Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-12-2018, 07:36 AM - Forum: Lounge
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PS4's Huge Mid-Year Sale Has Hundreds Of Game Discounts In The US
Good news for deal hunters: Sony is running a massive Mid-Year Sale on the US PlayStation Store, with discounts on over 800 items between now and July 17. That's a seriously big sale, significantly larger than most weekly PlayStation Store sales. So if you're looking to save money on digital PS4, PS3, PS Vita, and PSVR games, now's the time to do it. And if you're a PS Plus member, you get a bonus 10% off. Let's take a look at some of the biggest and best games that are on sale right now. [Update: In addition to what's available through the Mid-Year Sale, we've also gotten some additional PSN discounts, including a nice $20 offer on GTA V.]
To kick things off, you can grab last year's Egypt-set Assassin's Creed Origins for $36 ($30 with PS Plus). For the same price, you can get Diablo III: Eternal Collection, which comes with all the expansions that acclaimed dungeon crawler has gotten since release. Or you can kick it in the apocalypse with Fallout 4 for $18 ($15).
If you're looking for games that cost less than lunch, you can find plenty of them during the sale as well. The Zelda-like game Darksiders: Warmastered Edition is down to $6 ($2). The side-scrolling shooter Sine Mora EX is the same price. And if you haven't saved (or killed) a group of teenagers in Until Dawn yet, you can add it to your collection for $6 ($5).
Those are some of our picks for the best games in the PlayStation Store's Mid-Year Sale. You can find more below, or you can scroll through the whole big sale here.
This unique action adventure game lets you become Haimrik, a young scribe trying to make a living in a medieval town full of warriors, sorcerers, dragons and dragon-riding sorcerer-warriors. But one book changes his whole life. With the help of Masamba, a hungry lioness who will protect him while constantly trying to eat him, he?ll venture out to take on the evil king and his elite generals, the Word Warriors.
Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.
Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-12-2018, 01:18 AM - Forum: Lounge
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The sound design behind Bethesda’s Oblivion and Fallout 3
“The real fun in the sound design is everything is, for the most part, natural. You know, it’s all footsteps in the dirt. It’s wooden and metal weapons. There are no electronics to speak of. ”
– Audio director at Bethesda Game Studios Mark Lampert speaking to Noclip about sound design in The Elder Scrolls.
A lot of detail goes into goes into designing the soundscape of a game, and in a recent video interview with Noclip, audio director Mark Lampert goes over the music and sound behind classic Bethesda titles from Fallout to The Elder Scrolls series.
Lampert discusses how the real fun in sound design on The Elder Scrolls came from taking audio samples from nature. Every chirp from a cricket, clash of metal, or spark of fire (with the exception of the magical kind) came directly from the environment. Everything, except for the UI.
“There are no electronics to speak of, and so for UI that’s a hard one to because UI doesn’t exist,” Avellone explains. “There’s no menu, you know? So what is a menu supposed to sound like?”
Lampert prefers sticking to natural sources as much as possible. In The Elder Scrolls, scrolling through inventory is accompanied by the sound of paper unrolling as a player goes through to equip or unequip items.
“Try to make it something that’s related to everything else in the game, but still gives you that little bit of feedback you can feel yourself move through the menu,” he says.
He then switches gears to Fallout 3, noting the shift in design approach from natural sources to electronic.
“Sound-wise, I’ve got this whole new palette of options open[ing] up,” Lampert explains. “Now I can use straight up electronic sounds, things that are fuzzing out. I like the sound of old school stuff.”
“Old school stuff not in the sense of an analog purist sound, but electronics that get hot when they’ve been on a while. Something that might shock you, because it wasn’t built well or the wires had frayed through.”
So how does he go from translating UI sounds from natural to electronic? In this case with the Pip-Boy, it’s all about narrowing down. “Start with what’s there. It looks like, in a nutshell, it’s an old computer or an old television,” he says. “There’s a lot of good material out there for that kind of stuff.”
He was speaking as part of a longer interview around sound design and his role as an audio director on multiple Bethesda titles, so be sure to watch the entire video over at Noclip.
