Month: January 2016

(credit: Double Robotics)

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, telepresence company Double Robotics announced that it would be making some long-awaited upgrades to its original hardware. After 18 months of development, the Double 2 will now have improved lateral stability control to get the robot over challenging office terrain (like stray cords), a function called Power Drive to speed the Double down long hallways faster, and an optional Camera Kit accessory, which increases the Double’s field of view by 70 percent.

Double Robotics is just one of a handful of companies that started making telepresence robots a few years back. Beam, Anybot, and VGo are all competitors of Double Robotics. All of the companies make apparatuses that allow people who can’t be physically present at a gathering to call in from a Web or mobile interface and move around the space where the gathering is being held and interact with the people around them. Double Robotics’ devices are arguably sleeker and have a more minimalist design than its competitors, but the Doubles tend to be expensive (the base price of the new Double 2 is $2,500 and it doesn’t come with the iPad you’re supposed to affix to the top to allow two-way communication).

Ars played with one of the original Doubles two years ago in the MongoHQ headquarters, and we really enjoyed it. The Web interface allows you to see and hear everything going on in an office, and you can adjust the height so you can easily talk to people who are sitting or standing. It also lets you toggle between a view of the room and a view of the floor so you can navigate cluttered offices and stray paraphernalia lying around.

Microsoft has reminded Internet Explorer users that it will imminently end support for older versions of its browser from next week.

The software giant plans to hit the kill switch on IE 8, 9, and 10 on January 12, and it has been advising users to upgrade to Internet Explorer 11, or its new Edge browser, to avoid being exposed to potential security risks after that date.

From next Tuesday, Microsoft will end updates for the aged browsers and the nudge brigade from the Redmond camp is in full, sharp elbow mode to encourage users to swiftly upgrade to IE 11 or Edge. There will be one last patch on January 12 that will include an "End of Life" notification, asking users to upgrade.

Despite how common mental health problems can be, understanding them, or even just discussing them without prejudice, is something of a modern invention. Unsurprisingly then, as a relatively young medium, video games haven't had the best track record when it comes to dealing with such complex issues. Games like Far Cry 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (to name but a few) have used insanity as a cheap tool and catch-all synonym to explain away the actions of a homicidal villain, which does a great injustice to those suffering from real, treatable conditions.

That's not to say some games haven't tried, though. 2013's Depression Quest successfully achieved empathy through perspective, while Square Enix's Life Is Strange treated its delicate mental health subject matter with the utmost of care. (To say more would be to enter spoiler territory.) UK studio Ninja Theory, makers of DMC: Devil May Cry and Enslaved, is even trying to tackle mental health in the action genre with the upcoming swordplay epic Hellblade. Few games, however, have dared to take the horror genre—the worst offender of all when it comes to the cheapening of mental health issues—into such brave new territory.

Screenwriter Luca Dalcò hopes to change that. His new game The Town of Light, due out on Steam in February, is undeniably a horror experience, and one that at first glance appears to walk the same clichéd path as others in the genre. It's set in an abandoned mental asylum, players take on the role of a former patient, and—thanks to said patient's psychological problems—lots of scary stuff happens.