]

N: And how’s that working out? Is the circus business booming, or… I have no idea. That’s a world…

K: It is booming! And you know why? Well it’s just so damn interesting to look at, for one. You might have noticed Christina Aguileira had some circus stuff in her latest tour. T. Pain’s whole album was about being the ring leader, and I was actually on tour with T. Pain doing fire and stilts as my alter ego for his last tour; I just got off tour in February. And of course now Brittney is on tour with her Circus album. So it’s not doing too bad.

N: Alright, well. It was just something that like, wow, that’s sorta unusual. I don’t really read about that too often.

K: Anything that’s unusual and daring I’m usually into. It didn’t take me long to want to pick up a few skills. Someone would come along and say, “Hey do you want to eat some fire?” I’d be like, sure!

N: Who doesn’t!

K: Yeah, you know, willing. As long as you’re willing you’ll learn.

N: Excellent. All right, now I guess we can get to the reason why we’re here, Resident Evil 5. You’re the voice Sheva and you also did the motion capture, right?

K: That is correct, I did both. Quite a wild ride.

N: How did you first get involved with that? Who contacted whom? How does that even go about happening?

K: Well you know it’s funny. My experience with motion capture beforehand, I had only just done a couple of small games. Through a contact that I had worked with they recommended me to Capcom because they were having this search for someone who can handle the activities and the movement and the voice and everything that they needed for Sheva. And when I met with them I went through a series of tests. We did some green screen shoots, I went and got some training with guns and rifles because it was very important that I could do all the activity with my left hand. I’m a right-handed person and Sheva is left-handed. I had to make it look convincing. They made me jump through a couple of hoops and in the end they were happy with keeping me on. So I got the part!

N: And you did a good job, I would say. I mean I beat the game probably like three of four times. So, yeah, it was very convincing. So I wanted to know how long was that whole process, from the first day at the office till lights out, go home now. How long did that whole thing take?

K: I think it was a lot longer than most games. I was brought on in September of 2007. Up until that time they were still making the designs and the look of the characters, the background and the story. They’d been working on that since earlier in 2007. When I got brought in it was September of 2007. I went through a series of training with the green screen shoots. I don’t know how much you know about the background of how they developed this game, but we went through shooting the whole cinematic script on a green screen process that took the whole month of December 2007. So between September and December it was more about the training and getting familiar with the character. In December we did the green screen shoot, and then Capcom made their changes and decisions about what we would do for the next phase, which was the motion capture, which we started in January, which we did in phases throughout the year till about April. I started working on some of the voice earlier in that part of the year in 2008 and continued coming back for more voice sessions throughout the year all the way till about September, October of 2008. Between then and the game’s release there might have been a couple of pick-ups, not a lot. But yeah, a year, over the course of a year working on the same game which I hear is kind of unheard of. I feel like I’ve been totally spoiled by this whole experience.

N: Well it was a very big production. It doesn’t really get much bigger than that.

K: It was a huge production. Doing all the motion capture here in L.A. and using a film director in the Hollywood business. There was a lot of firsts for them.

N: Do you consider yourself a gamer at all, had you played any of the previous Resident Evil games? It’s one of the biggest franchises out there.

K: I haven’t played the earlier ones. I played Resident Evil 4 and really enjoyed that one. As far as games, I can’t say that I’m a hardcore gamer yet.

N: Oh, yet!

K: I say the word yet because now this has totally opened a whole new world to me and I’m attending a lot of my first conventions. I love the arcade games. I’m a big Time Crisis fan.

N: Oh, really?

K: Oh yeah. I love Time Crisis. Anything that I can actually use the prop in my hand I’m a big fan of. I’ve gotten used to—shooting real guns? That’s fun, you know? When I play Resident Evil 5 I get used to using my thumbs; I’m getting better. Especially with things like the Wii, the more interactive it is the more interested I’ve become. It’s opened a whole new world to me.

N: That’s actually tremendous. Now they’re developing all these motion controls, it’s supposed to be more immersive, this that and the third. I imagine more and more people will be gamers as the years go by.

K: Yeah, I can see it. It’s inevitable because everyone will want to be active in that way.

N: Yeah. Can you take us through the average day of production? Because you watch a documentary or whatever and you see Hollywood stars waking up at 4am to put on make-up and they’re working 17-hour days. Was it that arduous for you?

K: For me, I did have a pretty hectic schedule because I was in every scene. For me, and of course Ruben playing Chris Redfield, we probably had the bulk of the schedule to do. In the green screen shoot, we had the make-up call because we went through full make-up and full costumes for the green screen shoot. And the days were long. I would say at least 12-14 hours at the bulk of it, with the motion capture. My background, physically, has been mostly in dance and circus. I did sports in my school days and stuff; I’m pretty active. But I still had to get a lot of stunt training because I did my own stunts in the game.

N: That was going to be my next question. What type of training was involved? I imagine you’d have to be pretty physically fit to be jumping around all day doing motion capture.

K: Yeah, but I love the jumping around! I’m a pretty tough girl. At first, they were going to have a stunt double for me, but as we went through the process and they realized that I didn’t mind throwing myself around, I seemed to do it ok, they didn’t end up getting a double for me. All the training was basically on the set as we were going though it. When we would have the fight sequences come up, of course there would be a coordinator who was telling me how to do this, how to do that, how to make it look convincing. Within those long days they were very physical at the same time. As you can imagine, with all the gunplay—there was a lot of running away from zombies.

N: You’re not just sitting behind a desk all day…

K: No, it’s not a behind-the-desk job at all. So there is some truth to that, having the long days. The setups, too, especially in the motion capture process. They have to be so precise with the props and the set as far as spacing because it has to match when they put it in post-production, so there’s a lot of waiting between setups. You know, hurry up and wait.

N: I was literally just going to say that, hurry up and wait, but I didn’t want to sound…

K: Yeah, hurry up and wait. And when you’re not waiting you’re going full blast, no pun intended. But it was so much fun, because it really was like playtime. We had such a great cast and crew. The attitude was always fun, and everyone was focused on getting the game done and making it the best it could be, so it really was like playtime most of the time. It didn’t feel like work.

N: Are you now a licensed gun owner now, or did you get specific training?

K: I’m certified to use rifles and pistols. There’s another program that you go through that allows you to buy weapons. At the moment I’m not really interested in owning my own weapons. I have enough friends who have weapons that I can go the range. So I’m not owning any weapons at the moment, but I am certified to use them.

N: That’s awesome. I’m not a gun owner, but I’m not Mr. Anti-Gun, so it’s all sort of fascinating to me, the whole culture I guess. Now when I was playing the game, I just sort of classified Sheva’s accent as a sort of British accent. What did you base her voice on, is it just a generic British accent?

K: It went though a couple of changes. Her parents are from Africa, she was born there. She doesn’t grow up there, her parents die when she’s really young and she gets shipped to Europe where she spends most of her childhood. Capcom was trying to find this middle ground of what she would sound like. There was a lot more African in the beginning but she wasn’t there for most of her life so they decided to go with a more British accent. It’s funny because there’s still a hint of African in there, which you know makes sense if that’s the culture she’s from. So that’s how we came up with it.

