Cross-Section Member Oct 27, 2017 7,018 aka Steam Deck "easier to sneak into work" edition lol I do love my OLED Steam Deck, I use it for some of the less demanding games in my library, but sometimes I really do wish it was something I could just whip out of my pocket like one of the many retro handhelds in the marketplace currently. Obviously, the chief sticking point is the hardware. Would it be possible for Valve to fit the current Zen 2 APU inside a smaller form factor without compromising on performance or usability? Which feature would you be fine dropping in exchange for the ability to truly play your games on the go?  808s & Villainy Member Oct 27, 2017 46,640 Seems like a waste. Steam Deck has only sold a few million total. For Valve it's just an avenue to allow people to play some of their games on a handheld. I don't think having multiple SKUs is worth the effort for them   TimPV3 Member Oct 30, 2017 702 Does anyone else remember in 2004 when people thought the PSP was going to be too big? 😂   Squirrel09 Member Nov 4, 2017 1,911 I don't think valve will make a mini-steam deck. But I do think that we'll get some 3rd party Retroid pocket 5 sized machines that either run windows or steam OS here in the next couple years. Won't be super powerful, but would be good for smaller indies/emulation  PlanetSmasher The Abominable Showman Member Oct 25, 2017 132,801 I don't see how you reduce the form factor without cutting into performance. I don't think there's any real benefit there.   steviestar3 One Winged Slayer Member Jul 3, 2018 5,450 It'd be cool but it wouldn't make financial sense at the moment, no.   Imran Member Oct 24, 2017 8,838 I think if it were a significantly more mainstream machine with an appeal to kids, maybe. But it's a niche machine for adults, most of whom would not rush out to justify the extra production line and R&D on such a thing.   Vanguard Member Jan 15, 2025 592 Yes, it would be easier for kids to hold.   Bardeh Member Jun 15, 2018 3,833 No. Would likely take a decent amount of R+D that I'd prefer they put into other things.   Jamesac68 Member Oct 27, 2017 3,195 If people want it, sure. I don't, but somebody might. I ended up no longer using my Switch once the Steam Deck showed up because the bigger screen is just so much easier on my eyes. I'm actually looking forward to doing some catch-up once the Switch 2 hits, roughly the same size as the Steam Deck.   Roubjon Member Oct 25, 2017 3,083 Yes. I got carpal tunnel from the current model due to its size.   Dota322 Member Aug 13, 2024 86 They will once Arm Translation mature enough   PlanetSmasher The Abominable Showman Member Oct 25, 2017 132,801 Vanguard said: Yes, it would be easier for kids to hold. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Kids want a Nintendo, not a Steam Deck. What is the demographic for kids who want a portable console but don't want access to Mario and Fortnite?  LuciaDMC Member Oct 27, 2017 9,232 Bengali Yes that is my biggest request. Make the touchpads smaller, and make it lighter somehow. Also don't need 4 buttons at back, 2 is enough.  Sabin Member Oct 25, 2017 6,096 No. The deck already has too many SKUs imo and more SKUs.  cw_sasuke Member Oct 27, 2017 29,972 I dont think they can justify a niche revision of a somewhat niche device at that price point. It would be cool but i think they would put these resources behind other products.  Tobor Died as he lived: wrong about Doritos Member Oct 25, 2017 34,023 If they are going to make another model, it should be a box. As a handheld they have the right size.   Fallout-NL Member Oct 30, 2017 8,360 Nope.   Vanguard Member Jan 15, 2025 592 PlanetSmasher said: Kids want a Nintendo, not a Steam Deck. What is the demographic for kids who want a portable console but don't want access to Mario and Fortnite? Click to expand... Click to shrink... Kids like to play different games. There are lots of games that kids see streamers playing like Zort that aren't available on Switch, and they want to play what they see. Teardown and People Playground are other examples and the Steam Deck has easy mod support for both of these with Steam Workshop.  Lumination Member Oct 26, 2017 16,013 I don't think there's a market for two distinct sizes, but the next one should be smaller IMO. This thing is freaking unwieldy, and I have big hands. Reminds me vaguely of holding the Duke in the 2000s. And it's heavy as shit for long sessions.   thewienke Member Oct 25, 2017 19,288 I'm more interested in a faster pro version with a bigger and better screen with less backlight bleed and larger hand grips. Something like the Portal. I've never played the Steamdeck away from a wall outlet personally  StrangerDanger Member Jul 18, 2018 6,696 Lumination said: I don't think there's a market for two distinct sizes, but the next one should be smaller IMO. This thing is freaking unwieldy, and I have big hands. Reminds me vaguely of holding the Duke in the 2000s. And it's heavy as shit for long sessions. Click to expand... Click to shrink... If they went the Nintendo route and had detachable sticks, then it would be fine.   ramenline Member Jan 9, 2019 1,670 It would be cool, but I think you'll have to rely on things like the Ayaneo Air to fill that niche for small PC handhelds for now.   Mocha Joe Member Jun 2, 2021 13,413 I would love Steam Deck 2 to be even smaller and lighter. LCD was really uncomfortable due to the weight but the OLED made it tolerable. I still love using it though. Greatest handheld ever   Cipher Peon One Winged Slayer Member Oct 25, 2017 9,649 Yeah I think the Steam Deck is way too big. I'd like it to fit in my pocket, please.  BeansBeansBeans Member Jan 14, 2025 986 I'd love to buy a smaller deck for my son. He is 7 and loves games, but the deck is simply too big.   GravaGravity Member Oct 27, 2017 4,704 One way or another society will always return to the PS Vita   JetstreamRorschach One Winged Slayer Member Dec 30, 2017 2,153 Zaragoza, Spain. Not feasible. Steam Deck is very performant due to it being an absolutely inefficient laptop class x86 SoC on a big handheld casing. They are very energy consuming and need a whole lot of active cooling (the LCD Deck's back usually burns to the touch and the fan makes a lot of noise). Not all GPU and CPU architectures are compatible with all foundries. You'd either sacrifice performance to the point it isn't a Steam Deck anymore or get a smaller handheld with lower battery and hotter thermals than the original.   DieH@rd Member Oct 26, 2017 12,017 I would be fine with same case as DS1 [and same 7.4" OLED, only 120hz and with VRR].   CesareNorrez Member Oct 25, 2017 6,054 My wife didn't like playing on the Deck handheld at all until I got her one of those gaming pillows (the arm mount one from Mechanism). It is simply too large and heavy for extended use. So, in that regard, a smaller lighter version would be great. But I'm not sure if Valve sees any financial sense in it. Maybe when they do a Deck 2 they introduce a Deck Lite that matches the power specs of the original.   mattycubed Member Dec 12, 2021 289 My crushed hands say yes, my heart says no   Dekuman Member Oct 27, 2017 21,021 Steam Deck is tied to whatever APU AMD produces. Unlike a console, it's very unlikey they will take that old chip and shrink it down. That's a huge expense for a niche product. Die shrink is where you get your thermal headroom to go smaller. Granted, Valve can probably get deck-like performance from a more modern chip by downclocking it, and shipping it in a smaller form factor. But if they are designing with a new chip in mind, that would be a deck 2.  Apollo Corrupted by Vengeance Avenger Oct 25, 2017 10,053 I mean if they could, and it had a OLED model, I would absolutely get it Day 1. I use my Steam Deck a whole lot. But it is too big for me. If it was even slightly smaller it would be a huge improvement for me.   Sai Prophet of Truth The Fallen Oct 25, 2017 6,987 Chicago No, it's tiny enough.   iswasdoes Member Nov 13, 2017 3,330 Londinium Cant wait to see what Valve have in store hardware wise. I do see a deck 2 in the near future. Deck mini, less likely I think but I would like one   Bran Member Oct 25, 2017 540 For what it's trying to do, I can't see anything smaller working quite as well. The ergonomics, input options (trackpads), and screen are a core part of its appeal. Reduce or remove any of that, and you risk compromising functionality. It's already difficult enough to read text in some games. Making a flatter, tinier, more transportable machine that plays fewer games seems like a hard sell—you'd be better off with a different device.   J_ToSaveTheDay "This guy are sick" and Corrupted by Vengeance Avenger Oct 25, 2017 22,527 USA Nah, I don't personally think it stands to make much sense business wise for them. I say that as someone who would very likely be interested… but as someone who is generally interested in smaller form factor electronics—it hasn't seemed like audiences are there for them anymore.   Sabin Member Oct 25, 2017 6,096 Bran said: For what it's trying to do, I can't see anything smaller working quite as well. The ergonomics, input options (trackpads), and screen are a core part of its appeal. Reduce or remove any of that, and you risk compromising functionality. It's already difficult enough to read text in some games. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Exactly. There are also already enough smaller pc handhelds available that already cater that niche while steam deck is the device to offer great ergonomics.  Kaworu Member Oct 28, 2017 433 I don't care much about power. Give me a Steam Deck Lite to play indie titles with a decent battery life.   Ouroboros Member Oct 27, 2017 16,111 But the ergonomics are so good!! I'd hate to use a smaller version.   Adam_Roman Member Oct 25, 2017 3,399 I think this is something they're at least thinking about. Last year there was a lot of work happening on an ARM translation layer for Steam. While it's probably immediately for something like their Deckard VR headset, it would also be very lucrative for ARM-based handhelds to run SteamOS, like an Odin 2 or a Retroid.   BeansBeansBeans Member Jan 14, 2025 986 Bran said: For what it's trying to do, I can't see anything smaller working quite as well. The ergonomics, input options (trackpads), and screen are a core part of its appeal. Reduce or remove any of that, and you risk compromising functionality. It's already difficult enough to read text in some games. Making a flatter, tinier, more transportable machine that plays fewer games seems like a hard sell—you'd be better off with a different device. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I think that we will see some good options once Steam OS gets licensed more and more. I feel like the ergonomics could still work. Also I don't think i've ever once used the touch pads.  horkrux Member Oct 27, 2017 6,467 TimPV3 said: Does anyone else remember in 2004 when people thought the PSP was going to be too big? 😂 Click to expand... Click to shrink... That's crazy  closer Member Oct 25, 2017 5,580 gamers and their concern with their deck size smh   Regular Sega Fan Member Jul 22, 2022 1,825 Ally X + Steam OS could work I guess   BeI Member Dec 9, 2017 6,804 Probably not. Leave that up to third party SteamOS devices to handle. If first party Steam hardware covers everything too well, there wouldn't be much reason for third party SteamOS devices to exist.   FakePlasticTree Member Jul 24, 2018 13,995 The next Steam Deck should be a new hardware leap anything else seems like a waste.   thecaseace Member May 1, 2018 3,743 Yes they should. I get it, most Steam Deck users love everything about Valves machine, but the numbers show that even amongst the 'core' audience there's people like myself that think it's too large. The Steam Deck and Switch are both handhelds but only the Switch is truly portable. They could make a sound mainstream play if they found a way to drop the touch pads and make the device smaller. It would make a great additional SKU.  KalBalboa Member Oct 30, 2017 9,717 Massachusetts TimPV3 said: Does anyone else remember in 2004 when people thought the PSP was going to be too big? 😂 Click to expand... Click to shrink... Oh yeah, I remember friends in high school giving the 16x9 screen some side-eye, haha.  Siri Member Nov 7, 2017 1,367 I think we're more likely going to get x86 to ARM translation to a decent state than Valve releasing a smaller Steam Deck. In fact, it's one of the reasons I've just got a Retroid Pocket Mini V2 in the post. Even in their infancy, I think Winlator and/or MiceWine should handle some lighter stuff. Of course, the floodgates will open as and when Steam really does set up a flavour of Proton for ARM and you can just have Steam on your phone, but for now trying to get the likes of Project Diablo 2 and Outrun 2006 C2C running should be a fun thing. 

