By John Tyrrell

Emotions have been running high in the HTML5 application development space in recent months. With the current worldwide explosion of mobile and web app use currently underway, many feel HMTL5 is the bright future of cross-platform development.

The vision is simple: one single, straightforward web programming language that allows the creation of anything from a basic service app to a complex game that works across any platform without the need for native development. In theory, HTML5 is a developer’s dream, reducing costs, leveling the playing field and, for app and game studios in particular, opening the floodgates to a wealth of new potential development talent. But in practice, as is often the case when disruptive new technologies enter the marketplace, the road ahead for HTML5 has some twists and turns.

One of the hottest HTML5 debates centers around game development. Games are complex beasts that generally require specialized coding and the creation of native versions for each platform they are deployed on. The idea that HTML5 could eliminate these hurdles is exciting to the countless coders around the world who are working to embrace the emerging technology.

Cloud computing concept photo from Shutterstock.

By Rich Seidner

The rapid rise of cloud computing has been driven by the benefits it delivers: huge cost savings with low initial investment, ease of adoption, operational efficiency, elasticity and scalability, on-demand resources, and the use of equipment that is largely abstracted from the user and enterprise. There are fundamentally challenging questions that companies will be forced to grapple with as they decide what cloud functionality suits them best. The central issues include security, cost, scalability and integration.

Matt Ployhar

By Matt Ployhar

I’ve been following slates, tablets and similar PC form factors for quite a while now. They’ve actually been around for a very long time when one comes to think of it -- at least a decade from what I can tell. There’s a ton of hype around them all of a sudden, since Apple released the iPad over a year ago. So where will they go next?

John Gaudiosi

By John Gaudiosi

One of the themes at this year’s Game Developers Conference was games for change. Electronic Arts took this concept to heart with the development of SimCity, a new PC-exclusive, 3D reboot of the franchise from Maxis that’s scheduled to ship in 2013.

The Game Changers event -- presented by EA at the W Hotel -- was hosted by Lucy Bradshaw, senior vice president of Maxis, and featured Davis Guggenheim, the Oscar-winning director of the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. While Guggenheim wasn’t involved in the development of the game, he did lend his environmental star power to GDC 2012 to help showcase the social consciousness behind the new SimCity.

“Video games like SimCity allow gamers, including my own kids, to see the consequences of their actions,” says Guggenheim. “Games can educate people, without making them feel like they’re taking their medicine. SimCity gets under your skin and sticks with you.”

The word “convergence” won’t mean quite the same thing to the next generation as it does to us. That’s because kids today will come of age in a time when phones were used to play video games, computers could double as a private movie house, and televisions were flipped on to browse the Web. Unlike us, they’ll be living in a world where “ubiquity” is the word -- surrounded by devices.

The most interesting development of the ubiquity age isn’t that we’re surrounded by screens and able to connect to the Internet in myriad ways, from smartphones to televisions to tablets. Most fascinating is that no one device serves as the ultimate Swiss Army Knife, acting as a substitute for all the rest

Rather, we collect these devices the way golfers keep clubs. On the go, we check movie times on mobile phones. On the couch, we research that movie on a laptop PC or tablet, or we play a game of “Words With Friends” while our significant other watches the big game. Rather than seek a one-size-fits-all solution for computing, consumer behavior indicates that there’s a time and a place for every kind of screen.

Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center. Photo courtesy of ETC website.

By Brian Taylor

Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center was founded in 1999 by drama and arts management professor Don Marinelli and the late Randy Pausch, professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design. An independent center housed in neither the School of Computer Science nor the College of Fine Arts, the Entertainment Technology Center is headquartered in a riverfront technology park along the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, Penn., directly across from an old steel mill site that is now a mixed-use commercial-residential development designed to blend into the adjacent National Historic District. Its hallways are a pop-culture explosion (geek skewing sci-fi, where a life-size carbonite Han Solo statue leans next to Lara Palmer’s image hanging on a wall above a Blade Runner poster), the men’s room decorated in a Super Mario Brothers World 1-1 motif.

Whether 3D moves beyond a stylistic evolution and becomes a revolution, though, has yet to be seen. As some developers and players note, the unique visual effect of 3D -- with the initial disorientation of viewing a scene with an illusion of depth and then continuing to direct the action -- can take some getting used to. However, the PC games that have made the jump to 3D run the gamut, including StarCraft II, Call of Duty: Black Ops, World of Warcraft and Duke Nukem Forever.

PC developers need to spend much less time tweaking the rendering effects in their games, as opposed to more than several months to rewrite a console game engine from the ground up to support 3D. And Mick Hocking, a vice president at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and the head of the company’s 3D initiative, says that while some of the technology used to produce high-quality 3D displays has existed for a long time, it’s only recently become available at a consumer price point.

Quite often, simple things that occur in the real world can become incredible technical problems for visual effects artists attempting to digitally recreate or adapt those occurrences for film. One such gremlin is liquid simulation.

Previously, we looked at how Gradient Effects used the Exocortex Technologies Slipstream tool to create the memory pool in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, a sequence that required mimicking the effect of ink dispersing in water -- in large volume and high detail. Slipstream allowed Gradient Effects to complete the sequence with far less processing power, with greater efficiency and in far less time than other solutions, thanks to real-time rendering and a specialized production pipeline.

But while rendering ink in water is impressive, the power and majesty of the deep blue sea is something else entirely.

By John Gaudiosi

Bethesda Softworks showcased the much-anticipated Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim at Gamescom 2011 this summer in Cologne, Germany, allowing fans to check out the successor to the award-winning blockbuster hit Oblivion. Bethesda Game Studios has been hard at work on this new role-playing game (RPG), developing a brand-new game engine -- the Creation Engine -- for the open-world experience.

Longtime fans of the Harry Potter film franchise are familiar with the series’ ample visual effects (VFX), and this summer’s box office hit Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 -- the final adventure in the series -- ranks as one of the biggest VFX-driven Hollywood productions of 2011. Among the many emotive sequences in the Harry Potter film franchise is the memory pool sequence created by Gradient Effects. Here is a behind-the-scenes look at how Gradient Effects and Exocortex Technologies worked together to pull off this visually stunning special effect.