N: Do you do other accents? Is voice talent another one of your skills, can you break into a French accent if you wanted to, or…

K: Probably not a French accent, no. My parents are Jamaican, so definitely there’s a Jamaican accent in me. I grew up in Miami so I can pull out a Spanish accent. As far as voice, this credit has been really great in getting more work and opening that door for me more. I really love doing voice-over and sometimes I’m just using my regular voice in doing narration in commercial and stuff like that. Yeah this game has opened so much opportunity for me in that area.

N: Is voice acting something where you need to know someone who knows someone, or can you literally just show up to auditions and suddenly you’re some big guy.

K: I’ve been an actress all my life, and I’ve always had an agent for theatrical and commercial work. I know other voice actors who got into the game really early but I’m finding out now that it is a clique to get into. There are specific voice agencies that handle most of the submissions for voice-over work. If you’re not with them you’re probably not hearing about the work going on. It’s very difficult to just show up at a voice-over audition because most of the time they’re just sent in by tape through the agency or online. It’s not like showing up at an audition, just showing up at a certain place. It takes a while to get into as far as getting representation. Some people have done it by credits with people they know. A lot of it is word of mouth, that definitely helps.

N: Ok, well now I know.

K: Why, are you starting a voice-over career?

N: No, no. My brother, he’s studying dramatic writing at college so now I’m being exposed to the Hollywood scene, maybe, the production side of it. It’s just sort of interesting. Now, I just wanted to touch on the supposed controversy. When you guys were working on the game, did you feel that Capcom was being racially insensitive by setting the game in Africa, and all that the entails. Was that ever a concern, or is this all just a bunch of bologna?

K: I’ve addressed this question from day one, as you can imagine. Yeah, it is a bunch of bologna. I find it funny because if the game was never set in Africa then you’d have people complaining about that. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. There was a huge uproar a E3 2007, where it was just the Chris Redfield character in the trailer. At that time the development of Sheva was not even done, and they had started developing that character, and I have all the notes to prove it, from early 2007, but you know Chris Redfield is an established character; they already know what he’s about. So by the time I came in September 2007 they still weren’t done with how she was going to look, she was still being created so there was no way of being done by that E3. Unfortunately when people didn’t see anything but Chris in Africa I guess it had a reaction that was not totally all the way positive. She wasn’t an afterthought. This is a co-op game, it takes a lot more time to just whip that together. It seems a little bit ridiculous to just do that as a type of reaction and say all of a sudden yeah let’s make it co-op.

N: Yeah, I just wanted to get a sort of behind-the-scenes perceptive on that. I just read those things and it’s like, why am I reading this? It’s just absurd.

K: The whole time I was on set there was nothing racial, you know? I did not feel—I cannot imagine that if I was being offended that I would have stayed for a whole year, you know? That I was being totally abused racially, why would I have stayed?

N: Ok, I have an answer now, thank you. Now you’ve worked on a number of different mediums like TV, film and stage. Do you have a favorite? If you could only do one for the rest of your live would you pick or do you like them all equally?

K: I love being diverse. I love having the variety. With all my little extra skills I never get a moment to be bored. It seems like every week I’m working on a different project. I love being challenged, I love having different things to do. Gosh, if I had to pick one I wouldn’t really want to. I would say at the top it would definitely be film because I also make my own films, I love to write and produce. It was my first love, getting into the business. Motion capture, especially with games and film and animation, has become a very close second because I’m finding that my skills come in handy on a lot of projects in that genre that would not totally play out on television and film. I have much more freedom in casting character wise to play different roles than I’d be able to play in television and film if you had to see my face or be a cetain body type. So I love the freedom in that. So those two would be my top.

N: Now, we are a tech site at CrunchGear, so I’m gonna ask you a few tech-related questions. Nothing too crazy.

K: I hope I can answer them!

N: No, it’s not like how to fix your printer or anything like that. It’s nothing that boring, I swear. What type of phone do you use?

K: I’m an iPhone girl!

N: Oh, you are! Do you have the new one?

K: I don’t yet, but I’m gonna get it. I’m really excited by it. I’m sick of looking at my phone now when that one’s out there.

N: Well, if you have an iPhone what’s your favorite app?

K: I’m so embarrassed to say this. It’s my Scrabble game.

N: Oh, there’s no shame in that.

K: I’m so addicted to this Scrabble game that I got an app for it. It’s that and my translator because I’m interested in different languages.

N: Well if you have an iPhone you must be a Mac fan right? Or do you not even care?

K: I’m a Mac girl! And I’m really happy to be one because I’m a new one, sorry Windows. I finally made the switch early this year and I have not looked back.

N: I’ve been using Mac for a few years now so I understand.

K: They’re awesome.

N: And I wanted to ask, do you know who John Biggs is?

K: John Biggs? Not by the name alone, should I?

N: No, you shouldn’t. I guess I have one more question. What’s next for you? What are you doing now and what are you looking forward to?

K: Well, you know in the video game world you really can’t talk too much, so I can’t talk about that.

N: Can you say what company it’s for?

K: I probably shouldn’t.

N: Meh, then don’t, no big deal. But it’s a game we now know!

K: Yeah I probably shouldn’t. You think you’re saying little and then all of a sudden [gasp!] you get that reaction somewhere. But I do work on that Robert Zemeckis film called Christmas Carol coming out this voice-over with Jim Carrey and I actually get to use my circus skills.

N: Tremendous. Ok well I don’t want to take up all you’re time so I’ll let you go now. Thanks for the chat.

K: Well I’m glad everyone enjoy the game, thank you!

Reuben: Let me see, how can I encapsulate that? I guess it depends on project to project, but overall you’re acting just as you would on TV or film or stage, only you have to pretty much use your imagination to make up your environment around you, it’s all CG. You’re familiar with green screen acting — well, that’s probably the closest thing except you don’t even have a wardrobe, you’re in this marked-up suit that has these reflective balls on it, and there are 20 to 100 cameras surrounding you in a square or rectangle type area – the more cameras, the bigger the size. You’re working in this 3D environment, where in green screen you’re in 2D, or rather the camera can only see you and the background in 2D.

I guess the closest thing is stagework, but you’re not really projecting to the guy in the back, you’re just doing your thing. And with technology getting better and better, there’s actually real-time technology now where you can actually see the CGI environment while you’re acting, which helps tremendously.

What is the preferred nomenclature for what you do? I’ve heard it called Mocap but I don’t know if that’s a copyrighted term or something.

Yeah, Mocap is definitely the most common term we use now. There’s motion capture, there’s performance capture, there’s mocap, pretty much everybody in the industry just says mocap because it’s easy to say. For a while they were trying to call it performance capture, because it’s performance-based, which is true, but at the end of the day you’re capturing motions.