Interviews A Minecraft Movie: Piotr Karwas (VFX Supervisor) & Elizabeth “Liz” Bernard (Animation Supervisor) – Digital Domain By Vincent Frei - 20/05/2025 With 20+ years in film and advertising, Piotr Karwas has supervised VFX for top directors including David Fincher and Tim Burton. His recent work includes The Electric State, Elevation, he’s here today to talk about the Digital Domain work on A Minecraft Movie. After discussing The Electric State with us a few months ago, Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Bernard is back—this time to talk about her work on A Minecraft Movie. How did you and Digital Domain get involved on this show? Piotr Karwas: We were approached by the Warner Bros. VFX team as they were looking to bring on an additional vendor to help complete the remaining visual effects work. It was also an opportunity to be the best dad ever, since both of my kids are huge Minecraft fans. How was the collaboration with Director Jared Hess and VFX Supervisor Dan Lemmon? Piotr Karwas: I’ve known Dan Lemmon since our time working together at Digital Domain. We collaborated on several projects in the early 2000s, so it was a great opportunity to team up again. As for Jared, I’ve been a fan of his work ever since his first feature, Napoleon Dynamite. Years ago, I also had the chance to briefly work on his film Gentlemen Broncos. The blend of Jared’s signature humor with the global phenomenon of Minecraft was simply too exciting to pass up. I knew I wanted to be involved. Although Digital Domain joined the project later in the production process, we quickly got up to speed and delivered our work on time, despite some challenges. What are the sequences made by Digital Domain? Piotr Karwas: Our primary focus was the final battle sequence, but we also contributed to several fully live-action shots featuring set extensions and some CG animation, primarily around the entrance to the mine. Could you walk us through the process of creating the 500+ Piglins and Iron Golems clashing in that 360° battlefield? What were some of the major technical challenges in making that sequence come to life? Piotr Karwas: One of the key creative challenges was striking the right balance between honoring the iconic look and feel of the game while delivering a cinematic, action-packed experience. The goal was to blend a sense of realism through the movement and design of characters and environments with the charm and style of the Minecraft universe. Under the guidance of Jared and Dan, and in close collaboration with the other vendors, we were able to craft something truly unique. The battle unfolds during the Piglin invasion, as the sunny atmosphere of the Overworld begins to transform into a darker, more menacing environment reminiscent of the Nether. The entire battlefield was designed to function seamlessly in both visual states, capturing the warmth and cheer of the original Overworld, while also supporting its dramatic shift into a hellish landscape filled with fire and gloom. Additionally, the stylized world of Minecraft presented some technical hurdles, especially in large scale crowd sequences. The characters’ unconventional anatomy, limited range of motion, and signature fighting styles added an extra layer of complexity but also pushed us to be creative and innovative. Liz Bernard: We started out with 10 piglins, each of which had 2-6 costumes, plus 8 weapons and 2 torches. We were able to get a lot of variety out of that for our piglin horde. The golem army was smaller and more uniform, and golems are too powerful to be messing around with weapons. Instead, they prefer to use their iron arms to smash through their opponents, so we didn’t have as many different iterations, costumes, and such for the iron golems. In Animation, we moved as fast as possible to clean up and modify a big pile of motion capture so that we could provide our Crowds team with over 300 unique animation cycles and clips. Those clips included everything from golems doing windmill arm attacks, to piglins hacking at golem legs with axes and swords, to baby piglins running around in circles, freaking out. Although we started with motion capture for most of the piglin actions, transferring those actions from a full sized human mocap actor onto 10 different blocky piglins with giant angular heads and different body proportions meant each mocap clip needed a lot of adjustment. For example, piglins cannot raise their square little arms very high because their shoulders will quickly crash into the head. Once we had ploughed through that chunk of work, our Crowds team strung those actions together in Autodesk’s Golaem software to create the crowds seen in the backgrounds of our shots. In the mid-ground, we animated a custom set of longer battle vignettes that we could reuse in a number of shots by reorienting them to camera and offsetting their timing. And of course, there was quite a lot of hero animation to fill in the foreground and tell the story of the ebb and flow of battle. Minecraft is known for its blocky aesthetic. How was the animation rigging approached to stay true to that while enhancing the characters’ performance for live action? Liz Bernard: The piglins, hoglins, and wolves were rigged as pretty standard fleshy characters. The wolves had blocky chests and hips, which our Rigging team kept relatively stiff to preserve the original block shape even when we posed the characters in action. Because we were in a hurry on this fast-paced show, we needed to get rigs into Animation’s hands as quickly as possible, so we ended up relying on our shot modeling/sculpting team to adjust some of the characters’ bodies after animation was approved. They paid special attention to the final look of their shoulders, elbows, and knees, to make sure that the bend at each joint stayed as blocky as possible. The iron golems were a lot trickier to get right because they were made of stiff blocks of metal, had no deforming parts, and their joints were extremely simple. We discovered right away that making an iron golem walk meant instant intersections where the legs attach to the hips and the arms attach to the shoulders. So, to solve that problem and get the golems engaged in the battle, we had to give the animators complete control over every body part. This is not something we typically do because it’s easy to go overboard and end up “off model,” but in this scenario, it was absolutely required. This level of control gave the animators the option to offset body parts to achieve the necessary range of movement without visible intersections on screen or gaps in silhouette. Houdini was used to procedurally generate environments for the film. What were some of the most challenging aspects of creating such vast, dynamic landscapes? Piotr Karwas: The environments posed a unique challenge, not just because of their blocky nature, but because it was essential to make the Overworld feel like a tangible, real place. Some design choices were influenced by physical sets that had been built, while others drew inspiration from the real world. We focused on introducing a sense of natural imperfection, subtle elements like slightly uneven lines, worn edges, scuff marks, scattered debris, dirt, and even touches of realistic vegetation. All of this had to be carefully integrated into the strict, grid-based aesthetic of the Minecraft universe. Our environment team rose to the challenge and delivered a highly detailed immersive location, while working under a demanding production schedule. What were the biggest challenges in adapting Minecraft’s creatures and characters into a live-action setting while retaining their iconic charm? Liz Bernard: Because we came onto the project towards the end of shot production, we were able to use other vendors’ work as a rough guide for how our characters should move and behave. The Iron Golems in particular were a fun challenge, and although Sony had a few shots that we could refer to for the overall movement, it was up to us to establish their combat style. We researched how the golems fight in the game, which, as it turns out, is quite simple. We stuck with the game’s stiff legged walk, simple straight arm swings and skyward scoops to match the game’s iron golem attack style as closely as we could. However, purely matching the game wasn’t going to look quite right in a live action environment with human actors. So, on top of the simple performance, we layered weight shifts to counterbalance the heavy arms. We also added some additional step patterns to get them into position to attack piglins so that they would appear clever and more agile without straying too far from the game aesthetic. We also improved the contacts between the golems’ arms and each piglin to really sell the sense of effort and weight in each attack and hit. The destruction of the Overworld Portal seems like a monumental task. How was such an epic scene created, and what role did the environment and FX teams play in bringing it to life? Piotr Karwas: One of the biggest challenges was figuring out the mechanics of how large-scale destruction would play out in the Minecraft world. We had to carefully determine which elements would follow real-world physics and which could behave in a more stylized, game inspired way. We also spent considerable time designing the post-collapse remains to ensure they were visually compelling and cohesive for the staging of the shots that followed. The portal destruction sequence, in particular, appeared in the two widest shots of the entire sequence. These moments required both armies to be on screen, complete with fallen Iron Golems, defeated or pork-chopped Piglins, and digital doubles for every actor. It was a massive technical, logistical, and creative undertaking. We worked on these shots all the way to the final hour. Can you describe the bespoke zombification transformation pipeline developed for the Piglins? How did this process differ from traditional character transformations? Piotr Karwas: By the time we joined the project, the zombification effect had already been largely developed by Weta FX. One of our main challenges was matching their established look while ensuring visual consistency across both their shots and ours. At the same time, we knew we had to push the effect further. After all, this was the grand finale, where the evil army was being defeated. We also wanted the transformation to feel distinct, especially when applied to large numbers of Piglins. To achieve that, we went as far as building complete skeletal systems that could be revealed during the transformation. How was lighting handled to simulate firelit nighttime chaos? What tools or techniques were critical in creating that atmosphere? Piotr Karwas: To achieve the most realistic look, we used actual fire simulations to drive the lighting on both the characters and the environment. We initially started with just a few fires, but Jared was drawn to the striking visual accents and the warm hues they cast on the characters. As a result, we ended up populating the scenes with hundreds of fires. The air was also filled with atmospheric elements like smoke, ash, and embers, all contributing to a richly