Day: August 23, 2016

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PlayStation Now will soon let you play anywhere you have a PC

Analysts have been predicted the death of game consoles for years — and while they’re usually wrong, PlayStation Now is the strongest living argument for a gaming industry without iterative hardware. Sony’s internet-streaming games service puts PlayStation games on micro-consoles, full-sized PlayStation 4 machines and even standalone televisions. Today, Sony announced that the service is coming to an even wider platform: Windows.

Sony says PlayStation Now for Windows will launch in Europe soon, and will be followed by a timely North American rollout — but the exact details are still in the air. Sony has announced that it will sell a $25 DualShock 4 controller adapter for use with the service, for instance, but neglected to say if PlayStation Now for Windows will play nice with other PC gamepads. It might not: PS4 Remote Play on PC and Mac requires Sony’s own controller. It wouldn’t be too shocking if PlayStation Now kept tradition.

Even so, controller compatibility isn’t the only barrier to entry. PlayStation Now is pretty neat, but it requires a hearty internet connection to function properly — at least 5Mbps and a reasonable proximity to PlayStation Now server. The service also requires a PC running Windows 7 or higher, a 3.5Ghz Intel Core i3 or better CPU and 2GB of RAM. If you meet all those requirements, though, you can do something mildly historic: Play PlayStation 3 games on your PC for the first time ever. Neat.

Source: PlayStation

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How to make your WiFi 10x faster

Getting good WiFi at a sporting event isn’t easy.

But researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory think they’ve solved this problem. In crowded areas — be it a concert, airport, conference hall or sports stadium — a bunch of wireless routers need to be installed to deliver Internet access to everyone. Having so many routers can create interference, leaving a frustrated crowd with painfully slow Internet access.

In a new paper published online, the MIT team described a method for managing networks that causes the routers to collaborate better. The researchers developed algorithms that process a router’s signal so that multiple routers can send information on the same wireless spectrum without causing interference. In their tests, the MIT researchers found data transfer speeds that were 3.3 times as fast as usual.

Related: Huge breakthrough in blazing fast Internet speeds

Ezzeldin Hussein Hamed, one of the MIT researchers, said that the data could be transferred 10 times as fast if his team had tested with additional routers.

“This can enable some things that never could’ve been done before,” Hamed said.

The system hasn’t been tested yet in a stadium or other large venue. Hamed’s team demonstrated their advances in a lab, using laptops that roamed on Roomba robots. (The laptops were on Roombas in order to move around like people do in large gatherings.)

So sports fans and concertgoers will have to be patient. Hamed said it was too early to estimate when the average American would experience these gains. The MIT team has created a startup, MegaMIMO, and is talking with companies about how to commercialize their technology.

CNNMoney (Washington) First published August 23, 2016: 8:04 AM ET

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