I remember in shots of mocap from like 10 years ago, the actors have things the size of tennis balls stuck on them, but in the picture of you recently there are stripes on the suit and little tiny luminous things on your head… how do you think the technology has changed over recent years?

Well with the stripes on the black suit, we… well, let me back it up. What’s common these days is to have video reference. The motion capture is good, but sometimes if you’re playing a creature with non-human proportions or something, and you don’t have reference data to show what the actual actor’s doing, so the data it can be confusing. The animator might have trouble interpreting it, so he needs to watch regular video of the actor. But the black suit doesn’t always show up well, so basically all the stripes are are for when the animator goes back to the reference video they can see you better. That’s the only real addition to those suits.

There’s also got to be a lot of stuff that’s changed behind the camera, the production process and all that. I know you’re in front of the camera, but I imagine you also have some part in the post-production process.

Yeah, I actually have my own CG company now, we do our own motion capture as well as animation, so yeah, I’m very aware of the post-production process and how it works. It has changed over the years, the addition of real-time stuff, I mean being able to see yourself and your environment in real time, that’s great. We try to recreate the things you interact with, a chair, a tank, whatever, as well as we can in the CG environment so that when the actor interacts with it and you move it to post production, there’s less moving around of animations. That definitely helps.

We’ve incorporated virtual cameras into the motion capture now, where you actually mocap a camera, and you go in and capture all the camera movements, that adds more realistic camera movements. It also speeds along your camera pipeline because sometimes to animate camera movements takes quite a while – especially if you’re trying to animate it with an organic feel.

James Cameron, on Avatar, was actually really pushing those technologies, and has been leading the industry in the last couple of years, and now everyone has kind of jumped on that and tried to incorporate those two technologies into their pipelines.

I imagine. At E3, I was at the Ubisoft press conference where Cameron talked for a while about Avatar, and he was really getting into the story and the details, but he also sort of glancingly talked about the technology that has gone into it, probably because a lot of it is still proprietary stuff. What’s been your experience with that?

It’s been amazing. This is really the first time I’ve gotten to work with Jim and we’ve been working on this for the past few years. And it was really my first chance to see the real-time at work, when we started three years ago. It’s amazing to see, as a performer, how much that helped. I’ve done motion capture for so many years without that. I mean, I’d seen it before, but not as refined. Especially since I’ve been working in mocap for a while, I’ve been able to see how it benefits people.

New folks, who aren’t really used to motion capture and it’s their first time on the set, it can be a bit intimidating and they get a bit freaked out, you know? I’ve seen a lot of actors not be able to get into it very fast or even at all, but with the real-time addition, it really makes it a lot more, I guess adaptable for actors from TV or film.

Yeah, if you’re used to working on a set, with your actual co-actors, then moving to a big pink or green area, dots all over you, I suppose that real-time thing must be real handy. Now, James was talking about Avatar, both the movie and the game. I wondered if you guys shared production facilities for both, since that would probably streamline things, or were you using game assets in the movie or movie assets in the game, that sort of thing?

I haven’t been part of the game, so I can’t really say anything on that, but I remember hearing some other actors joking around with the producer, saying “Hey, when do we get to work on the game?” and he said “You already have!” So I think everything we’ve captured for the actual movie is actually being recycled over to the game. Which is great – theatrical quality.

Yeah, he seemed pretty excited about it – he was, well he was nerding out, actually, it was great.

I heard about the conference, I wasn’t there but I heard about it.

It was kind of fun. Of course he’s this visionary director but then he’s getting into the nitty gritty details and narrating it, it was interesting to see him really getting into his own work.

Yeah, it was fun watching him on set, he’s just so knowledgable, everything from the CGI stuff to the little things, like how does a soldier carry a gun, or where would his flashlight be on his gear. He seems to know everything about everything!

He’s got the vision, he’s got it all in his head.

And he does the research, I think that’s the most important thing. It’s like, when does this guy sleep? He must go home and read books and watch reference stuff, I don’t know, it’s like how does he get all this information in his head? It’s been a blast working with him, an honor.

So if you were to play a ninja and you were jumping around, obviously you’ve got to be pretty good at gymnastics but you can’t leap forty feet in the air, how much of the action we see on screen is real and how much is added in?

That depends project to project. Sometimes they just sort of want you to walk through the moves and not go all out, just to sort of get an idea. Some projects they want it exactly the way it’s going to be, the animators don’t want to have to fiddle with anything. In that case we’ll wire up, and we will jump forty feet in the air. And we’ll do it a hundred times until it’s exactly right in real life. It depends on the realism level and the amount of work that the animators will want to put in. Either way it’s going to be work, they have to clean up the data and everything.

Yeah, I was wondering if there was a lot of wirework involved.

Actually on pretty much every project we have wirework, even if it’s not all Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

I’m working on a project right now that’s heavily animated, hardly any original movements at all. A lot of games are like that. For in-game stuff, a lot of stuff is just captured for reference. When you’re mashing buttons, they need it to move quick. Traditional motion capture stuff is, I think it’s 120FPS, so frames have to be cut, usually down to 30 or less, and when you mash a button it has to happen in a lot less even.

So Cameron is big into the 3D thing now. Have you been working a lot with stereographic camera setups, has that changed the way you work at all? I mean, obviously you work in 3D to begin with, but has it changed the workflow or hardware at all?

Yeah, everybody’s looking at 3D and seeing how we can incorporate it into our next production. When it comes to motion capture, it’s already in 3D so you just hit a button to render it out. But yeah, there are a lot of 3D movies coming out in the next year or so that are CG, because for live action it’s a lot more work.

So lastly, since you’ve been working on Avatar, is there anything awesome or cool you’ve experienced that you can tell us about that we haven’t heard in the Entertainment Weekly kind of press?

There’s a whole lot of awesome coolness but unfortunately I can’t really talk about it.

I thought that might be the answer but it was worth a shot anyway.

No worries. It is going to be an awesome, awesome thing, that’s all I can tell you, and hopefully sooner rather than later. I heard they’re trying to push for a December release, but we’ll see. I can’t wait till it comes out.

Nice. Well, thanks for talking with us, maybe we can talk again in the future once Avatar is out, you can talk about some of that top secret stuff.

Definitely.

If you’d like to adopt your very own Reuben Langdon, check out his website, and then check out his production company’s website. Thanks for talking with us, Reuben.

I recently sat down with the king of gadget modders, Benjamin J. Heckendorn.

Ben recently spoke at the Games for Health conference here in Boston, where he talked a bit about his Access Controller, which was born from a request for a controller that could be used with one hand by a soldier who had lost his arm in combat.

Heckendorn also brought up the idea that Microsoft ought to make a “Brain Box” available for the Xbox 360, which would enable people to make their own controllers without having to deal with licensing issues. Microsoft would still make money by licensing and selling the Brain Box, while hackers and modders would be free to create unique controllers like the Access Controller without having to go through the expense and legal trouble of getting the controllers approved for retail sale. Sort of a standardized peripheral concept, if you will.

