Month: March 2021

Enlarge / Joe Biden speaks at the White House on March 2, 2021. (credit: Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)

US President Joe Biden has made the shift to electric vehicles an early focus of his administration. Days after his inauguration, he vowed to replace hundreds of thousands of federal civilian vehicles with electric versions. On Tuesday, Biden held a virtual meeting with CEOs from companies building charging infrastructure. The administration has set a goal to build more than 500,000 new electric vehicle charging stations by 2030.

Also on Tuesday, a coalition of six electric utilities announced a new initiative that will help Biden achieve his goal. The companies are planning to build a "seamless network of charging stations" in and around the American South. The group plans to build chargers near major highways in every southern state, stretching as far west as Texas and as far north as Indiana, Ohio, and Virginia.

(credit: American Electric Power)

This is not a joint venture. Each utility will build and run its own charging stations. But the goal is to make them appear to the customer as a unified network.

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  The Cardboard VR Viewer. [credit: Google ]

Google's last surviving VR product is dead. Today the company stopped selling the Google Cardboard VR viewer on the Google Store, the last move in a long wind-down of Google's once-ambitious VR efforts. The message on the Google Store, which was first spotted by Android Police, reads, "We are no longer selling Google Cardboard on the Google Store."

Google Cardboard was a surprise hit at Google I/O 2015 and moved the entry point for VR lower than anyone had imagined previously. The device was a literal piece of cardboard, shaped like a VR headset, with special plastic lenses. Google built a Cardboard app for Android and iOS, which would let any suitably high-end phone power the headset. The landscape display split into left and right views for your eyes, the phone hardware rendered a VR game, and the accelerometers did 3-DoF (degrees of freedom) head tracking. There was even a cardboard action button on the handset that would boop the touchscreen with a capacitive pad, so you could aim with your head and select options in a VR environment. Since the product was just cardboard and plastic lenses with no electronics whatsoever, Google sold the headset for just $20.

After cardboard, Google started to scale up its VR ambitions. In 2016, Google also launched an upscaled version of Google Cardboard, the Google Daydream VR headset. This was a plastic and cloth version of a phone-powered VR headset, with the key improvements of a head strap and a small controller, for $80.

Enlarge / The RX 6700XT GPU reaches retailers soon. When will it reach average customers, however? Honestly, who's to say at this point?

AMD's RDNA 2 push continues on March 18 with a newly announced RX 6700XT graphics card, starting at $479 and featuring just about the exact downscaled options you might expect from a card costing $100 less than last year's RX 6800.

Before we talk specs, of course...

AMD chose YouTube for the announcement—and, perhaps foolishly, left the chat function on. This allowed fans to spam the livestream chat with "sold out" and "out of stock" cries for a full 15 minutes. Weirdly, the video's host acknowledged that "demand for GPUs is at an all-time high," only to offer about as worthless a pledge as you'll get about availability: that the GPU will be sold both at AMD.com and at "e-tailers and retailers across the globe on day one."