textured, apocalyptic feel in every shot. To manage this across numerous shots, we developed semi-automated methods to batch simulate the effects efficiently. How was humor incorporated into the animation, especially with subtle gags like pork chops dropping onto the battlefield or background antics? What approach was used to time these moments? Liz Bernard: We had a good time adding easter eggs and gags into this epic battle scene! Piotr let me know early on that Jared would welcome goofy touches, especially on background characters, so I made sure to pass that information on to my team of animators. What did I get back? Nose picks, butt scratches, belly slaps, and all sorts of goofy behaviour in the background. We usually didn’t center those things in the action unless it was called for in the script (in fact, Jared and Dan had to pull us back a few times), but if you look carefully, you’ll find maximum silliness all over the place. And, of course, I have to mention the Great Hog here. He was probably our funniest character and the most challenging to animate. His style of movement was dictated by his unusual proportions, in particular, his itty-bitty legs and long chunky arms. Those stumpy legs meant his stride was super short unless he broke out into a full quadruped gallop, which our team animated with extra oomph and effort to get a good laugh. The Great Hog’s low rider pants took a dive after one particularly strenuous sprint across the battlefield to attack Natalie. When he rose up on hind legs in anticipation of smashing her with his giant blocky fists, Jared wanted to make sure that the audience could see clearly the gag that his butt crack was showing. In VFX, we traditionally call a gradient of options that we would pitch to the client a “wedge.” In this case, we needed to get a read on how low to go with the pants before we simulated them in CFX, so we sent over a “wedge” for the pants and butt crack for Jared to pick from. In this case, I guess it was actually…a wedgie. How was the visual humor seamlessly integrated into the more intense action sequences, and was there a particular moment that captured this balance perfectly? Liz Bernard: The visual humour was baked into the action from the get-go, from game to storyboards to previsualization. I mean, there’s something inherently funny about dozens of piglins in shorts getting smacked high up into the air and then poof! turning into porkchops. When I welcomed each animator to the show, I made a point of mentioning that they were a little more free to tell jokes with pantomime on this show than they might be used to on more realistic productions. Because we were always in a mindset to make each shot as funny as possible without distracting from the story points, the flavour in animation dailies was always funny. My team pitched piglins getting run over by the Great Hog by accident, baby piglins riding on an iron golem attempting to attack its head, some utterly hilarious slow-mo action with exaggerated overlap a la Baywatch, a hoglin and piglin rider mugging for the camera as they gallop by in the foreground, wolves clamped on by their teeth to the waistband of the Great Hog, and a whole lot of over-acted melodramatic writhing as the piglins zombified after the portal collapsed. You don’t have to tell animators twice to be silly. With such a large-scale project, how did the animation and VFX teams collaborate to maintain a cohesive style across both departments? Were there any specific moments where this collaboration stood out? Liz Bernard: This was a ripsnorter of a project timeline, so all departments were hitting the ground running and developing their parts of the project concurrently. That’s always challenging and requires a lot of communication to pull off. We had a bullpen of experienced folks in our show leadership, and knowing what each other’s departments could and couldn’t do saved us a lot of time as we ramped up. For example, we were able to establish a single groundplane early in our animation schedule, which helped us avoid having to adjust the character’s feet contacts to an evolving environment even as artists were still building the overworld battlefield. The Environments team did a great job set dressing the environment after we had placed our animation and crowds’ characters, so that we did not need to worry about running through plants, pebbles, fires, or corpses. The FX department established a workflow with the Crowds team to “porkchop” any crowds piglin that got smacked by crowds’ iron golems. Setting these rules and criteria helped each department streamline their processes. And, our production team did an absolutely incredible job making sure that every department stayed on target, communicated their roadblocks and breakthroughs effectively downstream (and sometimes upstream!), and adjusted the schedule to compensate. I think the moment where this collaboration really shone was when we saw all of the zombification shots at the end of the sequence starting to fall into place. One day, it felt like we had all of them left to tackle, and the next, we had our methodology kinks worked out and they all started to drop like dominoes. Piotr Karwas: As Liz mentioned, the schedule was extremely tight, especially for executing the film’s grand finale. We had to move quickly and strategically, knowing that things would evolve and change throughout production. I’m incredibly grateful to our amazing team at Digital Domain. Across all four locations, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Montreal, and Hyderabad, our artists worked around the clock to bring it all to life. Yes, there were long hours, high stress, and the usual frustrations with technology that doesn’t always behave but in the end, it was all absolutely worth it. Seeing kids enjoy the movie so much made everything worthwhile. Chicken Jockey! Looking back on the project, what aspects of the visual effects are you most proud of? Piotr Karwas: Without a doubt, the Great Hog’s butt crack was the highlight for me. Liz Bernard: Just the sheer scale of this thing is wild. This is one of those “more is more” kinds of projects that don’t come around so often in our world of photorealistic visual effects. Nothing was supposed to be “real” here, everything was exaggerated, every frame we produced was chock full of crazy action, over the top humor, and easter eggs. I’m very proud of our animation team for embracing this hilarious show in a more cartoony style that we don’t often have the opportunity to tackle. And, man, it tickles me that the fans got such a huge kick out of it all when the movie hit theatres. What else can you ask for? How long have you worked on this show? Piotr Karwas: About six months Liz Bernard: Just six months from start to finish. What’s the VFX shots count? Piotr Karwas: Digital Domain delivered 187 shots not including omits. What is your next project? Piotr Karwas: A Minecraft Movie I hope. Jokes aside, I’m looking at a whole slate of different projects. Liz Bernard: All I can say right now is that it’s a science fiction film that comes out in 2026. Stay tuned! A big thanks for your time. WANT TO KNOW MORE?Digital Domain: Dedicated page about A Minecraft Movie on Digital Domain website. © Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2025

Ethan Zuckerman wrote in The Atlantic in 2014: I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services. Through successive rounds of innovation and investor storytime, we’ve trained Internet users to expect that everything they say and do online will be aggregated into profiles (which they cannot review, challenge, or change) that shape both what ads and what content they see. Outrage over experimental manipulation of these profiles by social networks and dating companies has led to heated debates amongst the technologically savvy, but hasn’t shrunk the user bases of these services, as users now accept that this sort of manipulation is an integral part of the online experience. Marc Andreessen, who was there when the web was born, explained in a 2019 podcast why this sin was committed (this quote is lightly edited for clarity): One would think the most obvious thing to do would be building in the browser the ability to actually spend money, right? You’ll notice that didn’t happen, and in a lot of ways, we don’t even think it’s unusual that that didn’t happen, because maybe that shouldn’t have happened. I think the original sin was we couldn’t actually build economics, which is to say money, into the core of the internet and so therefore advertising became the primary business model… We tried very hard to build payments into the browser. It was not possible…We made a huge mistake. We tried to work with the banks and we tried to work with the credit card companies…it was sort of the classic kind of single point of failure bottleneck, or at least in this case, two points of failure. Visa and MasterCard essentially had a duopoly at the time, and so they were just literally, if they did not want you to be in the switch, they did want you to be able to do transactions, you just simply weren’t going to do it. I think Andreessen is too hard on himself, and I think Zuckerman is too harsh on the model Andreessen created the conditions for. The original web was the human web, and advertising was and is one of the best possible ways to monetize the only scarce resource in digital: human attention. The incentives all align: Users get to access a vastly larger amount of content and services because they are free. Content makers get to reach the largest possible audience because access is free. Advertisers have the opportunity to find customers they would have been never able to reach otherwise. Yes, there are the downsides to advertising Zuckerman fretted about, but everything is a trade-off, and the particular set of trade-offs that led to the advertising-centric web were, on balance, a win-win-win that generated an astronomical amount of economic value. Moreover, I disagree with Andreessen that we could have ended up with a better system if the banks and credit card companies had been willing to play ball. In fact, over the last thirty years, the credit card companies in particular have — in part thanks to companies like Stripe — gotten their digital acts together, and are integral to a huge amount of web-based commerce, which itself is driven through digital advertising (the largest category of advertising for both Google and Meta). That too is human, in that the biggest outcome of digital advertising is physical products and real-world experiences like travel (digital products like apps and games, meanwhile, are themselves pursuing human attention). What was not viable in the 1990s, nor at any time since then, was something like micro-transactions for content. One obvious problem is that the fee structure of credit cards don’t allow for very small transactions; another problem is that the costs to product content are front-loaded, and the potential payoff is both back-loaded and unpredictable, making it impossible to make a living. The biggest problem of all, however, is that micro-transactions are anti-human: forcing a potential content consumer to