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tv   Click  BBC News  June 19, 2021 3:30pm-4:01pm BST

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presidential election in a poll in which most would—be candidates were barred from standing. northern ireland's new first minister, paul givan, has been told he will have to resign when a new dup leader is in place. the son of a private investigator whose murder has remained unsolved for more than three decades criticises the metropolitan police's handling of the case. now on bbc news, click takes in the world's largest videogames exhibition e3 to see what games will be making the headlines over the coming year. this week — it's only a game show, it's only a game show, but what a game show! we are at e3 to look at the big new games. the new game stars, made by you, and the mum and daughter trying to boost representation in games.
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hey, welcome to click. lovely to see you out in the sunshine. lovely to see you too, lara. how are you doing? and you! i'm good. the sunshine is wonderful. mmm, yes. but, of course, at this time of year, we are usually enjoying the los angeles sun, getting ready for e3, the massive video games convention. yeah. but even though we are not in la, we're darn gonna dress like it! this is what e3 looks like. this is what e3 sounds like. all roar. basically, the gaming world takes over la's convention centre, theatres and hotels to launch the latest games and consoles with as much pizazz as tinseltown can
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muster, which is a lot. for the second year running, la won't be crammed with gamers because the whole event has been moved online. yeah, i do hope that hollywood has another industry to fall back on. all of this means that marc cieslak cannot live the la life while he covers the expo, but hilariously, he has to keep la hours. so here's his bleary—eyed report! we had some of this... you are go for launch. ..but none of this. cheering and applause. the covid—19 pandemic means the annual e3 games convention has done away with its usual physical event in favour of an online affair. i'm in london, not la, and there is an e3 event of sorts on. first out of the blocks this online—only e3 where ubisoft. they'd drafted in an actor who's broken bad and mopped up a mandalorian to star as
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the villain in their new game, far cry 6. these fish? giancarlo esposito is starring as anton castillo, the big bad running a fictional caribbean dictatorship in open world shooter far cry 6. the title's brought into sharp focus the issue of politics, or political themes, in games. the reality is every piece of work that you put out in the world is political to some degree. whether it's a film, a book, a tv show or game, far cry 6 is no different. so what interests me is, you know, what are we talking about? what themes are we hitting, you know? for example, we talk about the rise of fascism, we talk about human rights, we talk about imperialism in the context of a revolution, a modern revolution. after developing the tie—in game to james cameron's first avatar movie — a title which, it's fair to say, failed to set
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pandora alight — ubisoft�*s having another stab at a game starring nine foot tall blue cat people. details about the next avatar film are thin on the ground but the event's cinematic suggests the game will focus on adventures in the movie's universe, rather than a retread of the big screen experience. xbox was the next show in the e3 line up and after spending the gdp of a small country on acquiring mega publisher bethesda, expectations were high. halo infinite was supposed to launch alongside the xbox series x. however, when fans got a first look at the game last year, it's putting it mildly to say they were unimpressed. in fact, adverse fan reaction forced developments 3a3 into delaying the game, to spend more time tweaking it. the flag is ours. the most important thing is the quality of the games. we know that. our customers tell us that. our own teams feel that.
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and it's been a difficult year when you think about production in the time of covid—19. we took the feedback from people, we brought in new leadership and this was a big time for us to show multiplayer, you know? halo's multiplayer's always been such a stregnth. xbox played it safe by showing multiplayer gameplay, which included looks at special armour fan favourite weapons like the energy sword, and in a challenge to the likes of call of duty: warzone, halo multiplayer will be free to play. i think you see how these free—to—play multiplayer games have really done well. you can look at things like pubg, you can look at fortnite, you can look at warzone. and when you have multiplayer, it really is about a vibrant and growing player base, and that is our goal. and we've always said when everyone plays, we all win. # tell me what you want and i'll tell you what i'm gonna do.# forza 5 horizon heads to mexico, demoing a jungle rally from its campaign mode and some incredible landscapes, along with very, very shiny cars.
