Rumor has it Samsung is planning to introduce a Galaxy S camera running Android 4.0 at IFA 2012.

When a major tech event is approaching, the rumor mill tends to go wild with alleged photo leaks and anonymous sources teasing all sorts of unconfirmed devices. The upcoming IFA 2012 is no exception either and the latest tip given to GSM Arena has Samsung launching a new, Android-based camera.

The new device will allegedly be called the Samsung Galaxy S camera and feature a familiar 4.8″ SuperAMOLED screen. It won’t be running some stunted version of Android either, the tipster said it would come preloaded with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The device is described as a “Galaxy S III glued to the back of a point-and-shoot camera”, so bye-bye physical buttons. The camera itself has a 16-megapixel sensor, pop-out Xenon flash, 10x zoom, and a curved right side for easy handling. Reportedly, Samsung will fit all that into a package 1.5 to 2 times thicker than a Galaxy S III. GSM Arena created a realistic-looking photoshop render based on the rumors, which we’ve included above.

In terms of connectivity, the Galaxy S camera will potentially come in two versions: one equipped with Wi-Fi only and one sporting both 3G and Wi-Fi. Don’t expect to replace your smartphone, however, as the device is said to only support mobile data, meaning voice calls and text messaging will be absent. We can’t imagine many people would want to carry around a point-and-shoot as their main device, but it would be nice for photo-enthusiasts to have the option.

The Galaxy S may not be the first Android-powerd camera to reach the market, but it could be the first to get it right. After all, a connected camera would be very popular in today’s sharing-obsessed culture. Just keep in mind this is all speculation until the truth is revealed at IFA in less than a week. It is worth noting, however, that Samsung is known to introduce experimental products at IFA like last year’s Galaxy Note phablet.

For interest’s sake, let’s say the rumor is true. Would you buy an Android-based camera? And would you ever consider using it as your main device if it did support voice and text?

Oculus is using its Kickstarter windfall to bring the VR hardware to South Korea, suggesting a connected future for the technology.

Oculus, the startup company behind the Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles, has just hired Dillon Seo to open an Oculus Korea office, which will work with South Korean game developers to integrate the Oculus Rift into South Korean games.

Oculus has been going from high to higher lately: First it became the futuristic tech project of choice for high-profile code monkey John Carmack and indie darling Markus “Notch” Persson.  Then it won the Game Critics Award for Best of E3 2012.  Now its Kickstarter campaign raised a million dollars over its stated goal. Throw in public displays of affection by gaming superstars like Gabe Newell and Cliff Bleszinski, and you have a company whose futuristic product is starting to look less like a fantasy and more like an inevitability.

Suddenly swimming in a lot more cash than it had planned for, it was natural for Oculus to open some new offices. But making South Korea its first target is a surprise, and it implies some interesting directions for the Rift hardware.

The Rift promises to be the first great virtual reality headset. It’s basically a set of giant goggles that not only display a huge field of vision in stereoscopic 3-D, but also track the player’s head movements and translate them into in-game look commands. It’s basically “mouselook” translated into real motion, coupled with one of the most immersive displays imaginable. That makes it a perfect fit for first-person shooters, which explains the support of developers like Carmack and Newell, who’ve focused on the FPS genre for their entire careers.

But while the FPS is a popular genre in South Korea, running and gunning isn’t the distinguishing characteristic of the country’s game industry. South Korea has been called “the Mecca of e-sports,” because its games are defined by their focus on multi-player connectivity. Every major game in South Korea, whether it’s a shooter, a kart racer, a 2D side-scroller, or even a music game, is first and foremost an MMO, where players complete or collaborate with each other online. Starcraft tournaments are prime-time television events, four million people are playing online games at any given moment, and taking a date to a PC cafe for some death-match is as normal as sharing a milkshake at the sock hop.

So Oculus beginning collaboration with South Korean developers before it even has a product for sale suggests a few things about the company’s goal for the hardware. On a technical level, it means Oculus is confident that it can make the Rift display refresh quickly enough to meet the demands of competitive online play. One of the first development hurdles the Rift had to overcome was the lag between head movement and display refresh; a delay of even a few milliseconds in a VR display can cause serious nausea, which has crushed many previous company’s hopes for face-mounted technology.