continually decide on whether or not to pay for a piece of content is alienating, particularly when plenty of alternatives for their scarce attention exist. Subscriptions do work at smaller scales, because they are ultimately not about paying for content, but giving money to another human (or human institution); from The Local News Business Model: It is very important to clearly define what a subscriptions means. First, it’s not a donation: it is asking a customer to pay money for a product. What, then, is the product? It is not, in fact, any one article (a point that is missed by the misguided focus on micro-transactions). Rather, a subscriber is paying for the regular delivery of well-defined value. Each of those words is meaningful: Paying: A subscription is an ongoing commitment to the production of content, not a one-off payment for one piece of content that catches the eye. Regular Delivery: A subscriber does not need to depend on the random discovery of content; said content can be delivered to the subscriber directly, whether that be email, a bookmark, or an app. Well-defined Value: A subscriber needs to know what they are paying for, and it needs to be worth it. This last point is at the crux of why many ad-based newspapers will find it all but impossible to switch to a real subscription business model. When asking people to pay, quality matters far more than quantity, and the ratio matters: a publication with 1 valuable article a day about a well-defined topic will more easily earn subscriptions than one with 3 valuable articles and 20 worthless ones covering a variety of subjects. Yet all too many local newspapers, built for an ad-based business model that calls for daily content to wrap around ads, spend their limited resources churning out daily filler even though those ads no longer exist. I expect that this model will endure in the age of AI; obviously I’m biased on this point, but in a world of infinite content-on-demand, common content becomes community: if I’m successful this essay will generate a lot of discussion amongst a lot of people precisely because it is both original and widely accessible, funded by an audience that wants me to keep on writing Articles exactly like this. The Death of the Ad-Supported Web The ad-supported web — particularly text-based sites — is going to fare considerably worse. In fact, the most substantive pushback to my defense of advertising was in my own excerpt: most ad-supported content is already terrible, thanks to the bad incentives both Zuckerman and Andreessen bemoaned, and the impossible economics enabled by zero marginal cost content generation and consumption. The center of this world for the last twenty years has been Google. Google in its most idealized form Aggregated content consumers by mastering discovery in this world of abundance, directing users to exactly the site they were looking for, which was monetized through ads that were sold and served by Google. Indeed, this is the great irony in the ads antitrust case in which Google is currently embroiled; Eric Seufert asked on MobileDevMemo: I’ve heard arguments that, because Google suppressed competition in open web advertising markets, those markets should flourish when Google’s monopoly is broken. But my sense is that this ignores two realities. First, that consumer engagement has shifted into apps and walled gardens irreversibly. And second, that Google was keeping the open web on life support, and the open web’s demise will be hastened when Google no longer has an incentive to support it. What happens to the open web when its biggest, albeit imperfect, benefactor loses the motivation to sustain it? Note Seufert’s two points: walled gardens like social networks are both more attractive to most users and also better for advertisers, and Google might soon lose what little motivation they had left to support the open web. However, that’s not Google’s — and the web’s — only problem. Why go through the hassle of typing a search term and choosing the best link — particularly as search results are polluted by an increasingly overwhelming amount of SEO spam, now augmented by generative AI — when ChatGPT (or Google itself) will simply give you the answer you are looking for? In short, every leg of the stool that supported the open web is at best wobbly: users are less likely to go to ad-supported content-based websites, even as the long tail of advertisers might soon lose their conduit to place ads on those websites, leaving said websites even less viable than they are today — and they’re barely hanging on as it is! Microsoft and the Open Agentic Web This reality is the fly in the ointment of an intriguing set of proposals that Microsoft put forward yesterday at the Build 2025 Developer Conference about “The Open Agentic Web”; here’s CTO Kevin Scott: The thing that is super important if you think about what an open-agentic web could be, is you need agents to be able to take actions on your behalf, and one of the really important things about agents being able to take actions on your behalf is they have to be plumbed up to the greater world. So you need protocols, things like MCP and A2A and things that likely are going to be emerging over the coming year that will help connect in an open, reliable, interoperable way the agents that you are writing and agents that are being used so actively now by hundreds of millions of people to be able to go access content, to access services, to take action on behalf of users in fulfilling the tasks that have been delegated to them. One aspect of this vision of the agentic web was Microsoft’s commitment to the Model Context Protocol created by Anthropic; Scott told Nilay Patel in an excellent interview in The Verge that while MCP wasn’t exactly what he would have designed from scratch, ubiquity is more important than semantic differences, particularly when you’re trying to create HTTP for AI agents. The second part of Scott’s vision was something Microsoft created called NLWeb, a natural language interface for websites that makes them more directly accessible for agents: If you think back to the web, we have HTTP, and then we had things that sit on top of HTTP, like HTML mainly, that are opinionated about the payload, and so we’re announcing today NLWeb. The idea behind NLWeb is it is a way for anyone who has a website or an API already to very easily make their website or their API an agentic application. It lets you implement and leverage the full power of large language models to enrich the services and products that you’re already offering, and because every NLWeb endpoint is by default an MCP server, It means that those things that people are offering up via NLWeb will be accessible to any agent that speaks MCP. So you really can think about it a little bit like HTML for the agentic web. We have done a bunch of work already with partners who have been really excited and been able to really very quickly get to quick implementations and prototypes using NLWeb. We’ve worked with TripAdvisor, O’Reilly Media, a ton of really great companies that offer important products and services on the internet to add in a web functionality to their sites so that they can have these agentic experiences directly on their sites. Scott concluded by re-emphasizing how important it was that the layers of the agentic web be open, and used the evolution of the Internet as his example of why: So the last thing that I want to say before handing things back over to Satya is to just sort of press on these two points about why like open is so important here. So you know it is unbelievable what can happen in the world when simple components and simple protocols that are composable with one another are out there, exposed to the full scrutiny and creativity of every developer in the world who wants to participate or who has an idea. This thought game that I play with myself all the time is trying to imagine what the web would have looked like if one of the actors in the early development of the web, say the browser manufacturers, had decided that they wanted to vertically integrate and own the entire web. A hundred percent of the web would have been…dictated by the limits of their imagination, and it’s just obvious with 30 years of history that that wouldn’t have been a very interesting web. The web is interesting because millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people are participating to make it into this rich dynamic thing. That’s what we think we need with the agentic web, and that’s what we’re hoping you all can get inspired to go work on a little bit, to riff on, and to use the full extent of your imagination to help make this thing interesting. I think that widespread adoption of MCP as a protocol layer and NLWeb as a markup layer sounds excellent; the big hole in Scott’s proposal, however, was pointed out by Patel in that interview: That is the piece that on the web right now seems most under threat, the underlying business dynamics of I start a website, I put in a bunch of schema that allows search engines to read my website and surface my content across different distributions. I might add an RSS feed, which is a standardized distribution that everyone uses and agrees on. There’s lots of ways to do this. But if I make a website, I open myself up to distribution on different surfaces. What I will get in return for that is not necessarily money — almost in every case, not money. What I’ll get is visitors to my website, and then I’ll monetize them however I choose to: selling a subscription, display ads, whatever it is. That’s broken, right? As more and more of the answers appear directly, particularly in AI-based search products, traffic to websites has generally dropped. We see this over and over again. What’s going to replace that in the agentic era, where we’ve created new schema for agents to come and talk to my website and receive some answers? What’s going to make that worth it? Scott in his answer noted that websites would be able to communicate to agents what they wanted to make available and on what terms, along with some vague hand-waving about new advertising models and transactions. The last point is valid: Trip Advisor sells hotel rooms, and O’Reilly sells training courses, and you can see a world where websites based on transactions can not only benefit from exposing themselves to agents, but in fact transact more (and potentially pay an affiliate fee). Patel, however, rightly pressed Scott on the prospects for ad-supported content sites: As Google keeps more of the traffic for itself or it thinks differently about training data, all this stuff is changing. The trade here is make your website more agentic, and then MCP as a protocol will allow you to build some new business models on it. The problem, as I see it, is that the traffic to the web is in precipitous decline as Google referrals go into decline. How do you fix that problem so that everyone is incentivized to keep building on the web? I don’t know, honestly. “The Original Sin” of the Internet lacking native payments was not, in my opinion, a sin at all: advertising supported the human web not because Andreessen failed to make a deal with the