Month: January 2020

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  Whoa! I have hands!

Sales for Valve's Index virtual reality headset more than doubled between the third and fourth quarter of last year, according to a new report from tracking firm SuperData. That increase—from 46,000 units to 103,000 units sold—would likely have been even greater if the $999 system hadn't sold out due to inventory issues, the firm wrote.

As we've seen in years past, virtual reality hardware sales tend to spike in the holiday quarter, thanks to gift-buying and general holiday splurging. But SuperData cites "anticipation for Half-Life: Alyx" as a main driver for the Index's holiday sales increase (even though the game will run on any PC-based VR headset). And the Index's particularly large holiday sales spike seems to have put it ahead of lower-priced (and older) PC-based VR competition from the likes of the Oculus Rift S, HTC Vive, and numerous Windows Mixed Reality headsets.

Wireless, console VR rules over the niche

Despite the holiday spike, sales for all the PC-based headsets continue to pale in comparison to the self-contained, wireless Oculus Quest, which moved 317,000 units during the holiday quarter, according to SuperData. That number might have been even higher, SuperData writes, if Oculus was able to avoid inventory-limited sellouts for parts of the quarter.

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The Interior Department is preparing a new agency policy that would drastically limit the use of unmanned aerial vehicles made overseas, The Wall Street Journal reports. The new policy is due to be formally announced today. The agency worries that information collected by drones could be "valuable to foreign entities, organizations, and governments."

The agency has around 800 drones. According to the Journal, agency officials have admitted that all of them are Chinese-made or contain Chinese parts.

The Interior Department temporarily suspended the use of drones from Chinese companies like DJI, the industry leader, last October. Now the department is making that ban permanent—though it will grant exceptions for natural disasters and other emergencies.

Enlarge / NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was placed in Johnson Space Center’s historic Chamber A for vacuum testing on June 20, 2017. (credit: NASA)

NASA says it is holding to a March 2021 launch date for the James Webb Space Telescope, but a new report from the US Government Accountability Office suggests the mission probably will not happen then.

Because the space agency and the telescope's prime contractor, Northrop Grumman, continue to tackle serious technical problems, the report estimates that there is only a 12 percent chance that the large space telescope will launch in March 2021. It is due to lift off on board an Ariane 5 rocket from the European Space Agency's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.

NASA generally uses a "70 percent confidence level" to establish dates for missions, and if that were the case for the Webb telescope, the new report says the launch date would likely slip to July 2021. It also warns that additional problems could arise during the final phases of assembling and integrating the telescope for launch.

Enlarge / The soundbar includes the technology of a Roku Ultra inside, so it doubles as a streaming device. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Streaming giant Roku continues to lean heavily into the audio side of home entertainment. Today, the company announced that it is bringing surround sound capabilities to its Roku Smart Soundbar through a software update that will start hitting devices this February.

The surround sound expansion will let users connect other Roku audio devices to the smart soundbar wirelessly. Currently, Roku has a wireless speaker bundle designed to work with Roku TVs and a wireless subwoofer that connects via Wi-Fi to Smart Soundbars already. Users will be able to connect a pair of the wireless TV speakers to the smart soundbar to create a surround sound system that they can control through the Roku remote they already have.

Roku emphasized the ease of use of this smart surround sound system, saying that the technology embedded into the smart soundbar will identify the TV speakers automatically at the start of the setup and will pair with them wirelessly. Users can then choose the position of each TV speaker in their homes, properly directing the sound that comes out of each speaker. Once set up, users can control the whole system with the remote they already use with their Roku device. There will also be new stereo sound modes that users can equip to make non-surround-sound audio sound even better through their new speaker setup.