animation

LAS VEGAS--"Electric City" is the latest Tom Hanks animated adventure, but it leaves behind the madcap buddy antics of Toy Story's Woody and Buzz Lightyear for a futuristic utopia with dark underpinnings. Instead of coming to a theater near you, though, the 90-minute-long series will be streamed episodically on Yahoo.

Revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show 2012 here, with a more in-depth formal announcement coming tomorrow, "Electric City" was created by Hanks and will star him, while production is being handled by Playtone and Reliance Entertainment. "It was always our intent to have this project live and breathe online and we felt Yahoo would be the perfect home," Gary Goetzman, co-founder with Hanks of the production company Playtone, said in a prepared statement.

For its part, Yahoo has been exploring original online entertainment for a few years, with reality and news roundup shows like "omg! NOW," "Primetime in No Time," and "Daily Ticker" helping to drive around 26 million people per month. Thanks to Hank's involvement in "Electric City," though, Yahoo thinks the series has the potential to significantly expand the scope of digital-first series. … Read more

Google's Android operating system comes to life in a new manga comic that turns leading handset makers into--no joke--Japanese schoolgirls.

Resting firmly in the Japanese-dominated pop culture territory that lies somewhere in between totally awesome and totally creepy Sweet Android High-school chronicles the soap-operatic goings on among a group of students who just happen to be anthropomorphic representations of huge corporations.

The gang includes "international students" Moto-Laura-chan, Sam-Sung-chan, H-T-Syee-chan, Elle-G-chan and Soni-Eri-chan. See what they did there? That last one is a particularly clever play on Sony Ericcson. There are also characters representing some of the Japanese makers, including Sharp, Fujitsu, and Casio.

The latest scandal at Sweet Android High, of course, is that a teacher named Google has married Moto-Laura-chan. While it's tough to translate the panels, there doesn't seem to be any sign that a headmaster named Trade-Commission-chan opposes the marriage, but Ice Cream Sandwich and the Galaxy Nexus clearly make appearances. Funny--I never envisioned that the first Android 4.0 phone would be so buxom.

See if you can make any sense of the below panels for yourself:… Read more

First came OneNote, then SkyDrive. Now, Microsoft is jumping into the iOS games market with Kinectimals, a mobile version of the popular Kinect console title.

"Game" might not be the right word. Kinectimals simulates adopting and playing with a tiger cub (your choice of five breeds at the beginning, with five more you can unlock). Target audience: 3-year-olds.

OK, slightly older kids might enjoy this as well, but Kinectimals is so simplistic that I think anyone over the age of 7 is likely to lose interest pretty quickly.

That's not to say this Tamogotchi-style experience is bad, because it's not. Rather, it's cute as the dickens, with frisky tiger cubs who jump and coo and catch (or at least paw at) tennis balls. Soothing new-agey music plays in the background.… Read more

If you thought animating human motion for a video game or feature movie was hard, try rainbows.

In the search for better animation techniques for video games and movies, computer graphics researchers at the University of San Diego have gained insight into the physics of rainbows. Their discovery could lead to more realistic depictions of rare types of rainbows, such as twinned rainbows, and other natural phenomena.

The conditions for the appearance of a rainbow are well understood: light passing through water droplets in the air causes the light to reflect and refract within the water. The reflecting light fans … Read more

Crafted lets you play a 2D version of the megapopular game Minecraft, using many of the same sounds and graphics--so much so that we're surprised it's still available in the iTunes App Store.

Mojang's Minecraft has achieved a huge following for its open, sandbox style of gameplay, letting you manipulate every block in the world. Once you've gathered the right materials, you can make picks for mining, axes for chopping down trees, torches so you can see at night, and a whole laundry list of other items.

Crafted offers a similar experience, but all in 2D. … Read more

Love is a wonderful thing--so wonderful, in fact, that you may feel the desire to memorialize it in the form of your mouse cursor. Love AnimatIon Cursor lets you do exactly that. To be quite honest, the program isn't really our cup of tea stylistically; on top of that, it's not particularly easy to use. But if you're in love with love, we suppose it could be a cute addition to your desktop.

We installed Love AnimatIon Cursor and weren't sure what to do next; there was no interface, no system-tray icon, and no change in … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--In a quiet alleyway here, Ubisoft gave members of the media an early preview of Assassin's Creed: Revelations and the final travels of Ezio Auditore.

For the uninitiated, the Assassin's Creed series chronicles heroic members of a secret society of skilled professional killers that fight corruption and oppression. The games are deliberately steeped in historical research as each game educates players on the era it's set in and real power players of the period--if players choose to take a moment to read the game notes.

In the new game, Ezio, hero of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, leaves Rome behind for Constantinople in search of a weapon that could forever end a war between Ezio's assassins and the Knights Templar. Journalists had the opportunity to play the game for about three hours, uninterrupted--including the entire map of the great Middle Eastern city. … Read more

There should be no doubt that Apple's decision to block Flash from iOS in favor of HTML5 has spurred Adobe to make sure that its media-rich content-building tool and player Flash remains competitive. Flash Player 11 brings hardware-accelerated graphics support to the platform.

According to Adobe, the new Stage3D technology in the new Flash Player brings combined 2D and 3D acceleration that is up to 1,000 times faster than the previous Flash iterations. While currently Stage3D is supported only for personal computers, it should make its way to mobile devices in future Flash releases. The advancements offered by … Read more

Sprint has signed a $20 billion dollar deal for 30.5 million new iPhones, and Adobe releases Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 with accelerated 3D graphics support, and check out CNET.com's live coverage of Apple's announcement of the next iPhone(s).

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded: