Month: October 2017

Mark Zuckerberg at Oculus Connect 4 in San Jose, California. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

SAN JOSE, Calif.—On stage at the Oculus Connect 4 conference, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took the wraps off of Oculus Go, the company's first "sweet spot" standalone headset. Zuckerberg announced it would launch "early next year" at a price of $199.

The announcement followed Zuckerberg's statement that Oculus wants to get one billion people using its virtual reality products. (Yes, that was a B, as in boy.) He admitted how lofty that goal is, saying, "If we're going to get a billion people in VR, we have to work on both affordability and quality. We have to find the sweet spot in the middle. The high quality experience that doesn't tether anybody to a PC."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Pasieka)

Cable Internet with download and upload speeds of 10Gbps may eventually come to American homes thanks to a new specification for higher-speed, symmetrical data transmissions.

The industry's R&D consortium, CableLabs, today announced that it has completed the Full Duplex Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, an update to DOCSIS 3.1. The completion of the 10Gbps full duplex spec comes 18 months after the project was unveiled.

The completion of the spec doesn't mean you'll suddenly be getting multi-gigabit uploads and downloads, as commercial deployments may be at least a couple of years away and may not initially provide the maximum speeds allowed by the spec. 

Nissan

A few years back, I wrote a feature titled "Why you’ll never drive your car with a joystick." Today, I learned I spoke too soon (and that Ars' Creative Director Aurich Lawson is prophetic).

Over in the UK, Nissan and a company called JLB Design have finally done it. Courtesy of Carbuyer, I learned of a tie-in with the soon-to-be-released Gran Turismo Sport, wherein JLB converted a Nissan GT-R to be controlled by a DualShock 4 controller rather than the normal steering wheel and pedals. What's more, it's a completely remote-controlled GT-R—renamed the GT-R/C—as demonstrated by Nissan racing driver Jann Mardenborough, who drove the car around the Silverstone racing circuit from the passenger seat of a helicopter circling above.

Enlarge

Jony Ive, Apple's chief design officer, might want to take a lesson in creativity from Apple's lawyers.

The iPhone is beautiful, and we all know that. But Apple's response to an App Store antitrust lawsuit brought by consumers may take your breath away. Cupertino argues that it should not have to face a class-action lawsuit that accuses the iPhone maker of overcharging consumers for iOS apps in the Apple App Store (a monopolistic environment, the suit claims). The core argument in Apple's defense is so creative that the Supreme Court on Tuesday asked President Donald Trump's administration for its views on whether Apple's position before the Supreme Court is correct.

The antitrust ABCs

But before we get to how Ive is being one-upped on the creativity scale by others on Apple's payroll, we first must start with a basic understanding of the nuanced legal framework of antitrust law.

Enlarge / Because not all water can come from the Britta or fridge filter, after all. (credit: Wodicka/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

Detecting the agents of disease is often really hard. Imagine that you live in a village in a developing country. You may not have electricity, and your water comes via a well of unknown quality. Is the lining in that well sufficient to keep shallow, polluted groundwater from seeping in?

No matter how good your well-building skills are, you still need to regularly test drinking water to ensure that it is safe. A new development in detecting bacterial nasties has scientists saying there's a solution, one that looks like high-tech litmus paper. But I'm not so sure it's all it's cracked up to be.

Testing your water

I have a brother who runs a non-governmental organization devoted to water safety and sanitation. On his last visit, he entertained my kids by testing the water from the local canal. Essentially, you put a sample of water in a test tube and put another on a plate with some bacteria food. The plate and test tube are left in a nice warm place for 24 hours. In the absence of electricity, this involves taping the samples in your armpit.

Enlarge / Looks relatively easy to build with common household items...

One of my favorite Onion articles ever is about a down-on-his-luck man who tried to build a PlayStation 2 in his home workshop as a Christmas present for his game-loving son. I bring that up because Oculus has released open-source plans and files for its second Rift Development Kit on Github under a Creative Commons Attribution license. The release comes more than three years after the DK2 started selling for $350 (or what ended up being much more on the second-hand market).

The CAD drawings, firmware files, and electrical schematics technically provide everything you need to know to build the early, 960x1080 Rift prototype from a recovered Galaxy Note 3 screen assembly. There are plans for the tracking sensor, multi-part USB cable, and even the original packaging. That said, Oculus engineer Nirav Patel warns in a blog post that "some of the components of DK2 are challenging or impossible to source today, so it may not be possible for an individual to build a full headset from the provided files." That said, "we hope that parts of this release are useful though as learnings if nothing else!"

In that same blog post, Patel also mentions cancelled plans for a "DKHD" dev kit that was "smaller and lighter than DK1 and had a fantastic pixel density." Those particular spec improvements were scuttled in the follow-up dev kit in favor of improved pixel persistence, refresh rates, latency, and tracking for what would become the DK2.