State of the Art: Sony’s RX1 Camera: Compact, Full-Framed and Expensive, Too

When you’re shopping for a camera, you have a million specs and features to consider. Size, weight, battery life, megapixels, zoom power. ... Can you guess which aspect consumers consider most important?

The color of the body. (“Ooh, I like the shiny red one!”)

The camera buyer for a national electronics chain told me that. We both slapped our foreheads.

Please. If you’re buying a camera, shouldn’t picture quality be the most important detail?

If so, what you should care most about is the flat, rectangular light sensor inside the “film.” In general, the bigger the sensor, the happier you’ll be with the results and the more you’ll pay.

At the low end, snapshot cameras with tiny sensors (0.4 inches diagonal) cost $150 but give you blurry, grainy low-light shots. At the high end, those professional, big, black S.L.R. cameras cost $2,000 to $6,000 but come with full-frame sensors. That is, these sensors are as big as an old piece of 35-millimeter film (1.7 inches). They deliver unparalleled low-light quality, richness of color, detail and soft-focused backgrounds.

(You can buy cameras with even bigger sensors — medium-format cameras that cost $20,000 and military cameras that cost millions — but let’s say you live in the real world.)

All of this explains why Sony’s 2013 camera/camcorder lineup is so startling. The company has put full-frame sensors into three new cameras, at prices and body sizes that nobody has ever attained.

For example, there’s the A99, which Sony says is the world’s smallest and lightest full-frame S.L.R. It’s meant to compete with professional cameras like the Canon 5D Mark III ($3,200) and Nikon D800 ($3,000) — for $2,800. (These prices are for the bodies only.)

The A99 is sort of homely, but it has a long list of distinguishing features: fast, continuous focusing, even while filming or shooting something running at you; two memory-card slots; built-in GPS function that stamps every photo with your location; 1080p, 60-frames-a-second high-definition video; microphone and headphone jacks; and an electronic viewfinder whose video shows you the results of your adjustments in real time.

Sony says the A99 is also the only full-frame camera with a screen that flips out and tilts.

Then there’s the VG900, Sony’s first full-frame camcorder. It costs $3,300 — about $10,000 less than any other full-frame camcorder, Sony says. And its sensor is about 45 times as big as a standard camcorder’s sensor.

Now, a huge sensor may not seem to make sense in a camcorder. One frame of hi-def video has only about two megapixels of resolution; what’s the point of stuffing a 24-megapixel sensor into the camcorder?

Answer: It’s about picture quality. A big sensor gives you amazing low-light video, gorgeous blurry backgrounds, greater dynamic range and better color.

Thousands of filmmakers use full-frame S.L.R. still cameras to shoot video, because of the superior quality and because they can use different lenses for different video effects. S.L.R-based camcorders like Sony’s VG900 offer the same features in a camcorder shape. They’re much more comfortable to hold, and their buttons are better placed for video operation.

The VG900 accepts Sony’s E-mount camera lenses, of which there are 13; they don’t quite exploit the full area of that jumbo sensor. But the camera comes with an adapter for the older, more plentiful A-mount lenses. Alas, those lenses don’t autofocus with that adapter.

The most astonishing new full-frame Sony, though, is the RX1. It’s the world’s first compact full-frame camera.

Now, you’re forgiven if you just spewed your coffee. “Compact” and “full-frame” have never gone together before. Everyone knows why: a big sensor requires a big lens, meaning a big camera. You can’t change the laws of physics, no matter how much photographers would love it.

E-mail: pogue @nytimes.com

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Four dead, including suspect, in series of Orange County shootings

Orange County sheriff's officials said they don't know what prompted a series of shootings across multiple cities early Tuesday morning that left at least four people dead and others wounded.

Authorities believe the violence began in Ladera Ranch, south of Mission Viejo.

The first call came at 4:45 a.m. reporting a shooting on Red Leaf Lane, where deputies discovered a woman shot dead at the scene.

The suspect, described as a man in his 20s, fled the area in an SUV.

Sheriff's Department spokesman Jim Amormino said “multiple incidents” then occurred in Tustin and another at the Santa Ana border before the suspect apparently shot and killed himself in Orange.

“There’s a lot to sort out,” he said.