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but one of the biggest ticket items came courtesy of that $7.5 billion acquisition of zenimax, bethesda's parent company. this might be the first new games franchise in 25 years from the developer behind the fallout and elder scrolls games but bethesda still have not shown us any starfield gameplay. i think the problem, for me, with starfield is that we don't really know what the game is going to be like to play. we know it's gonna be open world, you're gonna have the freedom to do what you want, but that trailer did a really bad job of showing me why i should be excited, why i should be, you know, adding it to a wish list somewhere to make sure that i am, you know, in the know for all of the new information. like, it looked fantastic but i think there was such a disconnect between the presentation and the actual reality of what that game is going to be. we did get a very atmospheric cinematic and a launch date — 11 november 2022 — for this hugely anticipated sci—fi rpg. it will also arrive day one
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on xbox's subscription service, game pass. what about the big no—show? playstation! sony bowed out of e3 back in 2019. does its absence leave the field clear for arch rival xbox to do some catching up? playstation really was very conspicuous by its absence but i think the fight that microsoft finally came together with what it has been doing over the past four or five years, of buying different developers, i think in that case microsoft suddenly showed the results of what it's been doing and suddenly, people actually thought — some people, for the first time, ithink, thought "xbox game pass — i think i need this". seeing all those big games labelled as day one on xbox game pass is a very, very attractive proposition for gamers — especially when you're looking at, you know, £70, $70 triple—a purchases for the ps5. and looking at what the xbox series x has for 2022 and not really knowing what sony
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is doing for this christmas, let alone in 2022, is a really precarious situation for them to be in. it's—a me, wario! the last major show belonged to nintendo. they'd already quashed any hopes of seeing a new, more powerful version the switch. instead, nintendo relied on one of its biggest franchises, zelda, doing all the heavy lifting. the legend of zelda: breath of the wild 2 is still in development but a new trailer revealed that as well as adventuring on terra firma, link will also take to the skies. we got a tiny bit of gameplay, but little else. it's slated for release some time in 2022. nintendo has been raiding the back of the cupboards with switch refreshes for the likes of warioware, which challenges the player to complete a dizzying array
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of mini games such as peeling face masks and avoiding bird food while beating a ticking clock. wah! rats! as well as super monkey ball: banana mania, celebrating 20 years of sphere—rolling simians. this certainly was not the e3 that we are used to but it's worth remembering that the pandemic has slowed down and disrupted lots of video game development, so it's a minor miracle that we got to see any new content at all. with any luck, we'll have an event that we can attend in person in 2022. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that chinese smartphone company oneplus and oppo merged. amazon opened its fifth convenience store of just walk out shopping in london's chalk farm neighbourhood. and twitter is testing out an unmention button, asking users for feedback on the feature. it would allow a user to edit themselves out
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of unwanted conversations. it was also the week that an autonomous artificially intelligent ship that sailed across the atlantic. the mayflower has no crew on board and is retracing the 400—year—old pilgrim route from plymouth in the uk to massachusetts in the us. the ship will carry out experiments on the way, collecting data on sea life and looking for plastic waste. the winner of the davidson prize, a new contest for smart designs to adapt homes in the era of at—home working, was given to homeforest. the app connects with smart devices to transform the home into a forest bathing experience, replicating the feeling of walking in nature. volvo announced it's looking at ways to develop fossil fuel—free steel for its cars with swedish steelmarker ssab. it aims to use the steel in its cars by 2026. volvo plans to make its cars fully electric by 2030. and finally this week, we saw the largest number of children to ever sing on a zoom call. 97,967 children in the young
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voice choirjoined in, singing lovely day with billy ocean at the 02 in london, via the online service. this is the matepad pro and it's the first chance i've had to go hands—on with the new harmony0s, huawei's replacement for android that it says is a next—generation operating system. after donald trump put huawei on that us trade blacklist and blocked it from using google services, huawei said it would move to its own harmony0s which, it told reporters, would be completely different from android. now, the version of harmony0s running on this tablet looks a lot like android. the interactions are the same. the tablet also runs android apps, so i can stick the bbc news android app on here and it runs fine. the same goes for google maps. and if you run a diagnostic test app, it will report that this tablet is running android 10. now, the core of android
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is open source and there's nothing wrong with taking that and branching off to make your own software — that is what amazon has done with its fire 0s — and it clearly states that is a fork of android. now, it looks like this is what huawei's done here on the tablet, branching off and adding some of its own code, although it really didn't want to say it — it gave me some very vague answers — although it did say android apps are currently compatible with devices running harmony0s 2. this huawei watch 3 is running harmony0s, so it should work seamlessly with the tablet — although when i tried to use the watch as a camera viewfinder for the tablet, i could not get it to work. what is this experience like for a uk consumer? obviously, there are no google services but huawei has been working to develop its own replacement such as petal maps, which comes pre—installed. it's powered by tomtom and has most of the features you'd expect. there's a movie store with popular films, and huawei music — a streaming app that had every hit artist i searched forfrom major labels, although there were a few anomalies. this definitely is not steps.
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i tried to reverse image search to find out where this had come from. i'm guessing it's a tribute act but i could not find anything. so if this is you, please tweet me. i'd love to know more! i also found some of the artist bios show up in foreign languages. and other huawei apps aren't really optimised for the tablet display. the voice assistant celia is a little bit rough around the edge, too. i tried asking my watch "what time is it?" and it did not know. perhaps the biggest hurdle for a uk audience is the loss of the google play store and with it a lot of popular apps. petal search lets you fin and install a lot of android apps from third party sources, but what happens when android and harmony0s start to diverge? will app developers in the uk and us really make a harmony0s version of their software, on top of the android and i0s versions when many of them did not even adapt their apps for huawei app gallery when the whole thing was running android? the concept of harmony0s, where all of your devices communicate seamlessly, is a good one if you are willing to go all in on huawei.
