Month: December 2015

Enlarge / This is the real deal. (credit: Oculus)

In a press release last night, Facebook-owned Oculus announced that it will begin shipping final, complete versions of its Oculus Rift VR headset to developers starting this week. VR developers interested in taking advantage of this offer should submit their VR apps through the standard Oculus dev portal, and Oculus will "be in touch with next steps."

The announcement comes alongside another big deal: the 1.0 version of the SDK has been finalized as well and will also be available this week. VR developers interested in using the Rift in their games have previously had to work with steadily changing prerelease versions of the Rift SDK; some version shifts, like the jump from 0.6 to 0.7 and 0.8, have introduced substantial changes in the way developers have to have their apps interact with the Rift hardware. Multiple developers have told Ars they've chosen to hold off on integrating Rift support into games due to the possibility of sinking development efforts into an unstable prerelease SDK. The 1.0 release should signal to anyone who wants to develop for the Rift that now’s the time to get started.

The Oculus Rift is still expected to be released in the first quarter of 2016, though we do not have as yet an exact date. Nor has the price been announced, other than Oculus informing us that it will be "over $350." The release version is expected to include a 2160x1200 display panel (25 percent more pixels than a 1080p display running at 1920x1080) running at a 90Hz refresh rate and will require a pretty hefty GPU to drive modern games at a consistent 90fps. We also learned earlier this month that space combat sim Eve: Valkyre will be included in all Rift preorders to give new Rift owners something exciting to play right out of the gate.

(credit: Kārlis Dambrāns)

Google, the owner of the traffic app Waze, has managed to beat back a copyright lawsuit filed by lesser-known rival PhantomAlert.

Back in September 2015 PhantomAlert sued Google over allegations of copyright infringement. Google purchased Waze in June 2013 for over $1 billion. PhantomAlert alleged that after a failed data-sharing deal between itself and Waze collapsed in 2010, Waze apparently stole PhantomAlert’s "points of interest" database.

In a judicial order filed earlier this month, the San Francisco-based federal judge found that PhantomAlert could not allege a copyright claim on simple facts of where different places actually are.

The lads from the film World's End know when to start drinking. (credit: Universal Pictures)

A study conducted in the city of Newcastle, UK, has revealed what you always suspected. Over two-thirds of emergency room visits on weekends, especially in the wee hours of the morning, are directly related to alcohol consumption.

Newcastle University health researcher Kathryn Parkinson and her colleagues examined health records from a local inner-city hospital over the 2010-11 year, looking for statistics on how many people were admitted for alcohol-related issues. Then they conducted breathalizer tests of people admitted to the same ER during 2012-13.

In an analysis of the data, the researchers uncovered several telling patterns. Though overall alcohol-related visits to the ER hovered around 15.2 percent in 2012-13, the numbers jumped dramatically on weekends, rising to 70 percent. The majority of those were young men, arriving in the late night or early morning—and most of them came from outside the city. "Traumatic injury was the most common reason for attendance [at the hospital]," Parkinson and her colleagues write in a paper published yesterday in Emergency Medicine Journal. But "psychiatric problems" were a close second.