Tustin Police Lt. Paul Garaven said the suspect attempted to carjack multiple vehicles in Tustin, with  each shooting occurring a few minutes apart.

Police received a report about 5:30 a.m. of a carjacking near Red Hill Avenue and Nisson Road near the 5 Freeway in Tustin, Garaven said.

The carjacking suspect opened fire and wounded a bystander, he said.

Soon after that, another carjacking was reported near the 55 Freeway, Garaven said. The victim of that carjacking was killed, Garaven said. A body lay covered by a yellow tarp on Village Way near the McFadden Avenue freeway entrance.

Another shooting was reported on Edinger Avenue near the Micro Center in Tustin, Garaven said. Officers confirmed that another carjacking had taken place, he said.

One person was killed and another was taken to a hospital. Officers spotted the suspect in a stolen vehicle, followed him into the city of Orange and initiated a traffic stop near the intersection of East Katella Avenue and North Wanda Road, Garaven said.

The suspect then shot and killed himself, Garaven said. Garaven said there is “no threat to the community” because the suspect is deceased.

Bill Myers, who works at Allied Refrigeration at Edinger Avenue in Tustin, said he passed numerous police vehicles on his way to work early Tuesday.

The Micro Center, across the street from Allied Refrigeration, was roped off, and police were at the scene, Myers said.

Myers arrived at work at about 6:20 a.m. and said there was "a bunch of activity going on. It was pretty crazy."

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The 'One' Is a Huge Step Forward for HTC

HTC’s new flagship smartphone, the One, is an impressive bit of hardware and a big step forward for the company in three significant ways.

The One is a top-notch, beautifully designed handset packed with the best specs and a ton of compelling features. It also runs a unique, fresh take on Google’s Android operating system. And it’s available in exactly the same configuration across the three major U.S. carriers. This is the phone that could close the gap between HTC’s flagship and those from Apple and Samsung.

We spent a couple of hours with the One before its big unveiling in New York today, and were thoroughly impressed by the luxurious materials used on the handset, the expert build quality holding it all together, and a slew of thoughtfully crafted software features. Although the phone carries the branding established last year with the One X, One S, and other HTC phones, the One amounts to a reboot of the company’s vision for Android. The One X, HTC’s previous flagship, won critical praise, but as an AT&T exclusive it failed to generate the sales the company had hoped for.

“We think about the One X and we think ‘Wow, it was big, and it was one of the best phones we’ve ever done,’” Scott Croyle, HTC’s vice president of design, said. “But if I were to compare it to, say, other stuff that was out there, I wouldn’t say it was a step change different.”

The company set out to build a phone that could surpass, not just meet, the performance and quality of the Apple iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy SIII. So it put a huge effort into nailing the Sense user interface, packing the phone with the best tech and broadening its reach across carriers. Sense 4, the previous generation of HTC’s Android customization, has been thrown out. Every aspect of Sense has been rethought and redesigned. The result is a slick, clean user interface, full of artful icons that match the flat, understated look Google has been trying to push with its own stock version of Android. And there’s a focus in the new Sense on making things that users commonly do easier and more intuitive — such as sifting through social media and news apps, or snapping photos and video.

“I think we came to this recognition that, ‘Wow, there are these two other companies that are going to spend a lot more money than HTC,’” Croyle said. “This is the reality of the business. They have much deeper pockets and they can carpet bomb the industry and they have a tremendous amount of inertia there, particularly with Apple in the U.S. So, for the One, we really had to get it right, we really had to just go for it.”

While it’s easy to see the chamfered edges found on the One and think of the iPhone 5, the One is far from a copycat product. It has a massive — and gorgeous — 4.7-inch 1080p display with a pixel density of 468 pixels per inch. As with nearly every flagship phone out there nowadays, pixels are indiscernible on the One’s generous display. Colors look vivid and crisp as well.

The touchscreen dominates the front of the One, with aluminum capping each end. Rows of pinholes are machined into each strip of aluminum, serving as pathways for sound coming from a set of dual front-facing speakers. Every phone speaker we’ve ever heard has sounded like hell. While the One won’t replace your Jambox anytime soon, its onboard speakers sound immensely better than anything we’ve heard from a phone. Inside, the One features a 1.7GHz, quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU, 2GB of RAM, and NFC chip, Bluetooth 4.0 and connectivity to both HSPA and LTE networks.