Ben spent about a half hour with me before his presentation. Here’s the transcript:

CG: When you were a kid growing up in Wisconsin, what’s your first memory of something you ripped apart – your first mod?

BH: Oh, that’s a good question. Let me think. Well, I had an erector set so I would build things and then rip them apart. Because, you know, I only had one erector set so I had to recycle it. I was “going green” even back then.

CG: Were you one of those kids that just took anything apart that you could get your hands on?

BH: Yeah, I’d take apart old radios a lot. And probably my old Atari computer, which I still have – I used to take that thing apart all the time. Sometimes it was because Pepsi had been spilled on it. And usually I’d try to put stuff back together, that’s always the trick. As long as I could get stuff put back together, my mom didn’t really care. When I got a little older, I had more complicated things like camcorders. I would take that kind of stuff apart.

CG: Did you ever take something apart that you couldn’t get back together? I remember as a kid taking the family computer apart and I couldn’t get it back together. My parents were infuriated.

BH: I’m sure there was stuff. In general, usually there was always a screw left over. Even now, I don’t think you can put something back together properly if there isn’t a screw left over. I think they just put in extra screws to be left over. You take a laptop apart and there are always screws left over. But it’s all over-engineered anyway. It’ll be all right.

Dreamcast was something I took apart. I was going to make a portable version but I couldn’t really figure out how to do it. Other people have figured out how to do it now, though, so I’m glad. Now I don’t really need to do it. But I never really put that back together. So I do have a lot of sort of bastard, forlorn circuit boards laying around in a bastard, forlorn bucket.

CG: What’s your favorite mod that you’ve done?

BH: I’m pretty proud of the Commodore 64 laptop because, aesthetically, it looked great. I’m actually building another one and the intention is to auction it off for charity. It took me about two years of tinkering to get one to work, then I redid everything from scratch in about a week and a half. And now I’m trying to build this other one and it’s having problems, so it’s taking me longer.

It’s like one of those things where you have to go through two motherboards for some reason. Anyway, it’s going to have the better disk drive access system that people had been asking about. Like, “Why doesn’t it have this?” The 1541 Ultimate or something like that. So it’s slightly improved but it pretty much looks the same.

So it was one of those things where when I was painting it and putting it together I was like, “Damn, this looks good.” I’m usually not too self-conscious about stuff like that but with this one I was like, “This looks good.”

CG: With your mods, do you usually come up with all the ideas yourself or do you take a lot of ideas from your website’s forums and other people who follow your work?

BH: Any more, it’s almost exclusively what people input to me. Basically I’ll sit there checking Facebook and wasting time on the internet and if an interesting request comes in and they’re willing to pay, I’ll do it.

As long as it’s interesting. That’s kind of how I got into accessibility controllers, because I’m like, “Oh, this is interesting,” and kind of an interesting challenge. There will always be e-mails like, “I would like a Gamecube mixed with a coffee pot, blender, iPod, and floatation device,” kind of like you’d see in the SkyMall catalog, and stuff like that doesn’t really interest me.

But yeah, most of it is user submitted now. I very rarely build anything on my own accord any more. Actually, I am putting together another Pelican Case laptop thing for Xbox kind of for fun, but mostly just to use up parts. So mostly user submissions now. They’re the ones that want this stuff, not me [laughs]. My own Xbox 360 isn’t even modded.

CG: Yeah, that’s my next question. What’s your house like? Do you have stuff coming out of the walls and zip lines and stuff like that?

BH: No, you’d be surprised. Except for my work area, it’s quite clean. I have an Atari hooked up to my living room television now, which is a great conversation piece. It still works.

There’s a guy on my forum who’s name is Parker Dillmann, from a college down in Texas, and he came up with a really cool mod called the Longhorn Engineer Video Mod. It’s a little circuit board that he made, and you hook it up to your Atari and it gives you composite video and S-Video. It works great. So I got one of those from him at a convention, pimped it on my site, and I use it on my Atari.

I had a hell of a time getting the Atari to work at all. I have a big BRAVIA TV and, at first, the Atari didn’t work and I had to really tweak my own video mod to get a picture to show up, but Parker’s mod worked great. So the moral of the story is, yeah, he’s got a good video mod at LonghornEngineer.com.

So yeah, I do have an Atari, which is a fairly geeky thing to have on your TV. I used to try to have every system possible hooked up but now I just have Xbox 360 and Atari. That’s about it. You don’t have to move a circuit board just to sit on the couch, though. Because who wants that?

CG: Nobody! You’d rip your pants! So which console do you find is easiest to mod?

BH: Modern consoles? Because all-time, it’d be Atari. But for modern consoles, the Wii is pretty easy to work with mostly because it’s simpler and smaller. The Xbox 360 is actually fairly easy to mod but obviously since they double as nuclear blast furnace ovens, you have to think about heat and whatnot.

PlayStation 3 is definitely the hardest. I think with Sony – first, there’s not enough games for it – but hardware-wise, it’s very well done. It’s a very nice piece of equipment. But of course it’s all proprietary because it’s Sony. I like Sony but they kind of take the long way around the barn. I love Sony, though. Everything I buy is Sony. Except for my Xbox 360.

CG: One of our writers, Matt Burns, is dying to know: what is your favorite tool?

BH: My favorite tool? Oh gosh. That’s a good question. I love when I get good questions. Usually it’s always the same ten questions in the same order. My favorite tool?

For the longest time I didn’t use dremels, but now I swear by it. It’s like my third arm – or whatever number arm would be appropriate for your readers. Believe it or not, I have this little pair of tweezers that I got at, like, Wal-Mart. I’ve had them for about ten years and I actually probably use those the most – just a little simple pair of tweezers that are very useful because my fingers are only so small.

I do have some favorite screwdrivers from back when they used to make the things in Japan, probably back from around 1984. I still use them every day.

CG: Do you have any ridiculously complicated and expensive equipment that you use or is it mostly old-school screwdrivers and tweezers and stuff like that?

BH: Except when I have stuff done on a CNC machine, it’s mostly old-school. I have a belt sander and I’d like to have a drill press, I should really get one of those. Maybe I’ll ask nicely for one next Christmas. Not really, though, no. I do have an infrared thermometer, which is kind of fun. So I can point it at the Xbox 360 and say, “Oh, look, ten thousand degrees.”

The Xbox 360 is actually much cooler now that they’re on the third revision and the GPU and CPU are both 65 nanometers. It’s probably almost up to 30 degrees cooler but, yeah, that hardware definitely runs hot.

I think that – and I’ll probably never get a job at Microsoft if I say this – if you look at the Xbox, if Microsoft designed a car, it’d have no front grill, no radiator, and the exhaust would just kind of float off the engine. That’s kind of how the Xbox 360 is built.