New Preview Alpha Skip Ahead 1810 System Update – 7/2/18
Starting at 6:00 p.m. PDT today, members of the Xbox One Preview Alpha Skip Ahead Ring will begin receiving the latest Xbox One system update (1810.180629-1900). Read on for more about the fixes and known issues in the latest 1810 system update. This build has the same features as 1806 plus more to be announced over the coming weeks!
Fixes:
Groups
Renamed pins group now changes without the need for a reboot.
My Games and Apps
Fixes for titles using the FastStart technology.
Narrator
Various fixes for the new Narrator languages.
System Performance
Misc. performance fixes in the platform.
Known Issues:
Game Pass Tab
Preview Alpha – Skip Ahead users will notice that the Entertainment tab has been replaced on the dashboard with Game Pass content. This new tab allows for easy access to the Game Pass catalog and is only available in the US region at this time, so Preview Alpha Skip Ahead Insiders in regions outside of the US will continue to see the Entertainment tab.
Groups
You may see issues with Groups if you frequently switch between your non-Preview console and your Preview console. Workaround: Reset your Groups locally on the Preview console through “My games & apps” > Groups, then using the “Delete all groups” button at the bottom of the page to resync from the service.
Profile Color
Sometimes users may encounter an incorrect Profile color when powering on the console.
Networking
When the console wakes from Instant on/connected standby with a wired connection, the console may not recognize that the Ethernet cable is plugged in. Workaround: Please reboot the console via Guide -> reboot.
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker was a real hidden gem of the Wii U era, which is amazing when you consider that it was almost created by accident. The original concept for Captain Toad existed inside Super Mario 3D World, which featured a few minigame-like levels in which you had to help Captain Toad navigate a bunch of tiny cube-shaped levels, avoiding enemies and collecting stars and coins.
These levels were a nice change of pace from the frenzied chaos of a typical Mario level, and that’s largely down to the fact that Captain Toad is the antithesis to Mario. He can’t jump, you see. Instead, you can only waddle around the environment, forging your own path around enemies, to the tops of platforms, and past various different traps.
Nintendo clearly saw the genius of this design, and how well it captured and made use of the Wii U gamepad, that it was turned into its very own game: Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. The design remained largely intact – why fix what isn’t broken? – but was expanded on. Toad would now simply have to reach a single star to end the level, with hidden gems to find and extra challenges to pass for those that wanted more out of the leisurely difficulty.
It’s most notable for making excellent use of the oft-maligned and misunderstood Wii U Gamepad, allowing you to perform basic actions, like tapping to interact with the environment, to the unique, like blowing on the Gamepad’s mic to keep platforms afloat. The innovative ideas flowed thick and fast. The icing on the cake has to be its beauty. Make the case that this is one of the most gorgeous titles on the Wii U, and it’s unlikely anyone that had the pleasure of playing it will disagree with you.
So you could consider it criminal then that many of us never had the chance to play. Until now, that is, because Nintendo has dusted off the intrepid explorer and relaunched him on Nintendo Switch. And thankfully, the experience remains mostly intact. It’s clearly designed for play in handheld mode due to the amount of tapping and touching involved, but Nintendo has included gyro controls to allow for TV play. It’s definitely a far better experience in handheld, but the gyro controls more than suffice if you want to check it out on the big screen.
Either way you play is a trade-off though. It plays best in handheld mode but looks far better on your TV, where the higher definition visuals get to shine on the bigger screen. It’s amazing how well it holds up as well; though it launched on the Wii U back in 2014, it’s easily one of the best looking Switch games currently available. The amount of visual polish on show is remarkable, which is even more amazing when you consider that back in 2014 the Wii U was considered underpowered for a home console.
There’s new content as well, which is never a given where Nintendo is concerned. The best of these is the introduction of four new levels, themed on the Metro, Cascade, Sand, and Luncheon worlds from Super Mario Odyssey.
Curiously though, these new levels were included at the expense of levels themed on Super Mario 3D World. It’s not clear why Nintendo has made this decision – perhaps they’re holding them back for a Super Mario 3D World re-release on Nintendo Switch? – but it’s an odd omission. We can hardly complain due to the inclusion of new levels, but we can still shake our heads in confusion.
