Infinium Labs Inc. will debut its Phantom Gaming Service -- the first end-to-end, on-demand game distribution service -- at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), in Los Angeles, May 12-14, 2004, at Booth 746 in the South Hall of the Los Angeles Convention Center. The new service will offer subscribers a library of titles and make them available any time, day or night. The company plans to provide the service hardware free of charge to consumers who sign a two-year contract for a basic subscription to its flagship online gaming service at $29.95 per month.

NVIDIA Corp. and Epic Games announced the first public showing of the new game engine Unreal Engine 3 at this week's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Unreal Engine 3 is the first game engine to take full advantage of Shader Model 3.0 -- a key feature of Microsoft DirectX 9.0 -- enabled only by the NVIDIA GeForce 6 Series of graphics processing units (GPUs). Created by Epic Games, Unreal Engine 3 advances lighting and shadowing capabilities, shader effects and editing tools.

Discreet has purchased Unreal Pictures, developers of the advanced, award-winning character animation tool, character studio. This transaction brings in patents and core character studio technology allowing Discreet to further advance the state-of-the-art in intuitive character animation.

In creating visual effects for a new Coors Light spot, KromA conjured up the unique visions of a man bent on doubling his pleasure.

Conceived by Chicago agency Foote, Cone & Belding and directed by HSI's Joseph Kahn, the spot centers on a man who gets a new pair of glasses not to see better – just to see more. The glasses cause the man to experience double vision so that when he goes to the beach he sees twice the number of beautiful women. The spot is set to the Jan & Dean tune "Surf City," which includes the refrain "two girls for every boy."

When ATI Technologies launched the latest generation of its Radeon graphics technology in April, the company wanted a visual demonstration piece that would show off the card's realtime rendering and graphics capabilities.

Softimage Co. announced that Archimation, one of Germany's leading architectural presentation firms, used SOFTIMAGE|XSI software to create 3D renderings for two of the architectural firms designing the buildings to be constructed on the World Trade Center site in New York City.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING was the big winner at the 30th annual Saturn Awards, garnering eight statuettes at the May 5, 2004 ceremonies held at the Universal Sheraton in Los Angeles. KING reigned in awards for best fantasy film, best actor (Elijah Wood), best supporting actor (Sean Astin), best director (Peter Jackson), best writing (Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) and best music (Howard Shore), among others.

L.A. How To Break Into Videogame Industry: Conference and Resume Workshop
Los Angeles, California, USA
May 8, 2004

The summer movie season kicks off this Friday with the highly anticipated release of VAN HELSING, and Ellen Wolfe will have the opening day scoop on how ILM has reimagined Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and a few other scary creatures.

The live-action PETER PAN, another underrated gem from 2003, comes to DVD May 4, 2004 (Universal Home Video, $26.98) showing off CGI as gorgeous eye candy. The vfx (courtesy of ILM, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Digital Domain, Riot, among others) help push the wonder and whimsy of J.M.