credit card companies, but because it was the only business model that made sense. No, the real neglect and missed opportunity in terms of payments is happening right now: Microsoft is on to the right idea with its adoption of MCP and introduction of NLWeb, but its proposal, by virtue of not including native payments, isn’t nearly as compelling as it should be. The key difference from the 1990s is that on the agentic web native digital payments are both viable and the best possible way to not only keep the web alive, but also in the process create better and more useful AI. Stablecoins and Agentic Micro-transactions Start with the viability; from Bloomberg: Stablecoin legislation overcame a procedural blockade in the US Senate, marking a major victory for the crypto industry after a group of Democrats dropped their opposition Monday. The industry-backed regulatory bill is now set for debate on the Senate floor with a bipartisan group hoping to pass it as soon as this week, although senators said a final vote could slip until after the Memorial Day recess. I know I have driven long-time Stratechery readers a bit batty with my long-running and still-enduring-in-the-face-of-massive-grift-and-seemingly-unending-scandals interest in crypto, but stablecoins are genuinely a big deal. I wrote a brief explainer last fall when Stripe acquired Bridge: Stablecoins distill crypto to these most interesting bits. Unlike Bitcoin, stablecoins do not have intrinsic value downstream from a network effect, and unlike Ethereum, they are not set up to execute smart contracts or other applications; rather, their value is right there in the name: they are stable representations of value — usually the U.S. dollar…What remains is a synthetic currency that is digital but scarce, with all of the affordances that allows for, including the ability to move money frictionlessly (thus Collison’s analogy). The analogy I think of is to the Internet itself: Physical goods are scarce, but while you can scale up from hand-delivery, you still have to pay a lot for a delivery service, and if you cross borders you have to deal with customs. Information used to be delivered in person, then via physical media like letters or newspapers, but now it is purely digital and freely distributed and duplicated all over the world; it is abundant. Dollars right now are more akin to physical goods than they are to information: you can deliver it by hand, or even via delivery services like ACH or SWIFT, but the need for verification and confirmation flows introduce a ton of friction. Moreover, you can’t actually do anything with dollars at rest, other than watch them deflate. Stablecoins solve these problems: you can transfer them like information, while preserving scarcity, while blockchains provide verification and confirmation that scales from the smallest transactions to the biggest; meanwhile, they also earn a return while at rest thanks to the assets backing them. Stablecoins solve several of the micro-transaction problems I listed above, including dramatically lower — or no — fees, and the fact that they are infinitely divisible, and thus can scale to very small amounts. Stablecoins, by virtue of being programmable, are also well-suited to agents; agents, meanwhile, are much more suited to micro-transactions, because they are, in the end, simply software making a decision, unencumbered by the very human feeling of decision paralysis. In fact, we already have an excellent example of (deterministic) agents making micro-transactions at scale: the entire digital ads ecosystem! Every time a human loads a webpage, an awe-inspiring amount of computation and communication happens in milliseconds, as an auction is run to fill the inventory on that page with an ad that is likely to appeal to the human. These micro-transactions are only worth fractions of a penny, but the aggregate volume of them drives trillions of dollars worth of value. The problem, as both I and Patel noted, is that this ecosystem depends on humans seeing those webpages, not impersonal agents impervious to advertising, which destroys the economics of ad-supported content sites, which, in the long run, dries up the supply of new content for AI. OpenAI and Google in particular are clumsily addressing the supply issue by cutting deals with news providers and user-generated content sites like Reddit; this, however, is bad for the sort of competition Microsoft wants to engender, and ultimately won’t scale to the amount of new content that needs to be generated. What is possible — not probable, but at least possible — is to in the long run build an entirely new marketplace for content that results in a new win-win-win equilibrium. First, the protocol layer should have a mechanism for payments via digital currency, i.e. stablecoins. Second, AI providers like ChatGPT should build an auction mechanism that pays out content sources based on the frequency with which they are cited in AI answers. The result would be a new universe of creators who will be incentivized to produce high quality content that is more likely to be useful to AI, competing in a marketplace a la the open web; indeed, this would be the new open web, but one that operates at even greater scale than the current web given the fact that human attention is a scarce resource, while the number of potential agents is infinite. There is, to be sure, a tremendous amount of complexity in what I am proposing, and the path to a marketplace for data generation is quite unclear at the moment. Who, however, could have predicted exactly how the ad-supported web would have evolved, or centrally designed the incredible complexity that undergirds it? This is where Scott’s exhortation of openness is spot on: a world of one dominant AI making business development deals with a few blessed content creators, and scraping the carcass of what remains on the web for everything else, is a far less interesting one than one driven by marketplaces, auctions, and aligned incentives. To get there, however, means realizing that the Internet’s so-called “Original Sin” was in fact the key to realizing the human web’s potential, while the actual mistake would be in not building in payments now for the coming agentic web.

Democrats have a lot to be excited about when they look at President Donald Trump’s polls. Scores of voters have soured on his job performance since he took office. And that group of unhappy voters includes some of Trump’s new 2024 converts — the young voters, disaffected voters, and voters of color who left the Democratic coalition to join Trump’s.But Trump’s losses aren’t translating to Democratic gains. The polling so far suggests that the voters disillusioned by Trump similarly dislike the Democrats — and are more likely to leave politics altogether than align themselves with the Democratic Party.Congressional Democrats — and their party’s national brand — remain dismal: Some 37 percent of voters view the party favorably, while about 60 percent view them unfavorably, according to YouGov’s tracking surveys.Compare that to the GOP’s slightly better standing among voters in the same polls: 40 percent approve while 55 percent disapprove. Despite the early chaos and deluge of news during the first months of the Trump presidency, Republicans are either viewed more favorably than Democrats or running even with them in head-to-head polling.That dynamic is very different from how the parties were viewed during Trump’s first term. At this point in 2017, when Trump’s job approval was similarly spiraling downward, Democrats enjoyed a modest, but constant, edge of support over Republicans as a majority of the country turned even more negatively against Trump’s first-term agenda and performance. They sustained that advantage — generally a 3–6 point margin — through the 2018 “blue wave” midterms and beyond.In 2025, the picture is more evenly divided: a broadly unpopular president and two unpopular parties.A few interconnected reasons explain why Democrats are stuck in this conundrum — and offer some insight into what they have to do to get out of it.Democrats aren’t seen as a credible alternative — yetSo why aren’t newly anti-Trump voters flocking to Democrats? Perhaps the most important reason is that they don’t see Democrats as a better alternative. Consider April’s ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll, which was taken at what is, so far, the nadir of Trump’s public support. Despite broad discontent over Trump’s tariffs and inflation, Americans still said they trusted him “to do a better job handling the country’s main problems” over Democrats by a 7-point margin — 37 percent to 30 percent. Another 30 percent said neither could do a better job, while 4 percent said both could do it equally.Similarly, Americans are more likely to say that the Democratic Party is “out of touch” with the average person than either Trump or the Republican Party. About 70 percent of respondents say so about the Democrats, while 64 percent and 60 percent say so for Republicans and Trump respectively, according to that April poll.And what about those Trump’s newest voters — the youth and people of color who joined him in 2024? The data we have suggests they may be increasingly unhappy with Trump, but they’re not running back to Democrats either.Take the Spring 2025 Harvard Youth Poll, a project from that university’s Institute of Politics which has been specifically polling and tracking young Americans under the age of 30 since 2000.It found that young Americans’ approval of Trump and congressional Republicans has remained steady over the last few years. But views of the Democratic Party have collapsed from 48 percent approval in 2020 to 23 percent in 2025. Young Black voters, specifically, have grown more supportive of Trump since 2017, the polling suggests. And the unifying theme, Harvard’s analysts find, is a growing distrust of government — and political parties in general — even as the general ideology and values that young Americans hold seem to be moderating a little.Something similar is happening among Latino voters, according to a poll conducted over the past month by the Latino firm Equis Research and Data for Progress.Per the poll, Latino and Hispanic voters’ support for the president is “trending slightly below” 2024 levels. Yet he hasn’t seen a complete collapse in support, in part because some degree of voters still approve of his immigration, border security, and public safety policies, even if a growing share think he’s overreaching. That’s another difference from 2017, when these voters were strongly opposed.But Trump’s loss with Latinos does not appear to be Democrats’ gain. Latino Americans, including young men and Biden 2020-Trump 2024 voters, seem to be rejecting both parties. The firm notes that among Latinos who dislike either Trump’s immigration or economic policies, these voters “still don’t trust Democrats more on the [issues].”Plenty of voters are waiting and seeingAnother reason Democrats don’t seem to be gaining much support among Trump disapprovers is that there are plenty of voters who are biding their time. Polls and anecdotal data suggest there are voters who are still willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt even if they are disappointed. They are unsure or unenthusiastic about some of Trump’s job performance, but they’re not willing to go so far as to say they would redo their vote or switch parties next year.The gap between Trump’s support and the GOP’s support, for example, suggests that some voters might disapprove of how Trump has implemented his agenda, but still back Republicans in general. And the stabilizing of Trump’s approval rating as he does less may signal that voters are returning to him as he rolls back or stands down some of his more controversial actions.These kinds of voters show up a lot in focus groups conducted this spring, including those reported on by the New York Times, and in the wild.While reporting in Philadelphia on remorseful Trump voters earlier this month, I encountered many voters who said they wouldn’t redo their vote, but they still felt a bit let down with some of Trump’s approach to the job. At least anecdotally, young Trump voters tended to say this. Nikita, a senior at Drexel who spoke to me and Today, Explained producer Miles Bryan, admitted he “expected things to be a little different.” But he also thought it was too soon to make a definitive judgment on the Trump presidency or his future vote.