Month: October 2016

Enlarge / The top surface has two buttons and an analog stick on each controller.

SAN JOSE—Over half a year after Oculus launched the consumer version of the Oculus Rift, the company is set to make the platform more complete this December 6. That's when the Oculus Touch controllers will launch for $199.

The Oculus Touch package comes with an additional tracking camera, which is needed to avoid occlusion as you move the controllers around your body. Pre-orders will come bundled with VR Sports Challenge and The Unspoken.

The lack of hand-tracking controllers was one of our main complaints when we first reviewed the Rift headset back in March. But we've been very impressed with the Oculus Touch controllers in demos since then. Unlike most other hand-tracking cylinders, the Touch controller balances in the crook of your palm, allowing you to move all of your fingersand make more natural pointing gestures

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg talks about your brain. (credit: Oculus)

SAN JOSE—On stage at the annual Oculus Connect conference today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new piece of VR hardware that he hoped would provide a "sweet spot" between untracked mobile phone-powered VR like Samsung's Gear VR and high-end tethered headsets like the Oculus Rift.

While stressing that "it's still early," Zuckerberg shared a short video showing a wireless headset that uses "inside-out tracking" from an internal camera to track the user's position, without the need for an external camera or a connection to outside hardware. Zuckerberg called the computer vision necessary to get this kind of inside-out tracking "one of the toughest problems in computer science," but said that Facebook was "making progress" on solving it, to the point where you could track the user within a millimeter.

"We have a demo, but we don't have a product yet," Zuckerberg said. "This is the kind of thing we believe will exist... a completely new category of virtual reality product."

Facebook in VR: It's certainly coming, and company founder Mark Zuckerberg took the wraps off it for the first time at this year's Oculus Connect conference. Zuckerberg took the stage at the VR conference's keynote presentation on Thursday to talk about the future of Facebook, then donned an Oculus Rift headset, grabbed the system's upcoming Touch hand controllers, and began demonstrating a surprisingly robust system full of voice chat, facial expressions, and direct ties to the Facebook ecosystem.

The five-minute demonstration of the still-unnamed Facebook VR experience began with two other Facebook employees appearing as cartoony avatars on the same stage Zuckerberg was standing on. These characters were later confirmed as creations from the new "Facebook Avatar" system, which is clearly a Mii-like way for Facebook users to present themselves in systems like virtual reality. Those FB Avatars will launch alongside Oculus Touch "later this year." The demo appeared to track users' faces to show off smiles, open mouths, and detailed expressions, and the results looked loaded with emotion and human nuance.

The demo saw every chat room member interacting with a virtual smartwatch. That menu interface allowed chatters to bring up new virtual locales to stand in, share videos, take webcam calls from non-VR participants, and more. Zuckerberg and friends played a few simple games, including chess, cards, and sword fighting—and one of the chatters was able to draw his own sword, then immediately pick it up and fight with it. Zuckerberg later took a Facebook Messenger video call from his wife, who appeared as a giant screen that could be moved and scaled around the chat room. Zuckerberg eventually took a selfie inside the VR interface with his wife's video display (and he used a virtual selfie stick to take the shot). He immediately posted that selfie to his personal Facebook feed.

Enlarge (credit: Duncan Rawlinson)

Life in the American Southwest may not be as harsh as trying to survive in the Sahara Desert, but water is still scarce. Maintaining a supply for a growing population with some semblance of sustainability while balancing the various legal rights to the water that is there is hard enough without the unpredictability of year-to-year weather. A drying climate over the coming decades is the last thing anybody needs, but there have been some hints that's what is in store.

Projecting climate change for regions is necessarily less certain than global projections, and the Southwest is no exception. While expecting increasing temperatures is pretty straightforward, climate models simulate a range of possible precipitation changes in the area. This has complicated research into the likelihood of a future “megadrought”—droughts as severe as any we’ve seen in the 20^th Century, but lasting a few decades without respite.

A previous study of precipitation estimated a 20 to 50 percent increase in the risk of a megadrought this century if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, while another study that focused on soil moisture estimated a much higher risk. That's because precipitation alone can’t tell the whole story here—a warming atmosphere acts like an ever-thirstier sponge, increasing evaporation and transpiration from plants.