Given that it’s a Nintendo Switch title, room has obviously been made for multiplayer. You can each play with a single Joy-Con too, so it’s ideal for keeping the kids quiet during a long drive. The least interesting piece of extra content is the Pixel Toad challenges. These simply require you to scour each level with your eyes to find Pixel Toad somewhere and tap on him to complete the challenge. It’s cute, but rarely challenging and barely interesting. These were present in the Wii U version as well, but as they were gated behind the illustrious Toad amiibo before, they now unlock as standard without any plastic figurines.
Ultimately, there’s not an awful lot of new content, so you might not be persuaded if you’ve already played and own the Wii U version. But, if you’ve never experienced Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker before, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It’s found a great new home on Switch, and the added co-op feature breathes new life into it as you take on challenges with a friend.
Conclusion
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is a hidden gem from the Wii U era that’s been given a new lease of life on the Nintendo Switch, and rightly so. New levels and fresh multiplayer are welcome inclusions but it’s a bit of a shame that we’ve lost four levels as a result – and for no apparent reason. Still, all being said, this is a wonderful and gorgeous puzzler fit for all ages, and one which you should definitely experience if you’re yet to.
The Switch version of Captain Toad is a no-brainer. Given that Nintendo’s latest home console (of sorts) is massively more popular than the Wii U was, it’s only logical that Captain Toad would be the latest in a long line of ports aimed at giving some of the Wii U’s brilliant library a second chance at success.
For many, then, it’s the 3DS port – due for release on the same day as the Switch one – that’s raised a little more curiosity. After all, some question whether it’s necessary to keep committing resources to a system enjoying its twilight years, but the likes of WarioWare Gold and the upcoming Luigi’s Mansion remake prove that Nintendo’s still keen on ensuring those 70+ million 3DS systems out in the wild keep getting new games, at least for now. It’s just as well, really, because the 3DS version of Captain Toad is a fascinating demonstration of just how much it’s possible to squeeze out of this now seven-year-old device.
What’s initially impressive when playing the 3DS version is just how faithful everything is to the Wii U game. Like Hyrule Warriors Legends and Poochy & Yoshi’s Woolly World before it, it’s clear that sacrifices in visual detail have been made but the overall package is still the same. Most notable (especially when playing the Switch version then jumping over to the 3DS one) are the jaggier visuals, something which is pretty much inescapable given the 3DS’s humble resolution. Everything looks significantly rougher here, but that’s what you get when you’re dealing with a 400×240 output. When zoomed out the game’s levels can become a tad too low-res for comfort, though never to the extent that you can’t identify specific parts of the stage and figure out where to go next.
The frame rate also takes an understandable knock, from the stable 60 frames per second of the Wii U and Switch versions to (a similarly stable) 30fps. It’s certainly noticeable and does make things feel a little less slick and polished as a result, but given the slow pace of the game, it doesn’t really affect the way it’s played. One area in which it does achieve parity with the Wii U version is the controls. Since the Wii U technically used two screens, the 3DS version directly imitates them: the top screen is essentially the ‘TV’ while the touch screen stands in for the Wii U GamePad.
This means that, as in the initial release, you can use the touch screen to manipulate elements of the game world: moving blocks, spinning wheels, stunning enemies and the like. The Switch version obviously does this too in handheld mode, but while docked players instead have to make do with a less intuitive motion-controlled pointer. Since 3DS is handheld-only, no such concessions are necessary and it’s touch-based goodness for all.
This does, however, make for a curious situation in which both the top and bottom screen show similar action. In fact, they pretty much show exactly the same thing, albeit with the top screen obviously showing a little more of the sides due to its widescreen aspect ratio. Since both screens are rendering the same detailed 3D environments, it would be interesting to know how much processing power could have been freed had only one screen been showing the game instead. Maybe if the top screen had only shown information like level details and your life counter, improvements could have been made to, say, the frame rate.