I don’t know if you’ve ever taken apart a PlayStation 3, but it’s frickin’ awesome. Like all these heat pipes coming off the main chips, and there’s this fan that’s like six inches in diameter. So mostly at the base is this fan that’s turned by a big radiator. If you think of a Chevy Metro or a Smart Car, this is probably bigger than the radiators in those cars. But seriously, the whole bottom of the PS3 is basically metal, copper, fans, and cooling. Instead of, like, oh here’s some fans on the back that’ll just lazily pull out air.

It’s very well built – too expensive, though. Maybe that’s why it’s so expensive.

CG: Have you done any mods that have just gotten way too out of control? Any Frankenmods?

BH: I don’t know about, like, in scale or complexity but the original version of the Commodore 64 laptop was pretty much a complete and utter failure. The guy I was making it for was really patient with me but at one point, I was like, “Screw it,” and everything was scratched.

And I’ve done that before. I’ve built entire arcade cabinets – my friend wanted one for his company – so I tried to make this big fancy thing. It was all curvy and it looked like it was something from, like, Soylent Green or Computer Space. It was getting too complicated so I had to scrap it and just make an angular one, which was still fairly well done.

And I think I’m on the fourth year of trying to build a pinball machine. I love pinball. And I have this Neo Geo arcade cabinet that I built and I thought, “Has anyone tried to build a pinball machine from the ground up?” So I’m plugging away at that and I have a lot of the parts. The theme is “Bill Paxton Pinball.”

CG: Oh, nice!

BH: Because I wanted a theme and I was like, “What’s just ridiculous, but everyone understands it? Oh, Bill Paxton – the finest actor of our generation.” He’s got a lot of great quotes and I like cheesy actors like Bill Paxton and William Shatner.

CG: I used to perform at this improv place in Minneapolis and there was a show running there called Paxton versus Pullman. The whole premise was that nobody can ever tell which one is which.

BH: [Laughs] Yeah, it’s like all those mirror-mirror episodes where they’ve got the two Bills and someone yells “Shoot!” and the guy with the gun is like, “Which one?!”

One of them always has a goatee, and that’s how you know who’s who. [Laughs]

Check out BenHeck.com for more of Ben’s mods.

Here are some photos from Ben’s presentation at the Games for Health conference:

Jack Conte is an Internet musician who makes his living from selling MP3s online and generally running around like a madman making great music. I was introduced to him through Electro-Harmonix but I was amazed when I found the rest of his great music online. I met with him at a cafe in San Francisco where we drank huge bowls of coffee and talked music, technology, and hardware. He makes videosongs of himself recording his songs and sells his music online. Oddly enough, he also Tweets.

CG: So from a hardware perspective, and I know you use a lot of gear, it’s interesting how far things have come from your Dad’s old amp in the basement to a box that does everything for you. How have things changed in your experience so far and in terms of being a musician trying to get an authentic sound?

Jack: I think my ear is pretty good, but I don’t have formal training so my ear isn’t that good. I know when I like a sound. I’m pretty confident knowing when I like something… sometimes it’s the “wrong thing” but in terms of gear I always like the old stuff. My philosophy is that if it’s still around, it’s stuff people couldn’t bear to throw away.

The thing that’s cool about Electro-Harmonix is that they still make all those old pedals and old tubes. It’s tempting to get those electronic guitar boxes that does everything – I’ve had those before – but instead of opening doors they kind of close doors. The limitations imposed by that gear, using certain analog pedals, adds creative stimulation.

A certain number of musicians won’t be using the pedals, they’ll use the electronic stuff. But there’s a huge contingent of people who love the analog stuff. A lot of the modelers are really good, but I would rather use a pedal than a model of a pedal.

What would be the metaphor here for a non-musician? Something like a zoom lens vs. a prime lens?

If your options are limitless it can really hinder you. You don’t know which sound to choose.

People like knowing they’re using the original gear and the original sound. Another metaphor is computer animation… think about animated movies that include real people. Computer animation is good, but it’s not that good. It’s not the real thing. It’s kind of like that with the gear.

The main thing for me is just how it feels. It feels better to have a button you can stomp on. You can mess with analog stuff, which you can’t really do with computerized stuff unless you’re really familiar with the software.

What about overproduced music? Top 40 stuff? Is it too much?

I love well-produced stuff. The craft and the art of production is something I really, really love. I guess it’s about what the goal is. I listen to a lot of top 40 stuff on the radio that’s incredibly crafted — I don’t necessarily love the songs but I love the production for the skill level.

On the other hand, someone like Bon Iver recorded an album in a cabin in Vermont and that’s really raw and human. I love that as well.

You use mostly acoustic instruments that you run through pedals and other good stuff. Tell me about that.

I don’t love using synthesizers, but I do use synthesizers. I’m more inspired by acoustic instruments — as long as there’s something making the sound it’s something I really like. I like that I can unplug my Wurlitzer and still hear hammers striking the tines.

I’m not sure you can hear the difference but I feel the difference when I record.

How does it feel being an Internet music celebrity? How has it helped your career? How would things have been different if you did this 10 years ago? 5 years ago?

It couldn’t be done ten years ago. I wouldn’t be writing this many songs. You have to be careful because you have to be sure you’re making something for yourself while making something for the audience. I don’t want to be making something and asking the question “Will other people like this?” I’m asking “Will I like this?” That said, the incentive is that people will want to listen to the songs I make and it’s a business incentive because I’m making my living selling my MP3s.

That wasn’t possible 10 years ago. The infrastructure wasn’t in place. That is an exceptional transformation. I communicate with people through Twitter and MySpace. What I’m doing now probably wouldn’t be possible then. I’d be touring, trying to make a living. Now I can make music.

Will young musicians be following your footsteps? Will there be touring musicians?

There are going to be guys doing it like this. Lots of people think the record industry is falling apart. It’s not, but it’s changing. I think there’s always going to be a place for labels and there’s always going to be a Bono.

Finally there are people on the outside who get to say something. I’ve always felt like I’m on the outside of the music industry. I don’t know anybody who can get placement on TV or radio. But now I’m really glad that it can happen this way, completely outside of the traditional industry. It’s a great experience.

Greg “Heaven 17″ Kumparak was interviewed by his local CBS affiliate on the rise of online newsreading and the death of dead-tree papers. There’s no real way to embed the video so I’m adding a Final Fantasy character that Greg closely resembles. Update: Just kidding, we figured out how to embed it. Video is tucked away beneath the jump.

Congrats, Gregger!

http://llnw.static.cbslocal.com/Themes/CBS/_resources/swf/minivplayer.swf?CBS_storyIDs=47675@kpix.dayport.com&CBS_configPath=http://static.cbslocal.com/Themes/CBS/_resources/xml/kpix.xml

We had a chance to chat with billionaire entrepreneur, Mark Cuban, and CEO of Cinedigm, Bud Mayo, about their work together to bring live 3D entertainment into movie theaters across the country. The technology promises to be a completely different theater-going experience. Cuban even went as far as to call it “the LSD of 2009.”

Here’s the complete interview, conducted just before the live broadcast of the BCS championship game between Florida and Oklahoma on January 8, 2008.

