Month: March 2018

AUSTIN, Texas—HTC's VR team was out in full force at this year's South By Southwest festival, mostly due to the upcoming film adaptation of Ready Player One. The top floor of a jam-packed, book-to-film "experience" event included an hour-plus wait to play a few Ready Player One-themed VR games, all slated to launch alongside the film later this month.

Curiously, though, the best part of the whole thing wasn't really advertised anywhere at the event. Tucked behind some giant photo-op insanity like an Iron Giant replica and a tricked-out Delorean was a piece of futuristic tech I was way more interested in: the HTC Vive Pro.

Though we took a quick glance at the upcoming Vive Pro during January's CES, this SXSW event was the first time I got to scrutinize the hardware, which will launch later this year as the first "2.0" headset in the PC-VR era. We've yet to answer a giant question mark—how much will this upgraded VR headset cost—but after an impressive SXSW test, my acceptable price point definitely shot up a hundred bucks or so.

Enlarge / Garmin Dash Cam Mini. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Update: Our original Dash Cam Guidemaster was published in March 2018, but we recently tested out some of the newest options and updated our picks—just in time for 2019 summer road trips.

If you've ever been in a fender-bender or a serious car accident, you can appreciate the importance of a dash cam. These tiny car cameras stick to your windshield and silently record driving footage, capturing all the strange, mundane, and perilous things going on in front of your car. In addition to peace of mind during daily commutes, they can provide information footage to law enforcement, insurance companies, and other parties in accident situations, monitor your car when you're not around, and sometimes capture fun videos of you and your friends on a road trip.

But with the numerous big and small companies making dash cameras now, wading through the sea of devices before you choose one to buy is a formidable task. Ars reviewed the newest dash cams and revisited our testing of existing devices to pick the best dash cams available now.