Ahead of the 91st Academy Awards on Sunday, our Oscar Effects series puts the spotlight on each of the five movies nominated for "Visual Effects," looking at the amazing tricks filmmakers and their effects teams used to make each of these films stand out as visual spectacles. Ernest Cline's 2011 novel Ready Player One was once thought to be un-adaptable with its legions of licensed characters from television, movies, video games, and comic books assembling for a sprawling adventure within a virtual universe known as OASIS. And then along came Steven Spielberg to prove the skeptics wrong. Spielberg's adaptation of Ready Player One not only managed to translate the grand scope of its source material, but it also managed to deliver a film jam-packed with the iconic characters and pop-culture references that made the book so popular among a certain generation of readers. It did so with the help of a talented visual effects team led by four-time Academy Award nominee Roger Guyett, who was tasked with not only building a virtual universe populated by a host of familiar and not-so-familiar characters, but also making sure that the digital avatars of the film's lead characters were capable of conveying just as much emotion as their human counterparts. Digital Trends spoke to Guyett about the experience of bringing Ready Player One to the screen, building virtual universes, and finding genuine emotional depth among more than half a million CG creations.

This multiplayer game allows users to connect with their friends and embark on emotionally-engaging grand adventures in a living world that is persistent, social and rewarding. The adventure has multiple story arcs that surprise and delight players for the life of the game. A user can choose to simply experience the adventure, or they can help create it. Becoming part of VU is rewarding and easy for gamers and non-gamers alike. Whether the user is in the game or not, the universe and storyline continues moving forward.

Before, I've imagined AI to be human-like robots we can touch and see, walking amongst us on earth. But when we finally manage to create the perfect AI, or an artificial consciousness, this could also be virtual. And this would mean we could create new virtual universes, with artificial consciousness. Maybe they won't even know they are artificial, created by mankind. In the future, this could be like a game for us, remember The Sims?

If you enjoy navigating distant galaxies, leading intergalactic alliances and fighting space pirates, you might want to take on another challenge: discovering real planets. The space-based online game EVE Online, which bills itself as "the world's largest living work of science fiction", is delving into science fact by asking players to help search for planets outside our solar system. Details of the citizen science challenge, which is part of an initiative called Project Discovery, emerged at the game's annual Fanfest event in Reykjavik, Iceland, last week. A mini-game launching later this year within the EVE universe will present players with data from the now defunct COROT space observatory, which launched in 2006. They will be looking at luminosity curves, representing the change in a star's brightness as a planet passes in front of it.

Dark energy is a phrase used by physicists to describe a mysterious'something' that is causing the universe to accelerate in its expansion. It is the'gravitational glue' that holds galaxies together and is thought to make up five sixths of the universe's mass. These substances have profound effects on the birth and lives of galaxies and stars and yet almost nothing is known about their physical nature. But now a new computer model, twenty-five times faster than other methods, will allow scientists to compute virtual universes in the search of explanations about these mysteries. The new method makes the universe models more accurate by comparing the model's properties with an'inverted' version.