And from a marketing perspective, it suggests that Oculus wants to make the Rift part of a social gaming experiences. There’s undeniably something creepy about watching a person strap blinders over their face and interact with a world where he (and it’s usually a he) is the sole inhabitant. If the Rift catches on, it could inspire a whole new wave of moral panic over video games and the isolation they engender. But if the Rift is part of a connected social-gaming ecosystem, it becomes a way of plugging in rather than dropping out.

Suit up as the memory huntress Nilin in Capcom’s upcoming Inception-like (but not inspired) Remember Me.

Remember Me left a lasting impression on Capcom. The game publisher has decided to turn the sci-fi action game from French developer Dontnod into a new franchise. The game, which puts players in control of a sexy elite memory hunter named Nilin, will debut in May 2013 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. Jean-Max Moris, creative director on the title at Dontnod, talks about what’s in store for gamers in this exclusive interview from Gamescom 2012.

Where did the idea for Remember Me come from?

When we started the company, we wanted to do a cyberpunk game and take some of the current trends we see in today’s society into the future. That was one of the driving forces behind the game. We looked at the revolution of instant content sharing on social networks. We extrapolated that into the future, with memories being able to be shared amongst everyone. That gave a lot of control to the people who handle the manufacturing of the devices that do this, as well as the people who handle the memory transfers. This should resonate with some themes that we can see in our society today.

How did you create Nilin?

Because it was a cyberpunk game about memories, it had to be more about human identity and emotion than physical augmentation and being a bad ass with weapons. The lead female character, Nilin, was pretty much a no-brainer. We thought because the game was different, and more about emotion, it had to feature a lead female character. Then we devised her as a glitch in that society. And the glitch is something you can see in all our visuals. She’s a memory hunter, which means she has the ability to steal and change your memories. That’s where other inspirations came from for the memory remix, which you might have seen the video. We added a little bit of a butterfly effect in there; how it changes a few details, and one of your memories could change the world.

In addition to The Butterfly Effect, there’s also another movie called Inception that has a similar theme to this game.

The Butterfly Effect is a movie where they explore from another angle that theme. We were in development two years before Inception came out, so technically they copied us. We definitely share some similarities, especially when pitching to publishers, Inception made our life so much easier. We could just step in and say, “It’s a bit like Inception, but with memories instead of dreams,” and then they were hooked. Then we would say, “But we have all these other things that they don’t have.” It’s been great, and it’s a great movie.

From a gameplay perspective, can you talk a little bit about how you guys approached creating a different take on the action adventure genre?

My ambition and vision was to really have a well-anchored action/adventure recipe at the core of the game. Really, it’s 50 percent action with combat and fights, and 50 percent adventure, with exploration, traversals, puzzles, and that kind of stuff. On top of that, we added some innovation. We have the memory remix, which is a super dynamic puzzle that is tightly interwoven with the narrative and the concept. We have also some innovations in the combat with a deep combat system for an action/adventure game, which is not something you see very often. It was really about having a multilayer experience that could appeal to all kinds of different people. I look forward to unveiling a lot more about that experience in the future, because we have a lot more to share.

Can you talk a little bit more in depth about the Nilin and what you feel separates her from past female protagonists we’ve seen in video games?

First of all, when you work in the games industry, there’s this urban legend that female characters cannot succeed…with just a few exceptions. It’s not a bad thing to have lead female characters, it’s just that there are good and bad characters. I don’t want to compare her to other female characters because I would like Nilin to stand on her own. 

What we tried to do with Nilin is make her a really appealing combination of attractive looks, and even more, a resonating character trace that we try to really have at every stage of the experience, through every animation, dialog, piece of gameplay, objective, and reaction. Nilin is the lead memory hunter. She has the power to break into people’s minds and steal their memories.

Can you talk about the twist that this particular memory hunter has?

She’s had her own memory erased in the Bastille Prison at the beginning of the game, and she embarks on a quest to get it back. While that may sound like a little cliché in the world of video games, it actually totally fits with the theme of our game. Remember Me is as much about Nilin remembering who she is, as it is about us remembering who we are when we’ve uploaded our identities onto the Internet. The game also has all these layers of meaning. It’s also about her being this kind of, “Now you will remember me,” because she is an action/adventure character. There is this gritty, visceral feeling to how she behaves.