“[I’d] probably give him either to the end of the year, or just give him a year at first just to see how things are going,” he said. “He’s been in office for what, a few months now? So I guess it’s not enough time yet to really see … if these tariffs are gonna play a big role in our economy and really spike up prices for a while. So just give it some time to see how things play out.”The polling data also shows this dynamic. Trump hit a low point in his popularity in April, when he announced his tariff regime and after a slate of negative coverage related to DOGE and his immigration policy. As he dialed back his tariffs, DOGE receded, and headlines moved on to other news items, his approval ratings stabilized. Some polls are now even capturing a mid-May recovery. And through it all, most Trump voters, even in polls capturing growing disapproval, say they probably wouldn’t change their votes. Instead, it appears that as Trump changed the implementation of his policies, the slide in approval from disaffected Republicans slowed down.Disengaged Trump voters aren’t necessarily Democratic voters-in-waitingFinally, there’s another kind of voter who may be peeling away from Trump’s camp, but doesn’t seem to be Democratic bait: those who tune out of politics entirely, don’t follow the news avidly, and don’t have strong allegiances to any party.These low-propensity, low-information voters were the kinds who Trump was able to reach in 2024, contributing to rightward swings across gender, age, and racial demographics. Something about Trump uniquely appealed to him — what they might have heard about him on social media, podcasts, or from influencers — or they liked the snippets of his agenda and campaign that broke through to them. Democrats are still figuring out how to reach this demographic of voter — which skews younger — but they don’t seem to have broken the code yet, meaning it may be more difficult for Democratic candidates to try to win them over, or reach them at all, in the future.Earlier this month, the data analyst G. Elliot Morris quantified how much these kinds of voters have turned on Trump, finding a 33-point drop in support among people who pay “hardly” any attention to the news “at all.” That decline eclipses the drops among more engaged groups of Americans — his support among those Americans who follow the news “most of the time” has fallen by 14 points, for example, and started off at a much lower baseline of support to begin with. What’s driving that sharp drop is still unclear. Other data sources suggest it’s still the least engaged voters who have more positive views of certain Trump policies than more informed voters. But what remains true is that these voters aren’t very ideological, aren’t married to a political party, and thus aren’t the kind of people who would necessarily turn out in a midterm election. That’s another complication for Democrats who hope to profit off Trump’s overall popularity decline.Democrats will have to address these challenges in the coming monthsFor now, Trump and his party’s standing seem to have reached a new equilibrium. He is unpopular, but still in a much better place than at this point during his first term.Still, what’s old is new: Democrats have been here before. A November 2017 CNN headline — “Poll: Views of Democratic Party hit lowest mark in 25 years” — reads almost exactly like a 2025 one. Just one year later, Democrats would flip 41 seats in the House. As Split Ticket data analysts Armin Thomas and Max McCall write, “the opposition party tends to become more popular in the run up to the midterms while the opposite happens for the incumbent party,” and unpopularity hasn’t stopped sweeping midterms wins by Election Day.And a lot more is going to change in the coming months. Candidates will launch campaigns and make their case. Ads and rallies will start picking up. And the media environment will be swamped with election talk once again. Generic “Democrat” and “Republican” views will turn into personalized and specific contests between real people. And voters of all sorts will get exposed and educated to political debates. That’s the time when the incumbent party gets scrutinized more, and the opposition party may begin to look more favorable.Democratic victories next year will surely depend on winning over some of the voters Trump seems to be turning off. But as we’ve seen in the Trump era, midterm and off-year elections tend to bring out electorates much more favorable to them than to Republicans. The same may happen next year.See More:

Inside Boston Children’s Hospital, 3D printing and digital planning are “transforming” pediatric care. The 156-year-old institution uses Materialise’s Mimics software to turn two-dimensional patient scans into detailed 3D models, streamlining preoperative planning and enhancing surgical outcomes.    Dr. David Hoganson, a pediatric cardiac surgeon at the Massachusetts-based health center, called 3D technology a “total game-changer” for clinicians. Speaking at the Materialise 3D Printing in Hospitals Forum 2025, he outlined his role in leading the hospital’s Cardiovascular 3D Modelling and Simulation Program. Mimics has become part of routine care at Boston Children’s Benderson Family Heart Center. Since 2018, the Program’s engineers and clinicians have created over 1,600 patient-specific 3D models. Last year alone, the team made 483 models, which accounted for about 50% of its Operating Room surgical cases.     During Materialise’s healthcare forum, I spoke with Dr. Hoganson about his unique path from biomedical engineering to clinical practice. The Temple University graduate outlined how 3D modeling is no longer a futuristic add-on but an essential tool transforming the precision and planning of modern surgery. He revealed the tangible benefits of Mimics modelling versus traditional medical imaging, emphasizing how intraoperative 3D planning can reduce heart surgery complications by up to 87%. Looking to the future of healthcare, Dr. Hoganson discussed the need for more seamless clinical integration, validation, and financial reimbursement to increase adoption.    Dr. David Hoganson speaking at the Materialise 3D Printing in Hospitals Forum 2025. Photo via Materialise. From the factory floor to the operating theater When Dr. Hoganson began his career, it wasn’t in an operating room but on the factory floor. He started as a biomedical engineer, developing cardiovascular medical devices for two years, before transitioning to medicine.  This pedigree has been instrumental in shaping Boston Children’s 3D Modeling and Simulation Program, which was co-founded by University of New Hampshire Mechanical Engineering graduate Dr. Peter Hammer. The team has grown to include 17 engineers and one clinical nurse. “It has been an engineering-focused effort from the beginning,” explained Dr. Hoganson. He emphasized that the team prioritizes using “advanced engineering analysis” to plan and conduct ultra-precise operations.  Dr. Hoganson believes this engineering focus challenges the structured nature of clinical medicine. “The mindset of medicine is much more focused on doing things the way we were taught,” he explains. In contrast, engineering embraces constant iteration, creating space for innovation and rethinking established practices. He argued that engineers are not “held back by the way medicine has always been done,” which makes them an invaluable asset in clinical settings. When engineers deeply understand clinical challenges and apply their analytical skills, they often uncover solutions that physicians may not have considered, he added. These range from optimized surgical workflows to entirely new approaches to preoperative planning. For Dr. Hoganson, the “secret sauce” lies in collaboration and ensuring “zero distance between the engineers and the problem.” Dr. David Hoganson speaking at the Materialise 3D Printing in Hospitals Forum 2025. Photo via Materialise. 3D printing and digital planning enhance surgical outcomes  In pediatric cardiac surgery, speed matters. According to Dr. Hoganson, this is why digital 3D modeling takes priority in pre-operative planning and intraoperative guidance. Materialise’s Mimics software streamlines this process. Users can import CT and MRI data, which is automatically transformed into detailed, interactive 3D models. Surgeons can then run simulations and apply computational fluid dynamics to forecast the most effective treatment strategies. Boston Children’s 3D simulation lead described these capabilities as offering “tremendous benefits” beyond what traditional imaging alone can provide. Traditional scans are viewed in stacks of two-dimensional slices. Whereas, Mimics 3D models offer virtual segmentation, interior views, and precise spatial mapping. Dr. Hoganson called this a “difference maker” and “totally transformational” for surgeons.  Dr. Hoganson’s team uses this technology to perform a range of complex cardiovascular repairs, such as reconstructing aortic and mitral valves, closing ventricular septal defects (VSDs), and augmenting blood vessels, including pulmonary arteries and aortas. Materialise Mimics’ value is not limited to preoperative preparation. It also guides surgical procedures. During operations, clinicians can interact with the models using repurposed gaming controllers, allowing them to explore and isolate anatomical features in the operating theater.  One key breakthrough has been identifying and mapping the heart’s electrical system, which governs its rhythm. By integrating 3D modelling into intraoperative planning, surgeons have significantly reduced the risk of heart block, where electrical signals are delayed as they pass through the organ. With the help of Mimics software, incidence rates have fallen from 40% to as low as 5% in some cases.      