That said, it’s still useful to have the action replicated on the top screen too, if only because it lets you play the game in 3D. Yes, it’s fair to say the 3DS’s stereoscopic 3D feature no longer drops jaws in the ways it did back in 2011, but there are still occasional new releases that remind you just how impressive it can be when used properly (take a bow, Metroid: Samus Returns).
This is very much the case here: Captain Toad’s self-contained floating 3D stages and its general concept of rotating and zooming around them works perfectly in three dimensions, and genuinely gives the 3DS version an edge over the Wii U one, even despite its lack of oomph in other visual aspects. This is easily one of the better uses of 3D in recent years, and it’s nice to see Nintendo still supporting it when it fits as well as it does here.
The 3DS version also gets the new Super Mario Odyssey-themed stages that have been added to the Switch port. Unlocked through general gameplay or instantly using the Mario wedding amiibo, these lovely new stages perfectly capture the feel of Odyssey and are clear highlights in this new release. It’s a bit of a shame, however, that these stages replace the four Super Mario 3D World–themed stages that were in the Wii U version. It would’ve been nice to have had those too, making the new ports the definitive versions of the game, but as it is you’re still going to want to keep hold of your old Wii U copy if you want to have access to every single stage.
Ultimately though, we’re only talking about four levels being substituted for new ones, and if you can live with that then you’re otherwise still getting the full experience here. While it could be argued that the Switch version is now the definitive one – its docked and handheld modes bettering both the Wii U and 3DS versions in terms of visual fidelity – that doesn’t mean the 3DS port should be ruled out entirely as a waste of time.
Indeed, given the relative lack of power in Nintendo’s little 3D wonder, it’s fair to say the 3DS version of Captain Toad is the most impressive: not only in terms of what it manages to pull off, but how it actually manages to improve things in a way with its effective use of 3D.
Conclusion
If you own a Switch then there’s no real decision to be made here: Captain Toad is still far and away better on Nintendo’s latest system. That’s not to say the 3DS version is a write-off, though, because that’s far from the case. As seemingly one of the final few big-name releases for the system, Captain Toad pushes it to its limits to produce easily one of the best-looking 3DS games ever made. The 3DS may be preparing for retirement, but games like this are ensuring it’s going out in a blaze of glory.
Today we are rolling out a bunch of improvements in how we show you upcoming games on Steam.
In the past, the Steam homepage included an Upcoming tab that showed customers a complete list of everything that was coming to Steam. This was a pretty simple feature — it was literally just a chronological list of upcoming titles. It didn’t do anything to build a list of games suited to anyone’s interests and just wasn’t doing its job. Hundreds of new games are coming to Steam every month, but customers weren’t using this list to find new things to play. It was a feature that needed work.
Therefore, as of today the Upcoming tab will be a smarter, more tailored list called Popular Upcoming. This list will take into account the pre-release interest in a game — that is to say, data we gather through wishlists, pre-purchase, and a developer’s or publisher’s past titles. We believe Steam does a good job of taking early customer interest (even if that interest isn’t enormous) and helps a game amplify that interest through connection to quality customers. This smarter list on the front page aims to do just that.
Furthermore, when you click on “see more Upcoming Releases” at the bottom of that tab you’ll be taken to a dedicated Upcoming Releases page. This page will make suggestions based on your unique interests and show you what’s coming to Steam in a much more digestible format.
If you follow a developer or publisher with a new game coming out, the Upcoming Releases page will feature those games. If you’ve wishlisted a game, it will appear here as well. If you’ve shown Steam some of your interests, we’ll be taking that into account as you browse through games that are coming to Steam. Conversely, we won’t be populating this page with things you’ve willfully said you’re not interested in or with DLC for games you don’t own.
We also recognize that some of you do want to see the complete list of releases in one place — you don’t want us or our silly computers doing any work for you; you prefer a raw, unrefined deluge of new games. Well, on the Upcoming Releases page you can view a totally unfiltered list of everything that is coming to Steam, and while looking through that list you’ll know that as you add games to your wishlist or share them with friends, you’ll be helping Steam make it discoverable for everyone else.