Everything is packed into a sleek, aluminum unibody — shipping in either silver or black — that features a subtly curved back with inlaid antennas. The One weighs 5.04 ounces, and is just 0.36 inches thick.

The One will also sports a beefed up camera, with a ton of photo and video features — which are so plentiful we’ve written a separate story focusing on the One’s camera.

Along with all new hardware, HTC is using the One to introduce an all new take on Android. Sense 4, HTC’s last skin, was among the best versions of Google’s mobile OS thanks to its simplicity and gimmick-free implementation. The latest version — now just called Sense — brings users from a lock screen to a new Flipboard-like app called BlinkFeed, which displays a feed of information, stories, photos and video from various sources of your choosing. HTC has worked in integration with a few news outlets, so news stories by topic or by outlet can show up in your BlinkFeed. And the app can be connected to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social networks as well.

See a news story you’re interested in reading? Just tap the tile in your feed and you’re taken to a view that shows the story and its accompanying artwork in a presentation that makes reading clean and easy — again, very much like Flipboard, Pocket, Pulse and other “read it later” services. Tap a tweet or post from Facebook you’ll be launched into that corresponding social network’s Android app. You can even set up BlinkFeed to pipe in your photos and videos. Everything is displayed in reverse chronological order, just like your Twitter timeline, Facebook feed and everything else that’s sorted online.

While BlinkFeed is a pre-installed app, it’s also the default view any One user will see once they unlock their phone. If you want to get to a traditional Android homescreen view — with apps, widgets and folders of apps — just swipe in from the right on BlinkFeed and Android as you know it will appear.

“If you want regular Android, it’s there,” Croyle said. “But, everybody’s snacking on information, whether it’s from their social networks or some news source that they’re just interested in. So [BlinkFeed] really is geared around that recognition of how people are actually using their phones.”

AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile will sell the One, along with many smaller regional telecom companies. The significance of this can’t be overstated. Currently, only Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy S III are offered as widely. The iPhone is sold through AT&T, Sprint and Verizion — and it’s on it’s way to T-Mobile. The S III is sold by all four of the nation’s top carriers. All too often, a great phone, like last year’s One X, was confined to a limited audience due to carriers wanting exclusive rights to phones.

The fact that the One is joining it’s biggest rivals in a new paradigm that bucks the idea of exclusive phones is a good thing for HTC — because they get to sell their best device in more places — and consumers — because you have more choice when you go to buy your next phone.

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Ask Well: Coaxing Parents to Take Better Care of Themselves

Dear Reader,

Your dilemma of wanting to get your parents to change their ways to eat better and exercise reminds me of an old joke:

How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change.

Sounds like your parents may be about as motivated as the light bulb right now. Still, there are things you can do to encourage them to move in a healthier direction. But the first step should not be to hand them a book. Unless you lay some prior groundwork, that gesture may seem almost as patronizing as an impatient tone of voice – and probably as likely to backfire.

Instead, start a conversation in a caring, nonjudgmental way. Ask, don’t tell. “Say, ‘You know, I might not know what I am talking about, but I am really concerned about you,” suggested Kevin Leman, a psychologist in Tucson, Ariz., and author of 42 books on changing behavior in families and relationships. Ask simply if there is anything you can do to help.

Leading by example is also more effective than lecturing. “The son can role-model health by inviting his parents to dinner and serving healthful items that he is fairly certain they will find acceptable, or ask them if they are interested in going out dancing with him and his wife,” suggested Ann Constance, director of the Upper Peninsula Diabetes Outreach Network in Michigan.

Pleasure is a better motivator for change than pain or threats. Use the grandchildren as bait. Ask if they want to take the grandchildren to the zoo or a park that would require a good bit of walking around for everyone. Or the grandchildren could ask them to come along on one of those 2K fund-raiser-walks that many schools hold. After all, a day with the grandchildren is always a pleasure in itself. (O.K., usually a pleasure.)

