Sony has given gamers a first look at the design of its next console as well as some of the titles it will play.

The PlayStation 5 has a black core surrounded by curved white edging, and a blue glow.

Two sequels to bestselling PS4 releases were among the standout games announcements – Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Horizon: Forbidden West.

Sony’s machine will launch alongside Microsoft’s rival Xbox Series X before the end of the year.

“While there’s still a lot of unanswered questions about the PS5, namely price and release date, I think Sony did exactly what they needed to with this reveal event,” commented Laura Kate Dale, a freelance games critic.

“It showed off an hour of games, mixing sequels to popular titles, and new franchises from its biggest first-party studios, for a solid hour.

“People on Twitter are very split on whether they like or hate the look of the box, but overall Sony spent an hour getting people excited.”

So many people remarked that the console looked like a “wi-fi router”, that the term trended on Twitter shortly after the event.

More than two dozen new games were shown off in total.

Other highlights included a first look at Sony’s racing game Grand Turismo 7 and a brief look at Capcom’s zombie horror game Resident Evil 8.

It was not always clear during the event which titles were PS5 exclusives and which were not.

Pre-recorded show

The PlayStation 5 is set to go on sale later this year, seven years after the PS4.

In addition to being able to deliver improved visuals, the new machine also has a customised hard drive that will make it possible to radically reduce load times.

Sony is building a library of launch titles that will only be available on its next-generation machine. This contrasts with Microsoft’s approach, which is to initially release new first-party games on both its current and next-gen consoles.

Sony opted to stream a pre-recorded video rather than a host a live event because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The video was broadcast at 1080p resolution, much lower than the PS5 is capable of.

The PS4 outsold the Xbox One globally by more than a 2:1 margin, although the gap was much closer in the US.

In advance of Thursday night’s event, one industry insider said there were two things he was most excited about.

“The first is the new controller – the adaptive triggers offer deeper and more meaningful feedback for gameplay,” explained Robert Karp, development director at UK developer Codemasters.

“The other is the super-fast loading. On PS5, waiting to get into the action is a thing of the past.”

Returning heroes

The new Spider-Man game acts as a follow-up to 2018’s action-adventure game based on the Marvel superhero.

But this time round the protagonist is the Afro-Latino teenager Miles Morales rather than Peter Parker. The brief trailer showed him fighting and web-slinging through New York, showing off snow and electricity particle effects that would not have been possible in such detail on the PS4.

Several of the other reveals reintroduced familiar characters.

Aloy is back in the follow-up to Horizon: Zero Dawn.

In Forbidden West, the heroine was shown swimming underwater as what appeared to be a robot crocodile passed overhead, and battling against robot dinosaurs.

Assassin Agent 47 returned in Hitman III, IO Interactive’s stealth series. It is not due to go on sale until January 2021, however, so will miss out on launching alongside the PS5.

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart marked a return to Insomniac Games’ cartoon-like third-person action franchise.

Oddworld: Soulstorm was a surprise, bringing back the former slave turned hero Abe, in a series that dates back to the original PlayStation.

And Sackboy also returned for more platforming in A Big Adventure, a follow-up to the earlier Little Big Planet Games.

There was also a first look at some new intellectual property, including:

• Project Athia, which features a female protagonist on an alien planet who has to survive in a world populated by strange creatures
• Deathloop, which centres on two competing assassins battling within a “time loop”, which is being developed by Arkane Lyon, the makers of the Dishonored series
• Pragmata, a sci-fi adventure whose trailer showed a robot girl and a man in a flying suit tackling a space ship that had reversed gravity, which ends up transporting them from planet Earth to the Moon. It is not due for release until 2022
• Returnal, a moody space horror game in which a female astronaut crash lands on a world containing shadowy angel-like creatures and a floating orb

“What I found particularly great was the push on new IP,” gaming presenter Shay Thompson told the BBC.

“Many of the protagonists featured were women or girls, which is a huge deal. That would’ve been a pipe dream, even 10 years ago.”

There was no mention of any virtual reality games, however. Nor was was there any mention of a PlayStation 5 version of The Last of Us 2.

Coronavirus challenge

Sony also highlighted new features of the PS5’s hardware including 3D Audio and a 4K Blu-ray player. It also said the the new console would be released in a version that lacked a disc drive.

While Sony and Microsoft’s next-generation consoles will battle for sales, they both face the challenge of launching at a time when the coronavirus pandemic may not be over.

Although both firms have said that production is on track for winter 2020 releases, it is unclear what level of demand there will be.

“Console gaming has proven to be resilient to economic downturns because it continues to offer good per-hour entertainment value,” Piers Harding-Rolls wrote in a research note for Ampere Analysis.

“Even so, the recession and growing unemployment in key sales territories will undermine adoption – less so at launch [but] more significantly after mid-2021.”

Analysis: By Marc Cieslak, BBC Click

A confident introduction to the PlayStation 5 from Sony, letting the games do the talking, with a varied mix of big-name fan favourites and a lot of new titles from smaller studios.