Given the advantages of digital modelling, surgeons might be tempted to sideline physical 3D printing altogether. However, Dr. Hoganson insists additive manufacturing remains vital to refining surgical workflows. His team conducts a “tremendous amount of 3D printing,” creating patient-specific anatomical models, mostly with a resin-based Formlabs system. These models allow clinicians to test and validate plans in the lab before donning their scrubs. Boston Children’s has sharpened its surgical edge by using materials that closely replicate the mechanical properties of target tissues. This allows the team to 3D print anatomical models tailored to each child’s size, age, and physical makeup. For instance, Dr. Hoganson’s team can fabricate neonatal-sized aortas and pulmonary arteries that replicate the texture and elasticity of an infant’s vessels. Developed over several years, this approach enables accurate simulation of complex procedures, such as patch enlargement of pulmonary arteries. The team conducts rigorous preclinical testing by combining anatomical precision with lifelike tissue mechanics.  Dr. Hoganson explained that in-depth testing is crucial for refining techniques, reducing surgical risk, and minimizing complications in pediatric patients. This, in turn, slashes healthcare costs as fewer children spend extended time in the ICU following procedures. 3D planning and simulation empower surgeons to “do things right the first time, so we can reduce those reinterventions and complications,” Dr. Hoganson added.         Dr. David Hoganson demonstrating cardiovascular 3D models at the Materialise 3D Printing in Hospitals Forum 2025. Photo by 3D Printing Industry. Overcoming challenges to adoption in hospitals    What key challenges are limiting clinical adoption of 3D technology? For Dr. Hoganson, cost remains a critical barrier. “Having the efforts reimbursed will be a very important piece of this,” he explained. “That enables teams to grow and have the manpower to do it,” when 3D planning is clinically necessary. In the US, medical reimbursement involves a long path to approval. But progress is being made. His team has started billing successfully for some aspects of the work, marking an “encouraging start” toward broader systemic change. Adoption also hinges on easier integration into existing workflows. Dr. Hoganson noted that if 3D technology adds efforts and time to procedures, it won’t be chosen over existing methods. Therefore, “the more streamlined you can make the whole process for the physician, the more likely they are to adopt it.”  In response to these demands, Boston Children’s 3D Modelling and Simulation Program has designed a system that feels familiar to surgeons. “It’s not just about providing the technical aspects of the 3D model,” added Dr. Hoganson. “It’s about integrating the whole process into the clinical workflow in a way that works for the clinician.”  His team works at the center of these efforts, ensuring “there’s almost no barrier of entry to find and use the model they need.” Dr. Hoganson claims to have simplified the process to the stage where it looks and feels like regular medical care, removing the mystique and misconceptions around 3D technology. “There’s nothing special about it anymore,” he added. “That’s been a huge step towards this technology being a part of routine medical care.”   Boston Children’s integration strategy is working. The team expects to use 3D models in around 60% of heart surgeries this year. However, making 3D technology a standard of care has not been easy. Dr. Horganson said, “It has taken a very diligent effort to remove those barriers.”  In the broader tech space, 3D printing has sometimes suffered from overpromising and underdelivering, a pattern Dr. David Hoganson is keen to avoid. “We’ve tried to be extremely transparent with what is and is not being delivered,” he added. That clarity is crucial for building trust. A 3D model alone, for instance, serves a vital but defined role: enhanced visualization and preoperative measurements. Hoganson emphasized that 3D printing is not a miracle cure, but another tool in a surgeon’s toolbox.  For Boston Children’s, the future of 3D printing in healthcare lies beyond static models. Dr. Horganson believes additive manufacturing will be a basis for “taking the next step and impacting how surgery is conducted, and how precisely and perfectly it’s done the first time.” Over the next eighteen months, Dr. Hoganson’s team will double down on demonstrating how preoperative 3D modeling translates into better surgical procedures. This will include measuring outcomes from surgeries using 3D technology and assessing whether predictions have matched surgical results. He believes validating outcomes will be an “important step forward” in moving 3D modeling from supportive technology to an indispensable clinical standard. The number of patient-specific digital 3D models created annually at Boston Children’s Hospital’s Benderson Family Heart Center since 2018. Photo by 3D Printing Industry. Take the 3DPI Reader Survey – shape the future of AM reporting in under 5 minutes. Read all the 3D printing news from RAPID + TCT 2025 Subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry newsletter to keep up with the latest 3D printing news.You can also follow us on LinkedIn, and subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry Youtube channel to access more exclusive content.Featured image shows Dr. David Hoganson speaking at the Materialise 3D Printing in Hospitals Forum 2025. Photo via Materialise.

Whether DOOM: The Dark Ages is going to be able to perform to Microsoft and Bethesda’s commercial expectations in the long run remains to be seen, but the first-person shooter seems to have got off to a decent start as far as physical sales in the UK are concerned. As per charts released by the Gfk, DOOM: The Dark Ages topped the charts for highest selling physical titles in the UK for the week ending May 17.  Joining DOOM: The Dark Ages atop the charts is fellow new release The Precinct. Fallen Tree Games and Kwalee’s old-school GTA-inspired action-adventure title occupies the second place in the charts. Meanwhile, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 sits in eighth place, down from the top spot last week, while Assassin’s Creed Shadows comes in at No. 6, slipping down from fourth place last week.  Interestingly, ten years on from its original release, The Witcher 3 takes the No. 7 spot in the charts with its GOTY Edition, while fellow old horse Grand Theft Auto 5 also continues to figure in the charts, sitting in fifth place. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, meanwhile, comes in at No. 10. You can check out the full top 10 for the week ending May 17 below.  No.Title1.DOOM: The Dark Ages2.The Precinct3.EA Sports FC 254.Minecraft5.Grand Theft Auto 56.Assassin’s Creed Shadows7.The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt GOTY Edition8.Clair Obscur: Expedition 339.Astro Bot10.Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

News Mario Kart World Screenshots Showcase Photo Mode Nintendo showcases different frames and creative shows to offer glimpses of what the upcoming racer's photo mode will let players do. Posted By Shubhankar Parijat | On 20th, May. 2025 Upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 launch title Mario Kart World is set to be a game of many firsts for the Mario Kart franchise, from its open world setting to new gameplay features like being able to drive on water. With its release drawing nearer, Nintendo is continuing to shed more light on many of these new features, and has released new screenshots to highlight another one.  Taking to Twitter, Nintendo recently showed off a batch of new screenshots showcasing Mario Kart World’s photo mode. When racing around the open world in Free Roam mode, players will be able to pause at any time and hope into photo mode, where you’ll be able to use a number of different frames and editing tools to come up with creative shots. Check out the screenshots below for a glimpse of what photo mode will have in store. Mario Kart World is set to launch alongside the Nintendo Switch 2 as its launch title on June 5. Stay tuned for more details on the title in the lead-up to its release. Tagged With: Elden Ring: Nightreign Publisher:Bandai Namco Developer:FromSoftware Platforms:PS5, Xbox Series X, PS4, Xbox One, PCView More Borderlands 4 Publisher:2K Developer:Gearbox Entertainment Platforms:PS5, Xbox Series X, PCView More Death Stranding 2: On the Beach Publisher:Sony Developer:Kojima Productions Platforms:PS5View More Amazing Articles You Might Want To Check Out! Nintendo Switch 2 Physical Game Cases Showcased in New Images As previously revealed, physical game cases for Nintendo Switch 2 titles will be the same size as Nintendo Swi... Mario Kart World Screenshots Showcase Photo Mode Nintendo showcases different frames and creative shows to offer glimpses of what the upcoming racer's photo mo... DOOM: The Dark Ages Debuts on Top of Weekly Retail UK Charts The first-person shooter takes the top spot in the latest UK charts, while Fallen Tree Games' action-adventure... The Last of Us Trailer Teases Harrowing Season 2 Finale The seventh and final episode of The Last of Us' second season is going to premier on HBO Max next Sunday, May... Neil Druckmann Confirms Producer Role on Unannounced Naughty Dog Project The Intergalactic director is a mentor of sorts who provides feedback for the "other team" and acts like "the ... Marathon Must Rank in the NPD’s Top 5 Best-Selling Games of 2025 to Prove Successful – Rumor There are allegedly high sales expectations for Bungie's controversial extraction shooter when it launches on ... View More

Source: Simon Kennedy Moxon Architects and engineering practice Ingenieurbüro Miebach have completed a new timber and concrete pedestrian bridge for the town of Baiersbronn in southern Germany. The project seeks to strengthen connections within the town centre and forms part of a garden show, a regional event that spans 8km between Baiersbronn and neighbouring Freudenstadt. The Baiersbronn Bridge is designed to provide pedestrian and cycle access across the Murg River, as well as allowing occasional vehicular traffic. The structure reuses the abutments of a previous crossing, which had fallen into disrepair, helping to reduce costs and limit the overall carbon footprint. Ben Addy, founding director of Moxon Architects, described the bridge as “an expression of creative symbioses: the interdependence of timber and concrete; of site and geometry; and a process of continual innovation with our partners IB Miebach.” The 25-metre-long bridge is constructed using block laminated timber beams with a stepped bottom edge. The beams were manufactured off-site and transported to site where they were used as permanent formwork for an in-situ concrete deck. This composite approach aims to combine the compressive strength of concrete with the tensile strength of timber. Ezra Groskin, director at Moxon Architects, said: “Everything falls into place with this design. It is a story of two materials: the way they behave and interact structurally, functionally and formally.” Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy 1/7 show caption The glulam beams lean outward to reduce exposure to wind-driven rain, with edge detailing and the concrete deck intended to protect the timber from the elements. The scheme follows the 2022 completion of Balingen Footbridge and is Moxon Architects’ second bridge in collaboration with timber specialist IB Miebach. The Baiersbronn Bridge was the result of an invited design competition launched in 2021. Frank Miebach, director of IB Miebach, said: “Wood can do even more - this is just the beginning.” >> Also read: Moxon completes ‘hockey stick’ bridge crossing the River Severn >> Also read: New images of Acme’s £1bn Liverpool Street station plans as City publishes planning application Project team: Client: Gemeinde Baiersbronn Architect: Moxon Architects Engineer: Ingenieurbüro Miebach Main contractor: Rendler Bau GmbH Timber works: Schaffitzel Holzindustrie GmbH 