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and i can think of being popular in china, but it might still be a hard sell in the uk and us until some of these wrinkles are ironed out. brilliant. that was chris. now, making video game characters or virtual humans in movies generally looks like this. it often takes weeks, sometimes months, even. and so, it is usually reserved for the big triple—a games or moviemakers with big ideas and even bigger budgets. but that is about to change. take a look at these. they look pretty real, don't they? but of course these are completely fabricated digital renders, made using a new creator tool from epic games. my name is kai. i am a metahuman, just like all the others. it is my first day on the job. yes, the technology used to create these characters, these digital renderings of humans, has just become a lot easier, faster and accessible to more of us. alex humphreys has been finding out more.
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today's filming location is pretty epic. i have come to the london innovation lab, home to some of the team at unreal engine. they are owned by epic games, the makers of the hugely popular fortnite. what is unreal engine? well, it's software that allows actors to be fully immersed in virtual worlds. yep, not only is it used for building games, but has since evolved for use in virtual production where the digital and physical worlds meet. it's an industry that is still growing, with epic games being instrumental in making this technology shift happen. and so now it's not only game designers that use this, but tv and movie studios too. but i'm not here to talk about virtual production, i am here to look at epic games' new tool for creating digital humans. meet dana. she is 2a, like dogs more than people, and studies art in new york. oh, and she doesn't
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actually exist. i made her in half an hour. she was made using unreal engine�*s new metahuman creator. whereas once only professionals could make digital characters look this real, now it's open to anyone. normally it is in the weeks and months for an artist to create a simple face, but our intent was to reduce that down to minutes, so you can actually create a plausible photoreal digital human in half an hour, no problem. and in that time, this is how i made dana. so i've got a database of over 50 characters here, and i can choose four or more even, and blend their features together. so let's do this. making dana was so easy, and it's all because of geometry and ad scanning. the team at epic scanned a diverse group of real people, allowing them to track lots of data like the topology of faces and expressions. this data was then broken down into separate components for us
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to choose from to make our own new person. when you use the tool, really what is happening when you pick and move a point, sometimes you might think it's like sculpting, but actually what's doing is when you move that point it is finding the best fit from what we have available in that database, to where you are moving that point. people started doing work with the characters within unreal engine, and i think that's when they have really come to life actually, because when you see what a skilled artist can do, someone that knows how to work with light and composition with these characters, we have seen short films and performances. speaks japanese. i was intrigued to find out what a professional would do with dana, so i enlisted the help of swedish 3d artist anton palmqvist. he had already been experimenting with metahuman, and made these fantastic characters. oh wow! she looks so much more real, doesn't she?
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it's pretty much a game changer, because it can be really expensive to hire a character artist to do these kind of really detailed humans before, or if you scan it yourself, you would have a huge scan rig, and that's super expensive. so now we can get to do these thingsjust for free, like this, with the tools that they have released for us. i think people are fascinated with photoreal digital humans. like, can i create something absolutely lifelike, and how people run with that i think is still to be seen, beyond the known ways that people produce content, but then i think particularly influencers, we have seen that they exist already, these virtual characters that resemble no real person, but have huge, millions of followers on instagram. i think we will see more
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of those kinds of things happening. christopher travers is an expert on virtual influencers and has dedicated his career to the development of these digital characters. we are at about, i would say, 200 virtual influencers created, we're at about 10,000 virtual youtube is created, i would say in 50 years there will still be human influencers but virtual influencers will be the dominant influencer online. with digital humans becoming easier and fasterfor anyone to make, there is a sinister side to all of this. and one worry is that people will use tech like metahuman for catfishing, which is when someone pretends to be someone they are not. if i was a catfisher i would much rather use this kind of fabricated photorealistic imagery rather than trawling the alt web looking for actually existing photographs out there. so in that sense it will make catfishing much harder to detect. people leverage other people's photos, and so it's very hard to say in what ways would
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ill—minded people use this. but the amount of work required to do something like that, i think you would have to be extremely talented to actually get to a level where you can pull that off. which would be a strange use of talent, but... tech like the metahuman creator is a long way off being able to replicate humans completely. at the moment its main use will be for creating secondary or non—playable characters in games. but with tools like this making digital humans accessible to everyone and anyone, we will certainly be seeing more of them in future. or maybe we won't — as they'll all just look like the rest of us. great stuff. now one of the big differences between playing a game and watching a movie is that you, the player, can become the star of it. in fact, many games allow you to customise your avatar so you can just become a virtual version of yourself. but that hasn't always been the case. we have been taking a look
