Apocalypse Now is one of the greatest films ever made, and now it's going to be a video game. The game's creators -- including filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola -- are seeking $900,000 on Kickstarter to get development of the game moving. The plan is for a 2020 release. SEE ALSO: 3.5 million people supported Kickstarter projects in 2016 "Forty years ago, I set out to make a personal art picture that could hopefully influence generations of viewers for years to come," Coppola -- who appears to be serving in a creative advisory role -- said in a statement. "Today, I'm joined by new daredevils, a team who wants to make an interactive version of Apocalypse Now, where you are Captain Benjamin Willard amidst the harsh backdrop of the Vietnam War. I've been watching videogames grow into a meaningful way to tell stories, and I'm excited to explore the possibilities for Apocalypse Now for a new platform and a new generation."

Movies from The Lawnmower Man to The Matrix to Transcendence have sought to imagine what it might be like if we could literally interface a human mind with a computer. A new movie, MindGamers, is a thriller that will take that to another level by involving the audience to explore that very question. In MindGamers, starring Sam Neill ("Jurassic Park") and Tom Payne (The Walking Dead), a group of brilliant young students discovers the greatest scientific breakthrough of all time: a wireless neural network, connected via a quantum computer, capable of linking the minds of each and every one of us. They determine that quantum theory can be used to transfer motor-skills from one brain to another, and freely spread this technology, believing it to be a first step towards a new equality and intellectual freedom. Other parties are also interested in the technology--but for more nefarious purposes like mass-control to influence populations.

Imagine condensing 2,500 hours' worth of work into two minutes. It sounds crazy, but that's exactly what Bläck Studios -- in conjunction with motion capture sister studio Imagination Studios, under the Goodbye Kansas Entertainment Group umbrella -- does on a regular basis. It took 40 people, 23 shots and 2,500 hours to create this cinematic trailer for Conan Exiles, Funcom's upcoming open-world survival game based on Conan the Barbarian. In the trailer, it takes less than two minutes for Conan to cross a desert landscape across to Razma, who then fights alongside him against a swarm of growling beasts. But the process of developing that scene involves quite a bit more.

A new species of wasp has been discovered that starts its life in a horrifying way - by eating another wasp alive from the inside out. The gall wasps drills into the branches of trees to create a safe space for it to mature, but it turns out these crypts are not as safe as the insect thought. A new species of parasitic wasp - dubbed the Crypt Keeper wasp - has been found to deposit its eggs into the gall wasp's crypt. The gall wasps become stuck tunneling to freedom, and the parasitic offspring then eat their way out and emerge through the gall wasp's head cavity, like something out of the film Alien. The gall wasps drills into the branches of trees to create a safe space for it to mature, but it turns out these crypts are not as safe as the insect thought.

These and so many other video game franchises offer beautiful, sweeping scores for players to get lost in. Unfortunately, however, they're not always known or appreciated by people outside of the gaming community. Recognition is improving through live concerts and awards, but there's still a long way to go. The latest effort to champion and broaden its appeal is a new radio show on Classic FM. It'll be hosted by Jessica Curry, co-founder of British game studio The Chinese Room and composer of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and will focus on symphonic video game music in particular.

Netflix has rolled out a significant update to its Android app, allowing users to store downloads on their microSD cards. After months of desperate speculation, Netflix users gained the ability to save TV shows and films for offline viewing towards the end of last year, but there was one downside: users could only save content to their device's onboard storage. That placed a tight restriction on how much content users could download. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

Last year, the first season of HBO's Westworld concluded as most stories about robots do: with the machine eliminating its maker. This shouldn't have been surprising. Across Hollywood, from Terminator to Ex Machina, the first thing artificially intelligent robots seem to do once they gain consciousness is go rogue. It makes for a cool ending, but if the writers of Westworld's season 2 want to aim for more science and less fiction, they might consider having their "hosts" not eliminate humans, but help them to prevent cyberattacks or improve cancer treatments. And what if the show's humans didn't live in fear of robots, but instead set some ground rules for how AI technology can be used meaningfully, for the benefit of all?

The Screen Actors Guild & American Federation of Television and Radio Artists strike against nine video game companies over residual and pay disputes has reached day 96 and is now the second-longest strike in SAG-AFTRA history, according to a report from Deadline. The strike, which began last October, has focused on voice actors for video games. Specific demands for union members have included residuals for actors on games that sell more than two million copies and work time limits for vocally stressful performances. In a statement from October via VentureBeat, SAG-AFTRA said its push to strike was intended to help out its members who work with developers frequently. "No matter what these companies are peddling in their press releases, this negotiation is not only about upfront compensation. It is about fairness and the ability of middle-class performers to survive in this industry. These companies are immensely profitable, and successful games -- which are the only games this dispute is about -- drive that profit."

We consider the problem of segmenting a large population of customers into non-overlapping groups with similar preferences, using diverse preference observations such as purchases, ratings, clicks, etc. over subsets of items. We focus on the setting where the universe of items is large (ranging from thousands to millions) and unstructured (lacking well-defined attributes) and each customer provides observations for only a few items. These data characteristics limit the applicability of existing techniques in marketing and machine learning. To overcome these limitations, we propose a model-based projection technique, which transforms the diverse set of observations into a more comparable scale and deals with missing data by projecting the transformed data onto a low-dimensional space. We then cluster the projected data to obtain the customer segments. Theoretically, we derive precise necessary and sufficient conditions that guarantee asymptotic recovery of the true customer segments. Empirically, we demonstrate the speed and performance of our method in two real-world case studies: (a) 84% improvement in the accuracy of new movie recommendations on the MovieLens data set and (b) 6% improvement in the performance of similar item recommendations algorithm on an offline dataset at eBay. We show that our method outperforms standard latent-class and demographic-based techniques.

Artificial intelligence that reads and responds to our emotions is the killer app of the digital economy. It will make customers and employees happier--as long as it learns to respect our boundaries. When psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman visited the Fore tribe in the highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1967, he probably didn't imagine that his work would become the foundation for some of the latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI). After studying the tribe, which was still living in the preliterate state it had been in since the Stone Age, Ekman believed he had found the blueprint for a set of universal human emotions and related expressions that crossed cultures and were present in all humans. A decade later he created the Facial Action Coding System, a comprehensive tool for objectively measuring facial movement.