CrunchGear: You guys already have a special symbiotic relationship with all the 3D stuff — what can we expect going forward?

Bud Mayo: The vision that Mark and I share is all about transforming movie theaters from movie theaters to entertainment centers. And how do you do that? You bring choices that weren’t there before. So we see that vision in the same way. How we get there might may be slightly different but we’re going to work together to try to find those answers as we move forward.

Mark Cuban: The interesting part is that this is the natural evolution of the digital revolution. For the past I-don’t-know-how-many years, it’s been a move from large to small — smaller HD, smaller internet, smaller portable devices – but the reality is, you can go bigger too. Not only do you go bigger, you go with dual-channel, tri-channel, as many channels as you want. And a natural extension now that you’re getting digital projection into the theaters is 3D, bigger screens, and more unique experiences. And Bud at Cinedigm, who’s the leader in 3D technology and distribution, and HDNet, Landmark Theaters, and some of the other companies we have — we’re really trying to work hard together.

CrunchGear: Mark, you own Landmark Theaters and you just bought a stake in Carmike Theaters. Will you be converting those theaters over to 3D technology? How intricate of a process is it?

Mark Cuban: Eventually all the theaters will be able to support everything digital. The reality is, bits are bits. You can transform any type of content into digital and Cinedigm’s already got the network operation center to be able to distribute those bits. So now the question is trying to figure out the best content to get people out of their homes and into theaters to experience something completely new.

So with Cinedigm and Fox and the BCS putting together this unique BCS 3D experience, people are going to get a taste of it. But this is like Broadcast.com in 1998 in the early streaming days. This is just the beginning and it’s going to get even better.

Bud Mayo: This is a change. It doesn’t happen overnight. We started this eight years ago with a vision and now this is, in a way, Cinedigm’s coming out party: the first ever 3D live broadcast of an event. There have been lots of tests – we’ve heard about them and read about them, but this is for real. This is going nationwide, open to the public.

And it’s a taste of what’s to come. We’ve already announced a live Fall Out Boy concert, we’re going to do an NBA All Star Saturday Night, and there will be plenty more like that. Mark and I will be talking about lots of other programming, as will others; sports leagues, concert promoters – everybody wants to do this. And the public is the winner because it gets choices it’s never seen before.

CrunchGear: Has there been a little decline in traditional theater-going experiences?

Mark Cuban: Actually not. You know, people talk about social networking. We congregate around various topics on the net – we’re all on Facebook or MySpace or whatever it may be – but one of the ultimate social entertainment experiences is going to see movies.

Christmas day [2008], actually, was the best Christmas day ever in terms of admissions and dollars. The past couple of months in the theater business have been amazing. You can talk about sitting in front of your PC, you can talk about mobile entertainment, but the reality is that you get bored at home at some point and you’ve got to get out of the house.

You can reach out and connect to people digitally but, you know, if you’re going to go out on a date, you can’t just sit at home in front of the big screen. You got to get out of the home.

And I think the movie production companies are starting to realize that you’ve got to give people a good reason – they’re not going to just automatically go. So, before, there’d be random movies and people would just go to the movies to go to the movies. Now, they’ve gotta work well and they’ve got to be good movies, and that’s paying off.

And now we’re expanding the experience so that no matter what demographic you’re in, there’s a reason to go try something new, whether it’s 3D, whether it’s live broadcasts — it’s all interactive. Whether you’re sitting in front of a PC screen or a laptop or a digital projection in a theater, you’re still going to be able to text, you’re still going to have real-time discussion groups, you’re still going to be able to e-mail back and forth and interact.

It’s just a different out-of-home experience, and [getting out of the home] is never going to go away. We’re not going to all just turn into little hermits and hibernate, it’s just more of an issue of giving people the right reason to get out of the house. I think this is a big first step for Cinedigm and for CES and the people who are going to experience it.

You know, we did a live Mavs game this past March in 3D and I can just tell you, it’s crazy. It is crazy. It’s the LSD of 2009!

CrunchGear: From a technical standpoint, what goes on from the production end during a live event?

Bud Mayo: It’s a whole different system; a whole different crew, a whole different camera, a whole different production, different announcers. Everything is different. It’s immersive. It’s meant to bring you right into the theater and show you what it’s like to be there. If you can’t be there, this is the next best thing.

Mark Cuban: It’s not like, “Well are we going to the game or should we watch it in 3D?” This is just completely different. It’s a completely different experience. From a technical perspective, trying to get all the synchronization done and understanding the differences in direction – it’s a whole new medium. When you’re watching a game, it’s not like, “Well, I’ll watch it on the big screen at home or I’ll go see it in 3D.” It’s like, “Oh we’re gonna trip out and go see a movie or whatever in 3D.” It’s a whole different experience.

This morning I had the opportunity to have a chat with Bhaskar Roy, Co-Founder and VP of Product Management of Qik, a popular live video casting application available on most major mobile platforms. It’s not the first time we’ve interviewed him but, with competition at an all time high, I figured it was time to check back in.

The interview was conducted over IM and later formatted to fit within the traditional Q&A structure.

We last spoke to you way back in june, when you were getting ready to launch Qik on a few windows mobile devices. Whats new? Whats going on in the world of Qik?

A number of things. We now support Blackberry (alpha stage) as a smartphone platform. We also have support for a number of J2ME (java-enabled) devices (these are the feature phones that are typically given away by carriers), and for (jailbroken) iPhones. What you’ll notice is that we are starting to play around with location support.. people can instantly know where a person is streaming from (of course with the permission of the user) and to what detail they want to show that.

So essentially we are adding more devices, and seeing more of mass market pickup of our service. Users are starting to use Qik more as a communication service to share what they are doing live with their friends and family.

How have client downloads been? Any numbers you can share?

I cant share exact details – but what I can say is that we have over 100k users using the service from more than 150 countries. [Another] thing that we have done is made it really simple for anyone to get up and running. Basically you can go to http://d.qik.com from your phone and, if your phone is supported, it will prompt you and get you up and running in seconds.

We are seeing a shift of viewing videos from phones. People are viewing quite a few qiks directly from their phones (since we now have a WAP site, and an iPhone-optimized site)

Can we expect an Android port any time soon?

The challenge with G1 is that it does not inherently support video capturing. We are looking at it to figure out their roadmap around video, and we’ll then see how we can take advantage of the platform.

Which platform is proving to be the most popular for Qik so far?

That depends very much on a country level. Here in US we are seeing more WM, iPhone and BB adoption. Overall I’d say that WM, S60, iPhone are the leaders.

Speaking of the iPhone: What’s the status of Qik on the iPhone? Video recording and the App Store don’t generally mix, and last I heard it hadn’t been submitted for Apple’s approval yet. Has that changed? Are there actual intents on getting the Qik app into the store, or do you expect it to stay jailbreak-only?

We have not submitted to app store yet. There are a few things we are working on. Once those items are completed we’ll figure out next steps with the app store, but the intent is to release this app in App Store for all iPhone users

Any indication from Cupertino as to whether they’d let Qik through?