The event lacked the fevered energy that a live showcase generates, but it managed to settle into a comfortable groove as games like the new Ratchet and Clank allowed us to see what the PS5’s solid state drive (SSD) can do to reduce or almost eliminate load times.

Rather than a quantum leap, this next generation looks like it might be built around lots of smaller improvements in areas like audio, with 3D sound and improved haptic feedback in the controller.

Beyond better visuals and faster loading times, what does the next generation actually mean when it comes to games though?

On this evidence more of the same: shooters, racers, third-person adventure titles and sports games. Things we already have, but graphically improved.

PlayStation and Xbox have both struggled to communicate what the next-gen really has to offer.

But at least fans have now had a glimpse of some games and finally clapped eyes on the PS5’s curvy physical case.

It’s enough, perhaps, to whet gamers appetites for what’s to come.

Sony has given gamers a first look at the design of its next console as well as some of the titles it will play.

The PlayStation 5 has a black core surrounded by white edging, and was pictured in a vertical position.

Sony’s machine will launch alongside Microsoft’s rival Xbox Series X before the end of the year.

Read more:Sony gives first look at the PS5 console and games

A group of physicists working on the atomic bomb program at Los Alamos Research Laboratory in 1950 were having a discussion about aliens over lunch one day. The general consensus was that the reason humans hadn’t yet met any was because life was scarce in the universe and we just hadn’t been lucky enough to encounter them.

One of the physicists, Italian researcher Enrico Fermi, scoffed at this notion. He did some math and came up with a number to dispute the other researcher’s conjectures. In Fermi’s estimation, if aliens existed they should have already visited us by now. This became known as the Fermi paradox.

At it’s most basic, it goes like this: If life isn’t unique to our planet, and the universe is infinite, then the odds of it being flooded with life are great. And if it’s flooded with life, the odds are great that at least one of those life forms should have visited us by now. So the most simple explanation – the one Occam would approve of – is that aliens don’t exist because life is really special.

This doesn’t bother enthusiasts. An alien enthusiast will look you straight in the eye and declare no less than 12 excellent reasons why aliens exist but either don’t want to visit us or can’t. And it’s incredibly hard to argue with the suggestion that they know we’re here but are pretending not to see us. We’re not exactly putting our best foot forward as the “intelligent” life forms of planet Earth right now.

None of these arguments are new. And Fermi wasn’t the first person to dispute the fact that aliens exist by pointing out there’s absolutely no evidence for them. But Alexander Berezin, a researcher from the National Research University of Electronic Technology in Russia, has a new spin that could put both camps in their place.

What if aliens do exist, but the reason we haven’t found them yet is because we’re doomed to destroy them? Berezin says the simplest way to resolve the Fermi paradox is a “first in, last out” solution:

I argue that the Paradox has a trivial solution, requiring no controversial assumptions, which is rarely suggested or discussed. However, that solution would be hard to accept, as it predicts a future for our own civilization that is even worse than extinction.

… what if the first life that reaches interstellar travel capability necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion?

The crux of the situation, they argue, is that it doesn’t really matter whether aliens exist or not but only if we can observe them.

If we assume the reason we don’t observe aliens is because they’re on one of the infinite planets surrounding one of the infinite stars that isn’t our sun, then the important bit is whether or not we or any of the potentially infinite aliens have developed interstellar travel yet. And, whoever does develop it first, will probably just destroy all the other lifeforms in the universe.

Berezin isn’t saying that Trump’s Space Force is going to go out and kill all the aliens for their resources (although they don’t explicitly rule it out). The point of the paper is that some unintended ripple effect could have imperceptible consequences throughout the universe. They write:

I am not suggesting that a highly developed civilization would consciously wipe out other lifeforms. Most likely, they simply won’t notice, the same way a construction crew demolishes an anthill to build real estate because they lack incentive to protect it. And even if the individuals themselves try their best to be cautious, their von Neumann probes probably don’t.

As far as we can tell, Berezin’s basically saying that if we assume the most probable scenarios are true, then it’s likely that aliens exist all over the universe but the first ones to achieve interstellar travel will inadvertently destroy all the others. Yikes!

And how will this happen? Artificial intelligence, probably. If it doesn’t kill all humans, apparently it’ll just kill all… everything else. Berezin writes:

This problem is similar to the infamous “Tragedy of the commons”. The incentive to grab all available resources is strong, and it only takes one bad actor to ruin the equilibrium, with no possibility to prevent them from appearing at interstellar scale. One rogue AI can potentially populate the entire supercluster with copies of itself, turning every solar system into a supercomputer, and there is no use asking why it would do that. All that matters is that it can.

The good news is that, based on the fact nobody’s accidentally deleted us yet, it’s a near certainty that we’re the ones who’ll the destroying.

Read the whole paper here.

H/t: Peter Dockrill, Science Alert

Published June 11, 2020 — 23:29 UTC

Peter George calls it the protection paradox. People want to have safety, but they don’t want to spend a long time queuing for a security inspection.