We think these changes are going to help connect you towards games you’re excited about and make browsing all the new games coming to Steam a more enjoyable and productive experience. Making Steam more useful is never an exact science so we’ll be maintaining and adjusting these new features as more and more of you use them to find games you want to play.
Upcoming Games on Steam Q&A
Q: Can’t you replace this tab with something else? I have an idea about that, actually. A: We spend a lot of time listening to customer feedback on improvements to the store, so please, let ’em fly. This change is in direct response to feedback and data from both customers and partners on the usefulness of Steam’s front page.
Q: I’m a developer and in the past I knew that my game would be in that unfiltered list on the front page, at least for a little while. Doesn’t this make my new game even harder to find? A: We’ve spent a lot of time looking at data about how folks find and buy games and are certain that isn’t the case. The previous iteration of Upcoming was just too unfiltered for most customers to use it effectively. A piece of data for you: the old Upcoming list was only clicked on by less than half of one percent of customers whereas Top Sellers is clicked on by almost four percent. It’s clear to us that a brief (and sometimes very brief) spot on Steam’s front page isn’t useful if your game is shown to a random set of customers — what’s best for everyone is if your game is shown to the right customers, ones who have shown that they might like your game. If you’re building a great, entertaining product with a store page to match, these improvements will facilitate connections to those customers in a higher quality way.
Q:So let me get this straight, if me and all of my pals wishlist a game, we can help it get to the front page of Steam via the Popular Upcoming tab? A: Yes but probably no. We spend a lot of time writing code and monitoring these systems so they aren’t manipulated. Now, if you love an upcoming game and wishlist it or even pre-purchase it and we identify that this is a natural trend across Steam’s diverse customer set, we will start suggesting it to other folks who may feel the same way.
Q: I have another question, you can’t predict me with your flimsy Q&A. A: Please share it below and we’ll try to address it if it’s thoughtful and well-meaning.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-12-2018, 01:18 AM - Forum: Minecraft
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Minecraft 1.13 Pre-Release 7
We’re on the final stretch for 1.13 and hope to have it released by the end of July. If you’re experiencing any issues with world conversion (opening a 1.12.2 world in 1.13-pre6), please let us know by reporting it on the Minecraft issue tracker.
A full changelog for this Pre-Release can be found on Minecraft.net.
Fixed outstanding issues with the new improved fonts
MC-132833 – Opening 1.5.2 world on 1.12.2 works perfectly but bed is transparent.
MC-132974 – Converting 1.12 world to 1.13 spams Chunk file at x,y is missing level data, skipping
MC-132977 – Esc key results in an older world being converted to a newer version during ‘Play’ menu sequence
MC-133063 – When trying to connect to an unreachable server Minecraft crashes instead of showing error message
MC-133136 – Crash when launching the game with LWJGL allocation debugging enabled
MC-133139 – The image write callback is never freed, leaking small amounts of memory for each screenshot
MC-133140 – The GL debug message callbacks are never freed, causing memory leak warnings
To get pre-releases, open your launcher and go to the “launch options” tab. Check the box saying “Enable snapshots” and save. To switch between the snapshot and normal version, you can find a new dropdown menu next to the “Play” button. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (In the “launch options” page).
Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com.
Pre-releases can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds.
Share your thoughts on how 1.13 is shaping up in the comments below!
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-11-2018, 07:31 PM - Forum: Windows
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WIRED: ‘How artificial intelligence could prevent natural disasters’
On May 27, a deluge dumped more than 6 inches of rain in less than three hours on Ellicott City, Maryland, killing one person and transforming Main Street into what looked like Class V river rapids, with cars tossed about like rubber ducks. The National Weather Service put the probability of such a storm at once in 1,000 years. Yet, “it’s the second time it’s happened in the last three years,” says Jeff Allenby, director of conservation technology for Chesapeake Conservancy, an environmental group.
Floods are nothing new in Ellicott City, located where two tributaries join the Patapsco River. But Allenby says the floods are getting worse, as development covers what used to be the “natural sponge of a forest” with paved surfaces, rooftops, and lawns. Just days before the May 27 flood, the US Department of Homeland Security selected Ellicott City—on the basis of its 2016 flood—for a pilot program to deliver better flood warnings to residents via automated sensors.