Tempted to give them the gift of a health club membership? “Save your money,” Dr. Leman said. Try a more indirect (and cheaper) approach. Create a mixed-tape of up-tempo music from their era. (“Songs they listened to from the ages of 12-to-17, which is what we all listen to for the rest of our lives,” said Dr. Leman) They will enjoy it any time — maybe even while walking.

If you really want someone you love to make a change, the key is to ask them to do something small and easy first because that increases the chances they will do something larger later. Psychologists call that “the foot in the door technique,” said Adam Davey, associate professor of public health at Temple University in Philadelphia, referring to a classic 1966 experiment called “Compliance Without Pressure.” In the study, which has been duplicated by others in many forms, researchers asked people to sign a petition or place a small card in a window in their home or car about keeping California beautiful or supporting safe driving. About two weeks later, the same people were asked to put a huge sign that practically covered their entire front lawn advocating the same cause.

“A surprisingly large number of those who agreed to the small sign agreed to the billboard,” because agreeing to the first small task built a bond between asker and askee “that increases the likelihood of complying with a subsequent larger request,” Dr. Davey explained.

Any plan for behavioral change is most likely to succeed if it is very specific, measurable and achievable, according to Ms.Constance.

And the new behavior should also be integrated into daily life — and repeated until it becomes a habit. For example, if you want to walk more, start with a 10-minute walk after dinner on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Ms. Constance suggested. The next week, bump it up to 12 minutes.

Don’t give up, even if you meet initial resistance — it is never too late for your parents or you or any of us to change. “Taking up an exercise program into one’s 80s and 90s to build strength and flexibility can result in very tangible and enduring benefits in a surprisingly short time,” insisted Dr Davey.

As for instructive reading, Dr. Leman is partial to one of his own books, “Have a New You by Friday,” and Dr. Davey recommends “Biomarkers: The 10 Keys to Prolonging Vitality,” by William Evans. Ms. Constance recommends the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web site on physical activity and exercise tips for the elderly, as well as the National Institute of Health’s site on the DASH diet.

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Obama to Turn Up Pressure for Deal on Budget Cuts

Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Obama spoke at a White House auditorium surrounded by emergency responders.

WASHINGTON — President Obama, back from his three-day golf getaway, on Monday made use of his bully pulpit, while Congress remains out all week, to turn up the pressure for a bipartisan agreement to avoid indiscriminate across-the-board budget cuts that will otherwise hit March 1.

Speaking in a White House auditorium surrounded by blue-uniformed emergency responders to illustrate some of the jobs threatened if the cuts were to take effect, Mr. Obama warned that military readiness and vital domestic services would be hurt “if Congress allows this meat-cleaver approach to take place.”

“Changes like this affect our responsibility to respond to threats in unstable parts of the world,” the president said. “These cuts are not smart, they are not fair, they will hurt our economy, they will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls. This is not an abstraction — people will lose their jobs.”

Some Republicans in Congress have proposed alternative savings that would spare any cuts in military spending but not in domestic accounts. Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats are calling for a mix of spending cuts and additional tax revenues by closing some tax breaks for wealthy investors and corporations.

Mr. Obama’s comments were among his harshest toward Republicans, and reflected the political frame that he has devised to try to force Republicans into compromising with him by supporting some higher revenues — something they so far refuse to do.

“The ideas that the Republicans have proposed ask nothing of the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations, so the burden is all on first responders or seniors or middle-class families,” Mr. Obama said, adding that those proposals would “slash Medicare and investments that create good middle-class jobs.”

“So now Republicans in Congress face a simple choice,” he added. “Are they willing to compromise to protect vital investments in education and health care and national security and all the jobs that depend on them, or would they rather put hundreds of thousands of jobs and our entire economy at risk just to protect a few special-interest tax loopholes that benefit only the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations?”

Republicans, seeking to put blame on Mr. Obama if the cuts occur, have repeatedly noted that the White House proposed the sequester idea during debt talks in mid-2011. But both parties overwhelmingly supported the proposal as part of their deal. And as Mr. Obama said on Tuesday, the purpose of the sequester was to threaten something so unthinkable that the two parties would come together to agree on an alternative.

The president’s latest deficit reduction push comes as the heads of his 2010 deficit reduction commission — former Senator Alan K. Simpson and Erskine B. Bowles, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton — unveil a new plan that would reduce the deficit by $2.4 trillion through a series of spending cuts and an overhaul of the tax system.