Don’t know, as we have not even tried that yet.

Last we spoke, you mentioned that an expecting mother had streamed the birth-giving process to her husband through Qik. Has anything crazy like that happened since?

We have had more births, weddings. Also, now the media around the Pope uses Qik to capture Pope travels. We have Ashton Kutcher using qik

Who gets more viewers, Kutcher or the Pope?

[Laughs] Let me check their profiles, hold on.

• http://qik.com/ashton [8,221 views to the channel since 9/19/08]
• http://qik.com/h2onewscrossmedia [13,871 views to the channel since 7/12/08]

H2onews is the media company for Vatican. Oh also recently – Victoria Secret backstage was covered using Qik (http://qik.com/blog/273/victorias-secret-fashion-show–backstage-exclusive), and the BBC has been using this for getting citizen’s voice as as a part of the BBC Have Your Say project.

You guys have a number of competitors. Why should someone new to the mobile life casting world go with Qik?

Firstly, mobile broadcasting is just one of the things that people do. We are finding people using this more for communications than broadcasting – especially now with the ability to playback videos from the phone, etc. (Example: Someone receiving a SMS can play the recorded video right from their phone without having to go to a computer at all)

There are a number of technical differentiators we have, like:

• Broadest range of phone coverage. Doing this on N95 is one thing, but doing it across all S60 devices (that have different CPU processing powers, battery levels, camera specs) is another. Then on top of that add other platforms Windows Mobile (which has its own variants of PocketPC vs smartphone and from different manufacturers that have their own specs). Then take iPhone, Blackberry, J2ME.
• We still have the least latency + best quality (can do 640×480 SD quality over WiFi or 3.5g)
• Live is only one aspect – being able to have a high quality video after the fact is another (We have a patent filed on this)
• We are the only ones who cover the situation where if your battery dies in the middle or for some reason your video does not get uploaded. We can automatically detect this next time you start and send that out (patent filed on this)
• We’ve also filed a patent on the way streaming can be done through J2ME phones as Java does not inherently allow it

Finally – we have built it as a complete platform (rather than destination) so that anyone can integrate Qik mobile live streaming into their apps. People can stream live to their own flash players rather than ours, like we do with our partner Mogulus, where users don’t even know that it is a Qik stream they are watching getting broadcasted to the Mogulus flash player

So broadly speaking 3 areas where we do well: (a) Phone coverage, (b) Technology of live streaming from phones itself from disparate platforms and taking care of various conditions, (c) Platform approach to enable mobile live streaming to any site any social network and any Flash Player.

By the way – another point in the details: We are the only one that has shown live streaming from both GSM and CDMA networks. We support even Verizon and Sprint networks here in US (CDMA), while the others require you to be on AT&T or T-mobile (GSM).

I’m sure you saw yesterday that Ustream.tv is planning on entering the mobile scene. Any response?

They are approaching this from a broadcast point rather than communication like we are. The main thing here is that we are building Qik as a platform for people to share live video from their phones to their friends and family and their world, such that it can be consumed and experienced from the web and other devices and create a level of interaction therein. Ustream and others are building this out as a destination site for live broadcasting

What’s next for Qik?

You’ll see us marching down the path of enabling people to share live experiences from their phones to any connected device, and building out the platform even further to enable anyone and everyone to build mobile live streaming as a part of their site or product offerings.

There’s a group of developers who are trying to resurrect the old, fun version Star Wars Galaxies with the Star Wars Galaxies PreCU Emulation Project. The “CU” stands for Combat Upgrade, a term Sony Online Entertainment, the game’s harebrained developers, concocted to described the game-breaking changes it made to the combat engine. Longtime players of Galaxies, my brother Gabriel included, hated the Combat Upgrade.(“Upgrade? More like downgrade!”) Gabriel, who helped me write that Hitler Twitter video and is now a freshman at NYU, spoke with the project’s developers last week in order to figure out what makes them tick.

This is their story, as written by young Gabriel.

I’ve played Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) since February of 2004. I’ve been through the Combat Upgrade (CU) and the subsequent New Game Experience (NGE) that followed six months afterwards. (SWG has a very interesting MMO history for those interested in doing a bit of digging). SWGEmu is a project that’s dedicated to resurrecting the original iteration of Galaxies. The project grows stronger every day with a dedicated community as showcased with their bi-weekly updates on www.swgemu.com. Just as interesting, if not more so, is the emulation project itself. The community, as well as the development staff, has had ups and downs. I interviewed a roundtable consisting of developers and staff members alike from the project. I joined (in no particular order) Aaron “Kellina” Eaton, Ramsey Kant, Jayson “Ultyma” Marion, Kyle Burkhardt, Tanner “Seaseme” Kalstrom, and Joe “Bobius” Sylve, Sawyer “PhantmLdr” Towne, and Todd “Thoop” Hooper in an IRC chat room.

The project, known as SWGEmu, started on December 24, 2004, before the first Combat Upgrade. Ramsey and Ultyma were part of the original development team that actually had a shaky beginning. “January – April we were pretty quiet, lurked on free forums trying to break the encryption,” Ramsey said. “A lot of the project’s time in the beginning was spent reversing the client and documenting the protocol… I had helped out with a few smaller server emulators here and there, but most of us were new to the game.” Aside from a difficult encryption (which they successfully cracked), the original builds known as Core1/2 were bogged down by bugs, a rough community, and yes, even an ego. “When our project first started, we were completely closed source. Part of the reason for that was our ego,” Ramsey continued, “We didn’t want to open up to the community at the time, because the original mentality was it was ‘our own work.’”

That was years ago. When asked about the progress they’ve made since the Core 1 days, the sentiment is unanimously proud and positive. Today, the community is strong, united and dedicated. What started as a small group of people working closed source has grown to “what, 30+ staff members? 60,000 thousand people” Seaseme, a 2 year vet on the project, informed me. PhantmLdr, a silent hero of the community, quickly corrected Seaseme and said it was 60+ staff members.

“I, for one, am always amazed by the progress this team has made,” Bobius, one of the developers, commented, “both technologically and socially. I remember when I first heard of this project. I believe it was from a digg article declaring the project over. Ha! This project had been declared dead more times than Duncan McCloud. What we have now is on such a different level that what was around during the core1 days,” said Bobius.

“The project started when I was still in high school and it’s been in my routine almost every day, so it’s awesome to see how far the project has expanded,” added Ramsey.

For Kyle, the developer who brought crafting in the emulator, it was much more simple. “The moment struck almost a year ago when it became more of a downhill ride, than an uphill climb,” he said.

“I will still always look back to the very first stress test that we had. I think it was like 3-4 months into development,” recalls Ultyma. “We had 452 people online at the Mining outpost on Dantooine, and every single player was in combat.”