Rocketz Prophet of Truth Member Oct 25, 2017 8,604 Metro Detroit Ubisoft has release a gameplay showcase of what to expect in Anno 117: Pax Romana. Get a chance to see the new roads and land armies. Release still set for 2025. Looks like content creators have videos and impressions as well if you choose to seek them out. View: https://youtu.be/GBXNl88yeW4?si=dR8qywUrXnks3ver  Firebricks Member Jan 27, 2018 2,438 This is my most anticipated game of the year, and it looks great.   PapaJustify Member Nov 3, 2017 1,318 Germany Incredible. It's all I wanted and more. I cannot wait.   OP OP Rocketz Prophet of Truth Member Oct 25, 2017 8,604 Metro Detroit Saw as well you get a choice now of what food you want to start your first group of citizens with.   MacReady Member Jan 21, 2024 476 Looks really good.   MacheteSquadSteve Member Jan 6, 2025 276 Going to spend a lot of time with this. As gorgeous as Manor Lords is, I'm looking forward to a more pleasant climate to build in.   strudelkuchen Member Oct 25, 2017 13,387 Looks good. Anno 1800 is the best one since 1404, I have high hopes!   ProdigyZA Member Jun 9, 2024 1,491 Looking great.   Nacho Papi Member Oct 27, 2017 3,270 Looks gorgeous!   Squirrel09 Member Nov 4, 2017 1,909 What's the combat like in these games? My impression was that they were themed city builders, are they more like RTS with a city building focus?   cabelhigh Member Nov 2, 2017 1,917 Visually looks good, but just that trailer gameplay wise looks a LOT like 1800...seems like the streams have more unique gameplay tho, but I dont have the time to watch them   Shahadan Member Oct 27, 2017 5,565 So apparently you can choose which foods to supply to houses? wow Not sure I like stuff being locked behind a tech tree however  Majora's Mask Member Oct 26, 2017 2,028 Will watch when I get home, but really hope M+KB is implemented on consoles.   attic Member Jun 28, 2024 383 wow so this is by far the earliest setting in the series so far, that's so cool. antiquity-heads are eating good   Xando Member Oct 28, 2017 37,600 There is a lot of footage out there. Seems like some german influencers got a lot of time with it   Potterson Member Oct 28, 2017 7,227 Looking at influencers' videos, it looks like Anno 1800 (chains of production, how you handle citizens and their needs etc, missions) with small changes. And... It's great. 1800 is amazing.  FliX Master of the Reality Stone Moderator Oct 25, 2017 10,928 Metro Detroit Awww yiss, been waiting for this!   Anno Member Oct 25, 2017 7,876 Columbus, Ohio idk that I need ground combat to return. But otherwise it looks amazing, unsurprisingly.   GTAce Member Oct 27, 2017 4,601 Bonn, Germany Anno 1800 with a (for me) entirely uninteresting setting. Love 1800, but I hoped for a game with a generally bigger scope, maybe even multiple eras.   FliX Master of the Reality Stone Moderator Oct 25, 2017 10,928 Metro Detroit Squirrel09 said: What's the combat like in these games? My impression was that they were themed city builders, are they more like RTS with a city building focus? Click to expand... Click to shrink... The focus has historically been on production chains and trade. But looks like more combat options in this one than in 1800.  Bucca Member Oct 25, 2017 5,506 Beautiful   strudelkuchen Member Oct 25, 2017 13,387 monketron Member Oct 27, 2017 4,112 Hype levels at max. Cannot wait for this and also to see where they go with the DLC over the years. Shame we don't have a proper release date yet.   MegaSackman Member Oct 27, 2017 20,674 Argentina Only watched the trailer which didn't say much but I'll watch the rest later. Regardless, this is a day one for me. Thank god it's coming on consoles day one.   Shairi Member Aug 27, 2018 10,175 Oh damn, this looks sooo good. I'm so excited.   Splinky Member Jul 12, 2023 133 It makes sense to go straight to the Romans, those guys were way ahead of the curve in their love of grid layouts.   shoal Member Dec 27, 2020 753 Wow, I loved 1404 and didn't know this was coming out!   Genesius Member Nov 2, 2018 20,542 I'm excited for this but also a bit intimidated, especially since I'd be on console for this. I wonder if you'll be limited to Roman gods or if they would do something like incorporate early Christianity.  mavericktopgun Member Oct 27, 2017 5,435 Do we know if this comes to Switch 2? Mouse mode is perfect for this   strudelkuchen Member Oct 25, 2017 13,387 Genesius said: I'm excited for this but also a bit intimidated, especially since I'd be on console for this. I wonder if you'll be limited to Roman gods or if they would do something like incorporate early Christianity. Click to expand... Click to shrink... You are not limited to Roman gods.   Lightsong Member Nov 11, 2022 9,385 I'm so glad we went back so far in history. I loved 1800 but something even more modern is just not working well for this franchise.   Sec0nd The Fallen Oct 27, 2017 6,952 Looks nice. Anno 1800 was so wonderful and I've spent ridiculous amounts of hours in that game last summer. Don't feel like I'm ready for another Anno game yet, but I'll keep my eyes open for this one for sure.  FliX Master of the Reality Stone Moderator Oct 25, 2017 10,928 Metro Detroit Genesius said: I'm excited for this but also a bit intimidated, especially since I'd be on console for this. wonder if you'll be limited to Roman gods or if they would do something like incorporate early Christianity. Click to expand... Click to shrink... The console version of 1800 is wonderfully realised. Plays great with a controller.   SofNascimento cursed Member Oct 28, 2017 24,883 São Paulo - Brazil Give me all Roman games.   Lightsong Member Nov 11, 2022 9,385 My favourite Anno is still 1602, that had land combat too (controlled terribly, lol), so I'm totally on board with this.   Morten88 Member Dec 22, 2019 2,391 This looks really fucking good   Dmax3901 Member Oct 25, 2017 8,554 Looks so good, the tease of Romanising other provinces sounds super interesting, I wonder how extensive that will be. Would certainly be a good avenue for Season Passes to go down.   Smokey_Run The Fallen Oct 25, 2017 5,077 Can't wait to play it. It looks great. Hopefully a date gets announced soon.   MegaSackman Member Oct 27, 2017 20,674 Argentina I watched the IGN preview with distractions and didn't find anything truly different from 1800 outside of minor stuff. Not that it matters to me, 1800 was my first full Anno game (I played a FTP one a long time ago) and I'm ready for a new one, doesn't matter to me if it's more of the same.   FliX Master of the Reality Stone Moderator Oct 25, 2017 10,928 Metro Detroit Honestly 1800 is like the perfect game for me. More of the same is good in my book.   Aangster Member Oct 27, 2017 3,016 Looking forward to this, the universal UI being the console version of 1800 is my main concern though, because I don't think it'll work well for PC players and could end up being a bit of a disaster like Civ 7's.   Dmax3901 Member Oct 25, 2017 8,554 What do we think the chances are for this to get pushed to 2026?   Tmespe Member Oct 27, 2017 3,758 Dmax3901 said: What do we think the chances are for this to get pushed to 2026? Click to expand... Click to shrink... Medium since we don't have a release date yet. Then again the press preview is looking quite polished already.   Lucreto Member Oct 25, 2017 7,273 Dmax3901 said: What do we think the chances are for this to get pushed to 2026? Click to expand... Click to shrink... It's possible but they are still saying 2025, so it's still there target. There is a developer commentary livestream Wednesday so they might mention a date there.  finaljedi Member Jul 15, 2018 629 Cincinnati, OH I wonder when they run out of titles that add up to 9.   eonden Member Oct 25, 2017 17,557 That looks class.  

News Nintendo Switch 2 Physical Game Cases Showcased in New Images As previously revealed, physical game cases for Nintendo Switch 2 titles will be the same size as Nintendo Switch game cases, but in a different colour. Posted By Shubhankar Parijat | On 20th, May. 2025 The Nintendo Switch 2 is doing things similar to its predecessor in a number of ways, with how physical media will be handled also being on that list. The upcoming console will, for instance, continue to use cartridges for physical games, and we now also have a closer look at what the cases for physical games will look like.  Twitter user @Genki_JPN recently shared new images of Nintendo Switch 2 physical game cases, which are going to be the exact same size as the Switch 1’s physical game cases- the only difference being that as opposed to the Switch 1’s transparent cases, the Switch 2’s game cases will be red. Meanwhile, a couple of images also showcase the insides of a game case, which also won’t be that much different from the Switch 1. Check out the images below.  The Nintendo Switch 2 is set to launch worldwide on June 5.  Tagged With: Elden Ring: Nightreign Publisher:Bandai Namco Developer:FromSoftware Platforms:PS5, Xbox Series X, PS4, Xbox One, PCView More Borderlands 4 Publisher:2K Developer:Gearbox Entertainment Platforms:PS5, Xbox Series X, PCView More Death Stranding 2: On the Beach Publisher:Sony Developer:Kojima Productions Platforms:PS5View More Amazing Articles You Might Want To Check Out! Nintendo Switch 2 Physical Game Cases Showcased in New Images As previously revealed, physical game cases for Nintendo Switch 2 titles will be the same size as Nintendo Swi... Mario Kart World Screenshots Showcase Photo Mode Nintendo showcases different frames and creative shows to offer glimpses of what the upcoming racer's photo mo... DOOM: The Dark Ages Debuts on Top of Weekly Retail UK Charts The first-person shooter takes the top spot in the latest UK charts, while Fallen Tree Games' action-adventure... The Last of Us Trailer Teases Harrowing Season 2 Finale The seventh and final episode of The Last of Us' second season is going to premier on HBO Max next Sunday, May... Neil Druckmann Confirms Producer Role on Unannounced Naughty Dog Project The Intergalactic director is a mentor of sorts who provides feedback for the "other team" and acts like "the ... Marathon Must Rank in the NPD’s Top 5 Best-Selling Games of 2025 to Prove Successful – Rumor There are allegedly high sales expectations for Bungie's controversial extraction shooter when it launches on ... View More