When Congress returns from a winter recess next week, just days remain before the deadline for the so-called sequester of spending cuts, a deadline that already was moved once — at the start of the year — to allow more time for the two parties to negotiate.

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Jerry Buss dies at 80; Lakers owner brought 'Showtime' success to L.A.

Longtime Lakers owner Jerry Buss has died at the age of 80. Last week, it was revealed that he was hospitalized with an undisclosed form of cancer.

When Jerry Buss bought the Lakers in 1979, he wanted to build a championship team. But that wasn't all.

The new owner gave courtside seats to movie stars. He hired pretty women to dance during timeouts. He spent freely on big stars and encouraged a fast-paced, exuberant style of play.

As the Lakers sprinted to one NBA title after another, Buss cut an audacious figure in the stands, an aging playboy in blue jeans, often with a younger woman by his side.

PHOTOS: Jerry Buss through the years

"I really tried to create a Laker image, a distinct identity," he once said. "I think we've been successful. I mean, the Lakers are pretty damn Hollywood."

Buss died Monday of an undisclosed form of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, according to his longtime spokesman, Bob Steiner. Buss was 80.

Lakers fans will remember Buss for bringing extraordinary success — 10 championships in three-plus decades — but equally important to his legacy was a sense of showmanship that transformed pro basketball from sport to spectacle.

Live discussion at 10:30: The legacy of Jerry Buss

"Jerry Buss helped set the league on the course it is on today," NBA Commissioner David Stern said. "Remember, he showed us it was about 'Showtime,' the notion that an arena can become the focal point for not just basketball, but entertainment. He made it the place to see and be seen."

His teams featured the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal and Dwight Howard. He was also smart enough to hire Hall of Fame-caliber coaches in Pat Riley and Phil Jackson.

"I've worked hard and been lucky," Buss said. "With the combination of the two, I've accomplished everything I ever set out to do."

A Depression-era baby, Jerry Hatten Buss was born in Salt Lake City on Jan. 27, 1933, although some sources cite 1934 as his birth year. His parents, Lydus and Jessie Buss, divorced when he was an infant.

His mother struggled to make ends meet as a waitress in tiny Evanston, Wyo., and Buss remembered standing in food lines in the bitter cold. They moved to Southern California when he was 9, but within a few years she remarried and her second husband took the family back to Wyoming.

His stepfather, Cecil Brown, was, as Buss put it, "very tight-fisted." Brown made his living as a plumber and expected his children (one from a previous marriage, another son and a daughter with Jessie) to help.

TIMELINE: Jerry Buss' path

This work included digging ditches in the cold. Buss preferred bell hopping at a local hotel and running a mail-order stamp-collecting business that he started at age 13.

Leaving high school a year early, he worked on the railroad, pumping a hand-driven car up and down the line to make repairs. The job lasted just three months.

Until then, Buss had never much liked academics. But he returned to school and, with a science teacher's encouragement, did well enough to earn a science scholarship to the University of Wyoming.

Before graduating with a bachelor's degree in chemistry, when he was 19 he married a coed named JoAnn Mueller and they would eventually have four children: John, Jim, Jeanie and Janie.

The couple moved to Southern California in 1953 when USC gave Buss a scholarship for graduate school. He earned a doctorate in physical chemistry in 1957. The degree brought him great pride — Lakers employees always called him "Dr. Buss."

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Pondering the Point of Snow Bikes While Riding With Wolves

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At 80, Yoko Ono sees a world full of new activism

BERLIN (Reuters) – Half a life-time ago, artist Yoko Ono lay in an Amsterdam hotel bed with husband John Lennon, staging a week-long “bed-in” for peace and feeling they were very alone in their activism.

Today, Ono, whose own energy for campaigning has never tired, sees a world full of activists, maintaining her energy and faith in humanity.

“When John and I did the bed-in, not many people were with us. But now there are so many activists, I don’t know anyone who is not an activist,” she told Reuters in an interview in Berlin on Monday, her 80th birthday.

“Even the corporations – John always used to say the corporations need to be with us… Corporations now say 10-20 percent of their profits will go to such and such charity. They have to do that almost for people to feel good about it.”

