Sam Ferris was sitting in for Drex last night. She and I talked last night about the booming digital effects industry in Vancouver, including the new Sony Pictures Imageworks studio, a limited edition Sonos speaker, and how much I’m liking the PlayStation Gold wireless headphones.

This week we talk about the number of visual effects studios and operation in Vancouver (and what that means), a cool bookshelf speaker and a set of headphones, and a couple of games for the summertime.

Vancouver’s digital effects industry is booming

Pixar may have closed its studio in Gastown after only a couple of years. But them moving out made space for Industrial Light & Magic, who needed more space for its Vancouver operation. The digital effects studio originally founded by George Lucas has been working on the new J.J. Abrams Star Wars film, The Force Awakens.

And Sony Pictures Imageworks recently staged an official grand opening of its new global headquarters, on the corner of Granville and Robson.

They aren’t alone. Other effects studios in town include:

• The Embassy (where director Neill Blomkamp worked as an effects artist)
• Method
• Image Engine (worked on Jurassic World and is working on the Point Break remake)
• MPC (working on Suicide Squad)
• Digital Domain

Limited edition Sonos PLAY:1 Tone speaker

I’m a fan of Sonos wireless speakers. They make it easy to get music from my computer’s library to any room in the house through my wireless network. And with a different speaker in different rooms, we can actually have different music playing in each place.

Sonos already integrates with a number of music services, including Rdio, Songza, Spotify, and Soundcloud. And you can listen to radio stations through SiriusXM and TuneIn. There is not yet support for Apple Music, but Sonos has said it’s coming soon.

For those who are looking for a small, simple solution, with a nice design, the company is coming out with a limited edition PLAY:1 speaker this summer.

The Tone comes in two colours – black or white – and there are only 5,000 available globally.

They were released for purchase yesterday, and if you want one they are CDN$280. Get ‘em while they’re hot.

Hands-on with PlayStation Gold wireless headphones

A couple of weeks ago I got my hands on a new headset for when I’m using my PlayStation 4.

I’d been using the PlayStation wireless headphones, which were great, and upgraded to the Gold wireless headphones, which are even better.

Developed by Sony, these headphones are comfortable to wear, they fold for storage, and they connect wirelessly to a small receiver you plug into your PS4 console (you can also use them with a USB cable). The controls for volume, sound mix, and a mute button are located right on the headset.

The headset provides a virtual 7.1 surround experience and supports custom EQ settings created by developers. I’ve been using one created for Destiny, for example, which Bungie made to optimize the audio for the game.

And you can use these headphones wirelessly with computers and other devices that have a USB port and configurable audio settings.

There are headphones that provide better sound quality, but for the price — these retail for $120, and I’ve seen them regularly for under $100 — the Golds are worth their weight.

If you’re the nostalgic type, Sony’s releasing a set of the headphones branded with the original PlayStation logo and colours. They’ll be available this fall.

Games for the summertime

A couple of indie games recently released are great to pass the summertime hours. Find a cool basement and settle in.

• The Hole Story: A clever game starring a young girl who aspires to be an archaeologist, and who solves problems by digging holes and discovering clues. It was made by a group of seven females aged 9 to 16, and is worth every penny of the $5 it will cost you.

• Her Story: This one is a bit different, because you play it by conducting database searches. Before you run screaming, you should know that what you’re looking for is video footage of interviews with a woman who’s husband disappeared. Just see if you can figure out what’s really going on.

I was a special guest on “CKNW”: last night, talking about recent numbers that show smartphone sales in decline. At the same time, Apple’s share of the market has increased. “Sam Ferris”: and I talk about why that may be.

Oh, the beauty of Amazon’s Prime Day. Such fodder for interesting discussions and head shaking revelations. Drex and I discuss the promotion by the online retailer, as well as what the death of Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata means to video gamers. We wrap it all up with some marveling at what the New Horizons spacecraft is telling us about Pluto.

This week we mourn the passing of Satoru Iwata, who had been head of Nintendo for 13 years and we celebrate the success of New Horizons. But we start with Prime Day.