Recently, Allenby developed another tool to help predict, plan, and prepare for future floods: a first-of-its-kind, high-resolution map showing what’s on the ground—buildings, pavement, trees, lawns—across 100,000 square miles from upstate New York to southern Virginia that drain into Chesapeake Bay. The map, generated from aerial imagery with the help of artificial intelligence, shows objects as small as 3 feet square, roughly 1,000 times more precise than the maps that flood planners previously used. To understand the difference, imagine trying to identify an Uber driver on a crowded city street using a map that can only display objects the size of a Walmart.
Creating the map consumed a year and cost $3.5 million, with help from Microsoft and the University of Vermont. Allenby’s team pored over aerial imagery, road maps, and zoning charts to establish rules, classify objects, and scrub errors. “As soon as we finished the first data set,” Allenby says, “everyone started asking ‘when are you going to do it again?’” to keep the map fresh.
Enter AI. Microsoft helped Allenby’s team train its AI for Earth algorithms to identify objects on its own. Even with a robust data set, training the algorithms wasn’t easy. The effort required regular “pixel peeping”—manually zooming in on objects to verify and amend the automated results. With each pass, the algorithm improved its ability to recognize waterways, trees, fields, roads, and buildings. As relevant new data become available, Chesapeake Conservancy plans to use its AI to refresh the map more frequently and easily than the initial labor-intensive multi-million dollar effort.
Now, Microsoft is making the tool available more widely. For $42, anyone can run 200 million aerial images through Microsoft’s AI for Earth platform and generate a high-resolution land-cover map of the entire US in 10 minutes. The results won’t be as precise in other parts of the country where the algorithm has not been trained on local conditions—a redwood tree or saguaro cactus looks nothing like a willow oak.
A map of land use around Ellicott City, Maryland, built with the help of artificial intelligence (left) offers far more detail than its predecessor (right).
Chesapeake Conservancy
To a society obsessed with location and mapping services—where the physical world unfolds in the digital every day—the accomplishment may not seem groundbreaking. Until recently, though, neither the high-resolution data nor the AI smarts existed to make such maps cost-effective for environmental purposes, especially for nonprofit conservation organizations. With Microsoft’s offer, AI on a planetary scale is about to become a commodity.
Detailed, up-to-date information is paramount when it comes to designing stormwater management systems, Allenby says. “Looking at these systems with the power of AI can start to show when a watershed” is more likely to flood, he says. The Center for Watershed Protection, a nonprofit based in Ellicott City, reported in a 2001 study that when 10 percent of natural land gets developed, stream health declines and it begins to lose its ability to manage runoff. At 20 percent, runoff doubles, compared with undeveloped land. Allenby notes that paved surfaces and rooftops in Ellicott City reached 19 percent in recent years.
Allenby says the more detailed map will enable planners to keep up with land-use changes and plan drainage systems that can accommodate more water. Eventually, the map will offer “live dashboards” and automated alerts to serve as a warning system when new development threatens to overwhelm stormwater management capacity. The Urban Forestry Administration in Washington, DC, has used the new map to determine where to plant trees by searching the district for areas without tree cover where standing water accumulates. Earlier this year, Chesapeake Conservancy began working with conservation groups in Iowa and Arizona to develop training sets for the algorithms specific to those landscapes.
The combination of high-resolution imaging and sensor technologies, AI, and cloud computing is giving conservationists deeper insight into the health of the planet. The result is a near-real-time readout of Earth’s vital signs, firing off alerts and alarms whenever the ailing patient takes a turn for the worse.
Others are applying these techniques around the world. Global Forest Watch (GFW), a conservation project established by World Resources Institute, began offering monthly and weekly deforestation alerts in 2016, powered by AI algorithms developed by the University of Maryland.1 The algorithms analyze satellite imagery as it’s refreshed to detect “patterns that may indicate impending deforestation,” according to the organization’s website. Using GFW’s mobile app, Forest Watcher, volunteers and forest rangers take to the trees to verify the automated alerts in places like the Leuser Ecosystem in Indonesia, which calls itself “the last place on Earth where orangutans, rhinos, elephants and tigers are found together in the wild.”