The late Beatle and Ono’s 1969 bed-in to protest against the Vietnam war was repeated in Montreal, Canada. Press attention was huge, but much of it was mocking.

Ono, who gave a sell-out concert in Berlin on Sunday alongside their son Sean Lennon which closed with the anthem “Give peace a chance”, said it was still critical to stand up for peace despite new conflicts in the intervening decades.

“I don’t want to be drowning in sadness. I think we have to stand and up and change the world,” she said.

The artist, born to a wealthy Japanese family in Tokyo in 1933, has recently become a passionate opponent of fracking, a controversial procedure which has sharply lifted energy output in the United States but which critics fear pollutes drinking water deep underground and could increase earthquake risks.

“Fracking is an incredible risk to the human race, I don’t know why they even thought of doing it,” she said.

Ono, whose birthday is being marked by a major retrospective of her work in Frankfurt, said she feels she is becoming freer in her art.

“My attitude has changed… I’m allowing things to happen in a way I hadn’t planned before,” she said.

Asked about her feelings on becoming an octogenarian, she said: “I’m surprised. It is a miracle in a sense that I am 80, I am proud about it. Not everybody gets there.”

(Reporting by Alexandra Hudson, editing by Gareth Jones and Paul Casciato)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Twins Don't Need C-Sections

Obstetricians increasingly recommend planned Caesarean sections for women having twins, but a new study has found that a C-section for healthy twins usually provides no advantage over vaginal delivery.

Researchers randomly assigned 2,800 mothers carrying healthy twins to either a planned C-section or a planned vaginal delivery. There was no difference in outcome between the two groups. There were serious medical problems, like bone fracture or abnormal levels of consciousness, in 36 babies delivered by C-section and 35 delivered vaginally. Twenty-one babies delivered by C-section died, as did 17 delivered vaginally.

Mothers fared equally well in each group, with serious health problems in 7.3 percent of the C-section mothers and in 8.5 percent of the vaginal delivery group.

The trial was carried out in well-equipped health care settings and by practitioners experienced in multiple births. “These skills should be available to anyone trained in obstetrics,” said the lead author, Dr. Jon Barrett, chief of maternal-fetal medicine at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto. “This indicates the need for the current generation of obstetricians who have these skills to impart them to their students and give women the opportunity for the best choice.”

Results of the study were presented at a medical conference in San Francisco last week.

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<cite>Halo</cite> Creator Unveils Its Next Masterpiece, a Persistent Online World

"Citadel": Concept art from Bungie's Destiny.

BELLEVUE, Washington — Destiny, the new game from the creator of Halo, isn’t just another shooter. It’s a persistent online multiplayer adventure, designed on a galactic scale, that wants to become your new life.

“It isn’t a game,” went the oft-heard tagline at a preview event on Wednesday. “It’s a world where the most important stories are told by the players, not written by the developers.”

This week, Bungie Studios invited the press into its Seattle-area studio to get the first look at Destiny. Although the event was a little short on details — Bungie and Activision didn’t reveal the launch date, handed out concept art instead of screenshots, and dodged most of my questions — it gave an intriguing glimpse at what the creator of Halo believes is the future of shooters.

Bungie was acquired by Microsoft in 2000, and its insanely popular shooter was the killer app that put the original Xbox on the map. Bungie split off from its corporate parent in 2007, and Microsoft produced Halo 4 on its own last year. The development studio partnered up with mega-publisher Activision for its latest project, which was kept mostly secret until now.

Destiny, slated for release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, isn’t exactly an MMO. Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg called it a “shared-world shooter” — multiplayer and online, but something less than massive.

“We’re not doing this just because we have the tech,” Hirshberg said. “We have a great idea, and we’re letting the concept lead the tech.”

Built with new development software created specifically for Destiny, this new game is set in Earth’s solar system and takes place after a mysterious cataclysm wipes out most of humanity. The remaining survivors create a “safe zone” underneath a mysterious alien sphere called “The Traveler.”

The enigmatic sphere imparts players with potent weapons, magic-like powers and defensive technology. Thanks to these gifts, people have begun reclaiming the solar system from alien invaders that moved in while humanity was down.