He is the chief executive of Evolv Technology, a US business based just outside Boston that is developing systems to search for firearms at major public events, and perhaps one day look for symptoms of Covid-19.

Evolv has been asked if it can build arches into doorways and the company is examining ways to widen the space between sensors to allow larger crowds to go through more quickly.

Mr George has a background in cybersecurity work that he says qualifies him for finding needles in haystacks. Evolv sells security arches that contain a combination of electronic surveillance and AI software to sift through signals and spot one gun-toting individual among thousands of people filing into a rock concert.

This discreet technology was used to screen VIPs at this year’s Brit Awards at London’s O2 centre.

Traditional metal detectors throw up a lot of alarms for innocent metallic objects, creating a chokepoint for paying customers who just want to get to their seat in a stadium or concert hall.

This very high alarm rate prompted Evolv to blend AI software with radar to cut down on false alerts and keep the crowds flowing into a venue without irksome interruptions.

This is not just looking for the shape of a gun as defined by the software, but also for small shards of metal packed into a confined space to create shrapnel around an explosive device as was tragically demonstrated in the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing.

Evolv’s software engineers have written algorithms that interpret shapes as signatures, with the outlines of knives and guns catalogued as reasons to alert an operator.

The density of metal is one key indicator of a weapon’s presence and Mr George says his colleagues have programmed the system to react in 1/38th of a second.

The AI software analyses the results it gets from each crowd and this is uploaded automatically into Evolv’s own database.

Every arch sold is plumbed into Evolv’s home archive via the internet. So it gets updated from other scanners. The system evolves as the user base grows, or as Mr George puts it, “we can make everybody smarter as we share the data we collect.”

Evolv hopes to add thermal imaging capabilities to its scanners in the course of 2020. In theory that could detect people with high temperatures, one of the symptoms of Covid-19.

Dr Simon Worrell is an immunologist specialising in pandemic planning who works for health and security advice firm Collinson. He says the use of AI to assess human scans “sounds good, but I just don’t know how effective it will be”.

Taking paracetamol, for example, will lower the temperature of a Covid-19 carrier. And basic precautions are still paramount. “Physical distancing is important.”

He thinks that adhering to layers of protection, temperature checks, masks and staying apart, is the way to beat the virus.

Canadian threat protection specialist Patriot One Technologies has directed its AI team to research how its existing systems, built to identify one person carrying a gun in a crowd, can be tuned to pick up people with raised temperatures.

But Martin Cronin, chief executive of Patriot One and a former British Foreign Office diplomat, urges caution. “It’s not that easy to detect temperatures. You can’t just point a thermal camera at a crowd. Factors like the ambient temperature or whether someone has a raised temperature due to exercise can undermine the accuracy of scanning devices. People should be wary of bold claims to have answers to temperature scanning.”

Part of the challenge is tuning AI software to ignore such distractions and isolate the indicators that are important to keeping virus carriers out of crowded places. Patriot One wants to pin down a range of anomalies, including the absence of approved face masks, that mean a visitor merits further attention.

It’s been difficult enough training the systems to look for concealed weapons.

Patriot One found that radar did a fine job of peeking underneath coats and jackets to find what it thought were weapons. Unfortunately the number of false alerts was unreasonably high.

AI was drafted in to help, in the form of machine-learning technology that could sort out the shapes caught on the radar scan and assess whether they really represented a threat.

With a boost from AI the success rate rose, but it still wasn’t up to a stage where it could be unleashed on the public without common objects getting confused with the tools of a terrorist.

The system was only working well in some environments, while in others the signals became cluttered by outside elements such as emissions from consumer electronics.

More Technology of Business

The answer was yet more technology. Patriot One bought several companies, with additional AI and detection expertise.

Video images of guns and knives were fed into the AI software teaching it to discriminate between different objects.

And the company has connected its surveillance technology to security cameras suspended in familiar transparent bulges from corridor ceilings in customer sites.

Mr Cronin brought the AI ingredients together, pooling the data from different systems. He likens it to the way humans combine all of their senses to understand the world around them.

He claims the AI software has now eliminated interference from building noise and electronic signals, deleting the false positives that dogged early trials. And he presents the technology as leaving individuals anonymous. “We look for objects, not people.”

But the algorithms that underpin smart systems can be foxed by mundane events.

At one high school campus in the US a gun detection scanner was perplexed by the sudden appearance of umbrellas on a day of heavy rain. Retrained to identify an umbrella as a non-threatening object the software could then be updated across Patriot One’s user network.

Different societies throw up different problems. In North America the priority is to detect guns. For prospective UK users the system may be looking for knives. But in both cases the idea is to install unobtrusive security architecture.

So the next time you stroll into a corporate reception area or the entrance of a public building, cast a glance at those big planters that frame the door as you walk in. You might just have been checked out for weapons. Or perhaps, one day, a virus.