The SWGEmu team is actually preparing for a second stress test on December 6. Since their previous test they’ve added more core features (like crafting) and want to test them out under a heavy load. They want as many people as humanly possible to help out. They don’t need to do anything specific, just logging into the test server and standing around will suffice. Instructions on how to setup the emulator and login are on SWGEmu’s website. The purpose does more benefit to the players than the actual development team. Several of the developers explained that the stress test that will take place is meant to determine the type of hardware needed to host an actual server. That means all the planned servers that will come up when the emulator finally launches will have just exactly what they need to host the server.

For those of you wondering about the developers hosting their own servers, Kyle answered, “We plan on making that decision by christmas and announcing our intentions then =).” However, feelings are generally mixed. They still need to look at the pros and cons of such a decision but rest assured, they are thinking about it.

When asked about the progress of the project as a whole, Bobius said, “I think we’re very near something that is ‘playable,’ not a release, mind you, but something more game like than just a testing ground.” Ultyma added that the game, when finished, will have very few holes that could not be filled because of complete lack of documentation missed out on from the Pre-CU era, but it will be as close to 100 percent as possible. Add to the fact a Client-Dev team that will be creating custom content, players will be able to pick up the game where they left off or simply start anew.

Overall, there’s a fun atmosphere. The team has matured along with the project. I asked if there were any final thoughts PhantmLdr would like to share for the interview and he said, “SWG wasn’t just a game for people, it was something extremely special, and when it was changed, many people died a little and lost hope in the MMO industry. We want to renew that hope and bring alive a game that people fell in love with and show people that sometime people can do something amazing just out of passion for the game without caring about their bottom line.”

Kyle then added, “Unlike the other emulators out there, we are NOT trying to bypass paying someone for their work. I will guarantee you that virtually the entire community would still gladly pay for this game monthly if it still was available, but it isn’t, and this is proof that the customer is always right.” The project has had its share of drama, ups, downs, points of hardly any progress and periods where progress couldn’t be stopped. Today, the emulator shows consistency and progress. The bi-weekly updates on www.swgemu.com detail each weeks progress. With strong support from their community, there will be a day when we’ll be able to re-realize our world in the Star Wars universe (God that was nerdy, smite me), and when it comes it will be a great day for Galaxies fans.

Full chat log with the developers: http://paste.littleaton.com/99999

The Star Wars Galaxies PreCU Emulation Project

Our own sassy Doug Aamoth appeared on the Dr. Fitness and the Fat Guy Show last week, turning said show into Dr. Fitness and the Fat Guy and One Really Tall Norwegian. Pop over to their site to listen to Doug’s interview.

io9 popped over to the Skyblazer Ranch for a little talkie talkie with George Lucas who made a movie series called Star Battles and is now making some follow-up films called the Coaln Wars. These movies should explore more of the character’s backgrounds including Darth “Anakin Skyblazer” Vander’s first assistant, some girl named Ahsoka, and the history of Jabra the Hunn’s family. The new film will be released on August 15, 2008 and may cause a ripple in the Energy, a force-like thing that surrounds us all thanks to the power of the Mitocatians. We at CG are very excited, even if we just want to find out if Darth Vander is really Lyle’s father.

Tomorrow Qik, the popular webcasting service that streams video from your phone, will announce support for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform. Actual support for phones will be rolled out in the coming months.

I had the chance to sit down and chat with Bhaskar Roy, Co-Founder and VP Product Management of Qik, and Jackie Danicki, Director of Product Marketing. The transcript of the phone call follows:

Greg: So – What’s new with Qik?

Bhaskar: Tomorrow morning, we are going to announce support for Windows Mobile as an additional platform. So far, Qik has been on the Symbian S60 platform, and people have been streaming live video from these Nokia S60 phones. In tomorrow’s announcement, we’ll be announcing support for the Samsung Blackjack, and the Motorola Q as the primary devices for Windows Mobile.

With that, we’ll also be announcing a partnership with Microsoft, who we have been working with closely in the releases for these devices and making sure we are optimized for Windows Mobile overall. Microsoft will also be helping us push this through various events, starting at Tech-Ed next week. They have something called “Mobile Smackdown”, which will be one of the Tech-Ed events. There will be close to a thousand attendees for that particular session, and Microsoft folks will be demonstrating Qik.

Greg: It seems like the idea of streaming live would be foreign to some, with a lot of people being used to editing things down before they post them online. How have people been embracing Qik?

Bhaskar: We are actually seeing very good pickup overall, where people are using Qik to do a number of things from citizen journalism, to lifestyle applications, to healthcare, and just sharing things with friends and family. Live adds an element which recorded and edited video can not do, which is impromptu. Whatever I’m doing right now, people can see it, and people can appreciate that.

The best part is that when I’m streaming live I can actually interact with my audience. Whoever is watching that video can chat with me, and that chat shows up on my phone. It creates an engaged interaction with me and my viewers, something that you just can not get with an edited or an on-demand type of video… After you’re done, the stream is automatically archived, and you can download it, edit it, and repost it somewhere else. We’re not taking that capability away from users, but we’re providing the capability to stream it live. If you want to edit it, you’ll have the tools to do that as well.

Read more…

Houser talks about living in New York (he’s British) and the places he finds unique and interesting, like Brighton Beach, which inspired Hove Beach in GTA.

He also talks about the mixture of British and American humor in the series, the shift away from movies like Goodfellas, Boyz in the Hood, and Miami Vice towards a more Eastern European organized crime influence in GTA 4, character development and interactions, and, of course, the controversy that constantly surrounds the game’s violent nature.

It’s a pretty interesting read. Check it out.

Shigeru Miyamoto told MTV News that there have been very few incidents of people being hurt by the Wii Fit and that the platform will help stem the rising tide of obesity in the United States. Har har.

Actually, Miyamoto is pretty defeatist, saying that he knows the Fit won’t keep anyone slim:

I think what’s more important, though, is that rather than trying to have people try to exercise on “Wii Fit” every day, is the role that “Wii Fit” plays in trying to make people simply more aware of their own weight, their own health and their overall wellness. In that sense, I think “Wii Fit” does play a very important role and that even just by simply checking your body-mass index or your weight, even if you’re not checking on a daily basis, it really does help improve that awareness.

Here’s another gem:

And as you play the game, you’ll notice that we offer people plenty of direction and advice in making sure they have enough space around them. And if their balance isn’t that good, they can lean on somebody else for support.

That’s right: if you’re drunk, have a friend hold you on the Fit. You’ll thank us for it.

On Android:

Google is an Internet company so they are very good at the Internet experience. We have been working with Google for almost three years. Even before Google bought Android, we had conversations with Andy Rubin. We think the mobile Internet experience is horrible now in devices and we can now try innovating in this area. We are excited for the opportunity to work with Google since they have an in-depth knowledge of the Internet.

Peter — can I call you Peter? — WinMo is a pig and no matter how many pearls you dress it in, it’s still a pig. Run far and fast with Android into the upper reaches of Nokia+Symbian synergy.

HTC CEO Sounds Off on Shift, Eee PC, and iPhone [LaptopMag]