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at how far black representation truly has come in games in the last few years, and what one mother and daughter are doing to tackle the issue. this is yvonne, a graphic designer based in london. and this is her daughter alyssa. she is playing the game that they designed together — frobelles. but they didn't create this app for the fun of it — they wanted to solve a long problem in gaming. when alyssa came to me and said, "mum, i am looking for characters with hair like mine, why is it that these games don't actually have that?" it really brought home the fact that it is so important for children to see themselves, whether it is in games, books, the media. and for her to show to me that actually it was something that was disappointing for her, to not see afro hair, it made me realise that actually we needed to do something ourselves. after struggling to find
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a dress—up game that featured black characters, they decided to make their own — and frobelles was born. it's a dress up game that aims to empower young black girls and improve representation in gaming. there were two games that i really like to play, one of them is called chibi me and another one is called subway surfers. in subway surfers, to unlock the black characters you have to collect coins in the game, and in chibi me i couldn't find that much characters with afro hair like mine. while yvonne and alyssa had to create their own game, there have been strides in the wider industry to be more representative. in the last year, we have seen massive games such as marvel�*s spider—man: miles morales have afro—latino characters at the forefront. and animal crossing specifically featured black
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afro hairstyles in an update. but when it comes to representation, is enough being done? a survey suggests that one in ten of those working in the uk's games industry are from black, asian or minority ethnic backgrounds. that is higher than the national working average and above that in the creative industries overall. so why are so many people creating their own games? when it comes to diversifying the industry, there is always a big focus on getting more people in. but the most important thing is training and development and retention. so i think if we actually improve those programmes within games companies we can definitely get more diverse people to stay, and also rise up the ranks. the games industry is only a0 years old, it is still very much a juvenile industry and still forming, so i think the representations have developed, we have come a long way since the 70s and 80s, however there is still a long way to go. those nuances in terms of bringing in representations,
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brings in new stories, new ways of experiencing characters, and that diversity has a richness to it which people are very, very receptive to. so it's notjust about having representation, it's also about brands working with creators to bring about lasting change so that more players can truly win in the end. that is it from us from los angeles — sorry, london. still, it's been lovely. it has been lovely. and as ever you can keep up with the team on social media, find us on youtube, instagram, facebook and twitter at @bbcclick. thanks for watching, we will see you soon.
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hello, over the last few days we had a real deluge of rain across parts of the south of england. the wettest place was in north—east hampshire picking up 72 millimetres of rain over the last three days which compares with the month average of 48 millimetres, so it has been wet over the last three days than at the amount of rain we normally see all the month. not like that everywhere come across northern england, wales and scotland, it has been a trite month so far, edinburgh just picking up month so far, edinburgh just picking up five mil metres of rain so far. —— dry months. a little bit of sunshine coming through. summit scattered showers in scotland in particular, but i'm now looking to the south, the next batch of thunderstorms developing across northern france and these are going across the channel, prolonged spell of heavy rain and woking into parts of heavy rain and woking into parts of southeast england, really anywhere eastwards from the isle of wight, into hampshire, southeast
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england and east anglia into a real soaking and given how wet the weather has been over recent days, it could be localised surface water flooding at its heaviest. temperatures tonight on the mild side, nine to 13 degrees for most. tomorrow, any rain to start the day because eastern areas will tend to clear further east as the day goes by, left with a lot of cloud again, a future as scotland, this time moving in parts of northern ireland. a few cloud breaks ireland, south of scotland and northern england, north west wales, the favoured spots for those. temperatures similar to today, but a bit cooler around our eastern coast where we will have onshore winds are starting to develop. into monday's forecast, low pressure still to the south of the uk, still threatening rain across southern most areas, but this ridge of high pressure builds on further north and that means we should have much more in the way of sunshine living across most of scotland, northern ireland, northern england, probably the north midlands and north and west wales as well. that just leaves the far south when we
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will continue to have their cloud coming in, threatening rain at times and that rain could potentially also be affecting southern part of wales, a little uncertainty about that. that rain will clear and both cardiff and london will brighten through wednesday and indeed choose a seeing a bit of sunshine. scotland and northern ireland though there will be some rain on the way towards the end of the week.
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this is bbc news. the headlines at four... queues for covid vaccines as pop—up centres and walk—in clinics open in england in a major push to offer coronavirus jabs to all remaining adults. if it wasn't for the vaccine, we would definitely be seeing a wave that is going to be even bigger than the wave we had in winter but because of the vaccine, that is doing the heavy lifting, that is what is doing as much as possible to protect us at the moment. hardliner ebrahim raisi has been declared the winner of iran's presidential election in a poll in which most would—be candidates were barred from standing. northern ireland's new first minister, paul givan, has been told he will have to resign when a new dup leader is in place. the son of a private investigator whose murder has remained unsolved for more than three decades criticises the metropolitan police's
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handling of the case.

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