In a world where headcrabs aren't constantly trying to fellate your brain, Alyx Vance would have made a hell of a newscaster. A news producer would take one look at her and say: "You, girl, are gonna be the next Mary Hart's legs or Amanda Congdon's tits! You got quirk and charm up the wazoo! And talk about pleasin' the demographics: are you white? Are you black? Are you Asian? You could be anything! Bigots countrywide will claim you as their own! Your only race is HOT!"

Alas, Alyx Vance has never been allowed to pursue her calling. Enter News At Seven, which takes Alyx and automatically generates a news show within Half-Life 2:

News At Seven is a system that automatically generates a virtual news show. Totally autonomous, it collects, parses, edits and organizes news stories and then passes the formatted content to an artificial anchor for presentation. Using the resources present on the web, the system goes beyond the straight text of the news stories to also retrieve relevant images and blogs with commentary on the topics to be presented.

Once it has assembled and edited its material, News At Seven presents it to the audience using a graphical game engine and text-to-speech (TTS) technology in a manner similar to the nightly news watched regularly by millions of Americans. The result is a cohesive, compelling performance that successfully combines techniques of modern news programming with features made by possible only by the fact that the system is, at its core, completely virtual.

There's a three minute sample movie here, which is surprisingly excellent. Very impressive stuff, considering it is all automatically generated by polling random news websites. Florian Eckhardt

News At Seven [Official Site]

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