The new conservation formula is also spilling into the oceans. On June 4, Paul Allen Philanthropies revealed a partnership with the Carnegie Institution of Science, the University of Queensland, the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, and the private satellite company Planet to map all of the world’s coral reefs by 2020. As Andrew Zolli, a Planet vice president, explains: For the first time in history, “new tools are up to the [planetary] level of the problem.”
By the end of 2017, Planet deployed nearly 200 satellites, forming a necklace around the globe that images the entire Earth every day down to 3-meter resolution. That’s trillions of pixels raining down daily, which could never be transformed into useful maps without AI algorithms trained to interpret them. The partnership leverages the Carnegie Institution’s computer-vision tools and the University of Queensland’s data on local conditions, including coral, algae, sand, and rocks.
“Today, we have no idea of the geography, rate, and frequency of global bleaching events,” explains Greg Asner, a scientist at Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology. Based on what is known, scientists project that more than 90 percent of the world’s reefs, which sustain 25 percent of marine life, will be extinct by 2050. Lauren Kickham, impact director for Paul Allen Philanthropies, expects the partnership will bring the world’s coral crisis into clear view and enable scientists to track their health on a daily basis.
In a separate coral reef project, also being conducted with Planet and the Carnegie Institution, The Nature Conservancy is leveraging Carnegie’s computer vision AI to develop a high-resolution map of the shallow waters of the Caribbean basin. “By learning how these systems live and how they adapt, maybe not our generation, but maybe the next will be able to bring them back,” says Luis Solorzano, The Nature Conservancy’s Caribbean Coral Reef project lead.
Mapping services are hardly new to conservation. Geographic Information Systems have been a staple in the conservation toolkit for years, providing interactive maps to facilitate environmental monitoring, regulatory enforcement, and preservation planning. But, mapping services are only as good as the underlying data, which can be expensive to acquire and maintain. As a result, many conservationists resort to what’s freely available, like the 30-meter-resolution images supplied by the United States Geological Survey.
Ellicott City and the Chesapeake watershed demonstrate the challenges of responding to a changing climate and the impacts of human activity. Since the 1950s, the bay’s oyster reefs have declined by more than 80 percent. Biologists discovered one of the planet’s first marine dead zones in Chesapeake Bay in the 1970s. Blue crab populations plunged in the 1990s. The sea level has risen more than a foot since 1895, and, according to a 2017 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report, may rise as much as 6 feet by the end of this century.
Allenby joined the Chesapeake Conservancy in 2012 when technology companies provided a grant to explore the ways in which technology could help inform conservation. Allenby sought ways to deploy technology to help land managers, like those in Ellicott City, improve upon the dated 30-meter-resolution images that FEMA also uses for flood planning and preparation.
In 2015, Allenby connected with the University of Vermont—nationally recognized experts in generating county-level high-resolution land-cover maps—seeking a partner on a bigger project. They secured funding from a consortium of state and local governments, and nonprofit groups in 2016. The year-long effort involved integrating data from such disparate sources as aerial imagery, road maps, and zoning charts. As the data set came together, a Conservancy board member introduced Allenby to Microsoft, which was eager to demonstrate how its AI and cloud computing could be leveraged to support conservation.
“It’s been the frustration of my life to see what we’re capable of, yet how far behind we are in understanding basic information about the health of our planet,” says Lucas Joppa, Microsoft’s chief environmental scientist, who oversees AI for Earth. “And to see that those individuals on the front line solving society’s problems, like environmental sustainability, are often in organizations with the least resources to take advantage of the technologies that are being put out there.”
The ultimate question, however, is whether the diagnoses offered by these AI-powered land-cover maps will arrive in time to help cure the problems caused by man.
1 CORRECTION, July 11, 1:10PM: Deforestation alerts from Global Forest Watch are powered by algorithms developed by the University of Maryland. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the algorithms were developed by Orbital Insight.
