Month: July 2017

Enlarge / Oculus' Santa Cruz prototype, shown off at Oculus Connect last year, gives some idea of what a standalone wireless headset from the company could look like. (credit: Oculus)

Oculus is working on a $200 standalone headset that will serve as a bridge between the mobile-phone-based VR holsters like Samsung's Gear VR and PC-tethered high-end VR headsets like the Oculus Rift, according to a new report from Bloomberg. According to the report, the headset, codenamed Pacific, is set to launch in 2018 and will be shown to developers in October, which is when Oculus holds its annual Connect conference.

Bloomberg cites "people familiar with its development" in reporting that the Pacific headset will be powered by a mobile Snapdragon processor and be "more powerful" than the mobile-phone-based Gear VR. The standalone device "resembles a more compact version of the Rift and will be lighter than Samsung’s Gear VR headset," according to the report. The latest Gear VR weighs just 11.4 ounces, though the Samsung phones used to power the display and tracking add a few more ounces to the weight.

Much like the Gear VR, the Pacific headset will only track the directions users are looking, and it won't track the user's motion through space. A "future version" will include that full tracking capability, according to the report. Hand-tracking won't be built-in on the unit either, according to the report, with a Gear VR-style tilt-sensitive Remote used for interactions.

Audi provided flights to Barcelona and two nights' accommodation for this trip.

Jonathan Gitlin

BARCELONA, SPAIN—In one of the most elaborate new-car reveals the industry has seen, Audi has revealed its new technology flagship to the world. The big three German luxury brands (Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz) are locked in a constant battle of oneupmanship when it comes to these four-wheeled standard bearers. As each brings out a new super-sedan, it leapfrogs its rivals in terms of features and technology, and the fourth-generation A8 is no exception.

Enlarge / An Uber car (back) and a Yandex.Taxi car drive on a street in Moscow. (credit: VASILY MAXIMOV/AFP/Getty Images)

Uber is merging its business in Russia with Yandex, a dominant player in the Internet business in that nation and Eastern Europe.

The move is an unusual one for Uber, a company that doesn't have a reputation for backing down against competitors. Still, Uber has become embroiled in internal controversy and litigation back home, and that has perhaps sapped some of the company's desire to compete in Russia and several other Eastern European markets.

The assets of the two companies will merge into a still-unnamed new company, with Yandex owning 59.3%, Uber owning 36.6%, and employees owning 4.1%, according to a press release sent out by Uber Thursday. The CEO of Yandex.Taxi, Yandex's ride-sharing division, will become CEO of the combined business.

Enlarge (credit: Rajarshi MITRA - flickr)

On average, people in the US take around the same number of steps daily as people in Mexico—about 4,700. But the US has a much higher obesity rate than Mexico—27.7 percent compared to 18.1 percent. Why?

The immediate and obvious answer is food culture, and that probably does play an important role. But a paper in Nature this week suggests something else we should be looking at: activity inequality. In the US, a small section of the population gets in lots of daily activity, dragging the average higher, but the majority of people get very little. Other countries, like Japan, are more equal: more people there tend to fall around the average.

Activity inequality is already part of the conversation about obesity. When we talk about problems like exercise deserts, we’re talking about how some groups of people live in situations where there aren’t many options for physical activity, leaving a portion of the population with below-average activity. A new look at global data, however, confirms that this is a vital way to analyze the problem: high activity inequality in a country means high obesity, much more reliably than low average-activity levels mean high obesity. And addressing this inequality specifically, rather than looking at average activity, could yield much greater results.

Enlarge / If you want dark NIN lyrics in your Polybius, you'll have to beg game creator Jeff Minter for the customized build he sent to Trent Reznor. (credit: Llamasoft/Nine Inch Nails)

Industrial and synth-rock music fans got good news on Thursday when Nine Inch Nails announced its next EP, titled ADD VIOLENCE, coming in only eight days. What's more, fans got a hint of the EP with a catchy single—and to boot, its video includes an out-of-nowhere starring appearance from a video game. NIN went pretty indie here, choosing one of the weirdest video games of 2017.

The entire video for the song "LESS THAN" revolves around a woman playing a customized version of Polybius. No, it's not the urban-legend arcade game that stole souls in Oregon in the '80s; instead, it's the 2017 arcade-action game released by Jeff "Llamasoft" Minter (of Tempest 2000, TxK, and Space Giraffe fame). Minter confirmed to Ars Technica that the project began with a cold call from NIN's Trent Reznor via Twitter direct message.

"[Trent] mentioned that he'd enjoyed Llamasoft's stuff and he had an idea to discuss," Minter says. "Of course I was super chuffed to hear he'd liked our work, as I've enjoyed his a lot over the years too!"

Enlarge / An image of an offshore wind turbine, from Dong Energy. (credit: Dong Energy)

This week, Virginia utility Dominion announced that it would partner with Danish firm Dong Energy to build two offshore wind turbines as test cases for a commercial-sized installation.

Currently, the US only has one 30MW commercial offshore wind farm off Block Island in Rhode Island. Renewable energy proponents have sought to expand offshore wind’s reach for years in the hope it would re-create the low-cost energy boom that has occurred in the US with onshore wind. The offshore resource has a lot of promise—turbines can be built bigger out at sea, so they can generate more power, and wind is generally less variable.

But building offshore wind infrastructure is still expensive; it’s new territory for US contractors. Few utilities have experience managing offshore wind energy. Partnering with Dong Energy will bring some expertise across the pond—the company has constructed many large offshore wind installations in Europe, and it even submitted a subsidy-free bid to German energy regulators for a new installation to go up in 2020.

You won't be able to buy this in Japan anymore, now that Nintendo has stopped production.

Nintendo is discontinuing the last of its compact, flip-top, stereoscopic 3D portables in Japan. The New Nintendo 3DS—which packs additional RAM, more shoulder buttons, and a second analog nub over the original system—is no longer being produced for the Japanese market, according to a message on Nintendo's Japanese website. The original 3DS, which was replaced by the New 3DS, was discontinued in 2014, alongside the original 3DS XL (called "LL" in Japan).

The move leaves the Japanese market without any standard-sized 3DS hardware that supports the system's once-ballyhooed stereoscopic 3D feature. Japanese players that want a system with a smaller form factor and screens are now stuck with the Nintendo 2DS, which doesn't feature stereoscopic 3D. The larger, flip-top New Nintendo 3DS XL is still being sold with a glasses-free stereoscopic display, but it seems set to be replaced by the recently launched New Nintendo 2DS XL, which omits the 3D feature.

Nintendo has been reducing its focus on the 3DS line's stereoscopic 3D capabilities for years now. Recent games like Super Mario Maker for 3DS go so far as to ignore the feature entirely, saying right on the box that the game "plays only in 2D."