Light Start – Doom: The Board Game, mobile 3D printing, Gear S3, and LG flexes displays
Brett Venter
When digital Hell isn’t enough, turn to Doom: The Board Game
We’re huge Doom fans, if a bit… scared… at times. There’s nothing like rounding a corner and looking the demonic hordes in the eye. Staring them down and confidently going “Byeeeee….!” while sprinting in the other direction. Especially when things start tearing through walls… But if you’re a fan of that sort of thing but don’t want to keep on doing it on a TV screen then Doom: The Board Game should be right up your wicked well of damned souls. Combining cute horrifying little figures, cards and a floor map, the sort of thing we’ve seen with Dungeons and Dragons: Castle Ravenloft and other board games, there’s enough space for two to five players to have their entrails (virtually) strewn all over the board. One person takes controls of all the creepy little demonic minions while everyone else needs to try and take them down without dying horribly. Doom: The Board Game is coming from Fantasy Flight Games and is expected to launch before the end of the year.
A back-mounted 3D printer case – because a backpack just isn’t going to cut it
Say you need to move a 3D-printer. Perhaps you live in a country with functional public transport and you don’t own a car. What do you do? If you own an Ultimaker, you can turn your printer’s packaging into a 3D-printer backpack (which looks suspiciously like it should be filled with beer) and use that to take said printer on the subway or whatever other first-world transportation options you have available. You’ll have to shell out around R950 for the straps used to make your packaging function as a backpack. Some of you might ask: Why not just 3D-print a transportation case? And that’s a good question. Printing something large enough to put the printer into is the same as opening a wooden box with a crowbar that is nailed inside. It’s a pretty good trick, if you can do it.
We could see Samsung’s Gear S3 wearable at IFA in Berlin
Samsung’s Gear S2 has been out and about for a while and it’s about time for a refresh. And that refresh should be coming this September and will be taking place at IFA in Berlin, if the newest reports are accurate. SamMobile claims that Samsung’s updated Gear S3 wearable will get its first showing in about a month and they’ve also said that the smartwatch will have a rotary bezel. It seems that Samsung really liked the one on the Gear S2 so they’re sticking with it for the sequel. Which should also be round, by the way. There’s no other details available yet but we should hear more in the run-up to IFA, which takes place from 2 to 7 September this year.
LG is upping production of their flexible OLED displays, to the tune of $1.7 billion
In case you were wondering whether curved smartphone screens were a temporary thing, wonder no more. You don’t spend $1.7 billion on a fad, unless you are an oil magnate in need of a major tax break. LG, as it happens, is spending that much money on a new production line that will make OLED displays for smartphones. Flexible OLED displays, to be specific. The production line will be installed at a larger factory that LG announced in 2015 and there’s speculation that the flexible smartphone screens issuing forth from its confines won’t be… er… confined to LG handsets. Apple is thought to be switching to OLED phone screens soon, though it’s more likely that Apple will stick to the uncurved displays. LG’s curved screen ramp-up should be ready to go by mid-2018, so there’s that to look forward to in about two years.