Bungie fired off a list of design principles that guide Destiny’s creation: Create a world players want to be in. Make it enjoyable by players of all skill levels. Make it enjoyable by people who are “tired, impatient and distracted.” In other words, you don’t have to be loaded for bear and pumped for the firefight of your life every time you log on to Destiny.

After this brief overview, writer/director Joseph Staten used concept art and narration to outline an example of what a typical Destiny player’s experience might be.

Beginning in the “safe zone,” a player would start out from their in-game home and walk into a large common area. From here, the player would be able to explore their surroundings and meet up with friends. Then, they might board their starships and fly to another planet, let’s say Mars, in order to raid territory held by aliens.

During this raid, other real players who traveled to the same zone (like visiting a particular server on an MMO) would be free to come and go as they please. For example, a random participant could simply walk on by. They could stop and observe. Or they could get involved in the fight. In this instance, Staten suggested that a passerby would join the raid and then break off from the group after the spoils were divvied up without any user interface elements to fuss with. Walk away, and it’s done.

Bungie made a point of saying several times over that Destiny will not have any “lobby”-type interfaces, or menus from which to choose from a list of quests. Instead, players will simply immerse themselves in the world and organically choose to participate in whatever activities they stumble upon. Bungie promised solo content, cooperative content, and competitive content, though it provided no further examples of these.

The developer said that by employing very specialized artificial intelligence working entirely behind the scenes, players will encounter other real players who are best suited for them to interact with, based on their experience levels and other factors.

Staten didn’t say how many players would be able to exist in the world at the same time, but said that characters will be placed in proximity to each other based on very specific criteria, not simply to “fill the world up.”

Bungie showed off three distinct character classes throughout the day’s presentations: Hunter, Titan and Warlock. Although no differences were outlined between them apart from the Warlock being able to use a kind of techno-magic, the developer was keen to emphasize the idea that each character in Destiny would be highly customized and unique, and will grow with the player over an extended period of time.

While many games make the same promise, Destiny’s vision of “an extended period of time” isn’t 100 hours. It’s more like 10 years.

Bungie’s plan is for the Destiny story to unfold gradually over the course of 10 “books,” each with a beginning, middle and end. Through this will run an overarching story intended to span the entire decade’s worth of games, although like many other topics covered during the day, Bungie gave little detail about how this will work.

The developer spent a lot of time emphasizing its claim that no game has been made at this scale before. Bungie says it has a whopping 350 in-house developers working on Destiny.

Senior graphics architect Hao Chen gave examples of the sort of impenetrable mathematics formulas that allow Bungie to craft environments and worlds at a speed that it claims was previously impossible.

Bungie’s malleable team system was also said to increase its output. With the ability to co-locate designers, artists, and engineers at any time, Bungie says it can go through exceptionally rapid on-the-spot iteration and improvement for each facet of the game.

Apart from highly improved technology and the basic concept of humanity taking back the solar system, there’s just not a lot of hard information on Destiny at the moment. One thing that was made quite clear is that the game will not be subscription-based. Every presenter was clear in stating that players will not pay a monthly fee to participate in this persistent world.

While fees may not be required, a constant connection to the Internet will be. Since the core concept of Destiny is exploring a world that exists outside of the player’s console and is populated by real people at all times, it “will need to be connected in order for someone to play,” said Bungie chief operating officer Pete Parsons.

Representatives from both Bungie and Activision gave vague answers when Wired pressed for further details, often stating that they “were not ready” to discuss specifics. Whether that means those things are still being kept from the press, or whether they have not yet been determined by the development team, was unclear.

Questions currently unanswered: How will players communicate? How will players interact with each other outside of combat? What content exists in the non-combat “safe zones”? Subscriptions may be out, but what about in-app purchases? Will player versus player combat be available? Will the game ship on a disc or be download only? Will its persistent world allow Xbox and PlayStation gamers to play together? What content and interactions will be possible via smartphones and tablets (which Bungie alluded to)? Will the fancy new tools be licensed to other developers?

And so on.

For now, Bungie is asking us to take it for granted that it will execute on a bold 10-year plan for a very different sort of shooter. In the history of the always-changing gaming industry, no one’s ever been able to pull off a 10-year plan for anything. Can Bungie do it?

Hey… they made Halo, right?

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