Amazon’s Prime Day

Did you know that today is Prime Day? No, I’m not talking about math, I’m talking about the Amazon membership service.

I’ve been a Prime member for a couple of years, and for an annual fee of $79, I get free two-day shipping on lots of my purchases from Amazon. I could also get unlimited photo storage with Amazon’s Cloud Drive as a Prime member.

I purchase sufficient items from Amazon that I more than earn back my annual fee in shipping charges (or time and fuel, if I was going to source things from local retailers).

And to encourage non-members to join Prime, Amazon invented Prime Day, which they say has “more deals than Black Friday”.

Yes, it’s a consumer event to drive people to buy things. But there are some great deals to be had, and I won’t have to pay for anything to be sent directly to my door.

Everything from home appliances and tools to pet supplies. Movies and games, as well as headphones, mobile accessories, and home theatre systems.

Many of those were timed specials that were available throughout the day, but there are 12 deals of the day that are up until the sale ends

• There’s a decent 2 TB external hard drive from Seagate for $100, which is 44% off.
• There are product bundles from GoPro, PS4, and Xbox One.
• There’s a 55-inch HD TV for only $600 (the brand is Proscan, which I cannot speak to).
• The best of the bunch is the complete Breaking Bad series on Blu-ray, which comes in a limited edition meth barrel.

You have until midnight, Pacific time. Hie thee to Amazon.

Nintendo chief executive Satoru Iwata has died

Japanese video game company Nintendo announced on the weekend that its CEO, Satoru Iwata, had died of cancer at the age of 55.

For those of you who aren’t gamers, think of it like this. Iwata’s impact was much the same as Steve Jobs, and his loss is being felt as deeply by fans around the world.

In a presentation at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2005, he said, “On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. In my heart I am a gamer.”

Iwata was responsible for Nintendo’s Wii game system, which was released in 2006 to compete with the PS3 and Xbox 360. While the competing consoles were high-powered with amazing graphical fidelity, the Wii instead featured motion-sensing controllers with family-friendly game titles and became one of the best selling game consoles in history.

He also directed the development of the Nintendo DS, a disruptive gaming console that helped establish gaming as a portable entertainment.

Tributes are everywhere, but the best is this one from game developer Simogo, in the form of a simple game experience that honours Iwata’s game, Balloon Fight, which he made in 1985.

News from Pluto

We know more about Pluto — and its moon, Charon — than ever before, thanks to the
New Horizons spacecraft which Tuesday completed a flyby past the planet.

We’ve learned that Pluto has:

• an atmosphere
• a red tinge to its colouring
• geographical features including ice mountains that are as high as 3,400 metres (twice as tall as Mount Seymour, on a planetoid which is only as wide as the distance between Vancouver and San Diego), which means it’s geologically active
• no impact craters, which tells us it’s young (less than 100 million years)
• at least five moons.

We’re going to learn a lot more, too. But it will take 16 months for the rest of the data from New Horizons to reach Earth.

It took nine years for New Horizons to travel the nearly 5 billion km to Pluto. To put this in context, if we were to lay out the solar system on the ground of a big field, we could hop from Mercury to Earth. And we’d have to walk across the entire field to reach Pluto.

New Horizons passed extremely close to Pluto, too, only an Earth’s diameter away. Being able to get that close to an object so far away is an extraordinary feat, described by astronomers, including administrator Charles Bolden, as being equivalent to hitting a golf ball from New York and getting a hole in one in Los Angeles.

Just check out the images. These are high-resolution photos of a world we’ve never seen up close before.

Next, New Horizons heads further out, hopefully to get data on other objects in the Kuiper Belt, a region similar to an asteroid belt but which consist of bigger objects composed of ices, as opposed to the rocks and metals most asteroids consist of.

The video below, part of the Pluto in a Minute series from NASA, shows us some of the images of the worlds in our solar system, the first of which was of Mars, taken by Mariner 4 on July 14, 1965.