We go over the many ways Apple's $1 billion victory over Samsung could hurt Android users, and a few ways it could help.

On Friday, a jury of nine unanimously decreed what we already knew: Samsung copied the iPhone. Samsung got greedy and made smartphones, for a while, that hit a little too close to Home for Apple. Samsung phones mimicked everything from the iPhone’s overall design to its Home button, and even its squared, colorful icons. Perhaps most ridiculous, Samsung, for a time, even copied the fun, uniquely Apple, rubberbanding effect that happens when you’re scrolling through data on an iPhone or iPad.

Because of how obvious this copying was, Apple has won $1 billion in damages from Samsung. This victory is huge and it may have negative impacts on phones already released and those coming out in the future. Android phones, which currently comprise 60-70 percent of all smartphones sold around the world, could lose key functionality. Many of them could be taken off the market or be drastically redesigned so that they don’t remotely resemble the iPhone. Let’s examine the ways Samsung’s loss might have screwed things up for Android users.

What’s at stake

Before we fly in head first, let’s detail exactly what’s at stake and why all this is happening.

Despite the fact that Xerox first invented things like icons, folders, and many other standards of computing devices today, both Apple and Microsoft have been working separately (together) to take down an emerging common enemy: Google. With Android, Google is becoming a big player in smartphones, tablets, and is already entering the PC space. Google built Android on top of Linux and has given it away to manufacturers for free. Microsoft hates Android because it makes its living selling operating systems, not giving them away. Apple hates Android because it is riding on the success of the iPhone, which single-handedly ignited the smartphone business, and is now becoming the Windows of the phone and tablet world.

For decades, Microsoft and Apple battled one another, but they resolved their differences long ago and signed large cross-licensing patent agreements. Apple even showed a Nokia Windows Phone at the Samsung trial as an example of a phone that isn’t copying the iPhone. 

To try and stop or slow Android, Microsoft has bullied nearly every Android manufacturer into paying it licensing fees of $5-$15 per Android device sold. Apple’s preferred method of attacking Android has been to sue the pants off of every company making Android devices. Samsung and HTC have been its top targets. Apple and Microsoft probably aren’t calling each other up on the phone each night to cackle at their progress against Android, but they do have a mutual interest in keeping the status quo. Google scares them. (Learn more about how this lawsuit affects Android.)

With that out of the way, let’s press on.

Zooming is going to get difficult

Two of the key patents that the jury just upheld were for “pinch to zoom” and “double tap to zoom.” Pinching and double tapping to zoom are natural touch gestures we all use constantly to zoom in on web pages, maps, and all kinds of things on phones. I don’t know if Apple came up with it first or not, but I don’t think what amounts to simple hand gestures should be patentable. Regardless of my thoughts, we can expect Samsung and many other major Android manufacturers (maybe even Google) to remove this functionality from future phones and possibly from phones already on the market via an over-the-air update. How will we zoom now? Well, we’ll probably have to tap an onscreen zoom bar or something stupid. Not cool.

No “rubber banding”

While few Android phones have this effect, likely for fear of angering Apple, don’t expect any of them to gain it anytime soon. Because of this lawsuit, iOS devices will likely be the only phones that allow you to pull (stretch) a page beyond its scrolling point and then release it to watch it snap back in place. It’s purely an ornamental design element, but it is one of those small things that makes the iPhone so fun to use. Google and other manufacturers have already used bands of color and other effects to hide their mimicry of Apple’s scrolling effect. Expect more experiments in the future, but nothing that too closely resembles Apple.

No “slide to unlock”

Whether you’ve realized it or not, most Android phones have already been affected by Apple’s litigation. Though this trial didn’t involve “slide to unlock” patent at the end, other Apple lawsuits have, and you can bet that Android manufacturers are going to try to avoid any gesture or software patents Apple has actively protected. Most Android phones have already been altered to avoid breaking this patent. Most newer Android phones do not unlock with a straight left-to-right sliding motion anymore (or at least a bar that you swipe across). Expect the onscreen ways you unlock your phone to get stranger as time goes on. 

>> Next page: Android could lose more than a few gestures