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It took me a few days with an Oculus Rift before I really felt comfortable swiveling my head around while playing a video game. Sure, I’d gotten somewhat used to the idea in years of trade show VR demos or while playing around with my own Oculus Rift development kits and Samsung’s Oculus-powered Gear VR. But those experiences were fighting with decades of gaming experiences where my head generally stayed glued to one spot, pointed at the center of a TV or monitor, and tilted only occasionally to maybe get a better view of something in the corner.

It can be easy to fall back into the “look straight ahead” habit when you first start playing many Rift games. Even when the 3D display showed items flying past my shoulder or out of my peripheral vision, I’d often reach instinctively for the right analog stick or the shoulder buttons on my controller to try to turn the camera. It would take a split second before I realized, “Hey, wait, I can just turn and look for the thing I want to see.”

It might sound hyperbolic, but this is a change that requires looking at and thinking about gaming in an entirely new way. The final consumer version of the Rift now shipping to early adopters shows that Oculus has taken that rethinking seriously, putting years of development and billions of Facebook dollars of careful work toward the problem. But it also shows some early rough edges, especially on the platform software side, and these small blemishes highlight the fact that we’re still very much in the first generation of consumer-grade virtual reality.

Surprisingly beautiful scenes like this are practically worth the price of admission on their own.

The title should have been my first clue. The almost too cute spelling of "Adrift" looks like "Adroneft," and this isn't just an affectation. It hints at the all-encompassing isolation and loneliness that pervades everything about this game.

Adr1ft's introduction is by far the most action-packed part of the game, as your protagonist wakes up clawing her way back to the nearest piece of a massive space station that has just blown apart. Her EVA suit is holding together enough to keep her alive, but an air leak means her survival isn't guaranteed. Worse, the computerized systems that operate the escape pods are offline, and reactivating them requires the usual Metroidvania-style wild goose chase/scavenger hunt through the station's tattered remains.

If you're an avid gamer, this is the kind of setup where you now expect the unexpected—a journey filled with hidden dangers or some sort of sci-fi/fantasy twist. Maybe an alien virus has turned everyone else on the station into bloodthirsty zombies. Maybe the station's AI has gone crazy and wants to eliminate all human life. Maybe the station was the first casualty in an alien invasion, and you have to warn Earth.

An artist's impression of the Hitomi satellite in orbit. Note: That scary, all devouring X-ray source isn't actually that close to Earth. (credit: JAXA)

The Japanese space agency, JAXA, lost communication with its new Hitomi X-ray astronomy satellite on Saturday, spending Sunday trying unsuccessfully to reestablish control over the spacecraft. The prognosis appears to be fairly grim after the US Strategic Command’s Joint Space Operations Center revealed Sunday that it is tracking five pieces of debris associated with the satellite.

It is not clear whether Hitomi struck a piece of space debris in its orbit about 580km above Earth or what else might have precipitated the loss of communication. Either way, scientists lamented the apparent failure of an instrument that would have allowed them to probe much deeper into the relatively unstudied field of X-ray astronomy.

High-energy but very-short-wavelength X-rays are absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere. To observe them, scientists must therefore send instruments into the upper atmosphere or into space itself. Unlike other kinds of observational  astronomy, then, X-ray astronomy is a fairly new field.

The expandable habitat from Bigelow Aerospace is lifted into Dragon's trunk for a ride to the space station. (credit: SpaceX)

It's a big idea. It's a bold idea. And at first blush, it seems a bit of a daft idea. A company called Bigelow Aerospace wants to build space stations for the government and hotels for private customers that will inflate like balloons once they reach outer space. Bigelow’s inflatables have the potential to revolutionize spaceflight by providing lighter, and much larger, places to live in space. But the big question remains: Does anyone really want to live in a space balloon?

NASA intends to find out and has signed a $17.8 million contract with Bigelow to do so. As early as April 8 a deflated module will launch inside the trunk of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. The space agency has agreed to attach a test module to the International Space Station, inflate it, and over the course of two years determine if such a contraption can work in space. Crew won’t live in it—inflatables remain too experimental to risk life and limb. But if the module holds up, NASA will invest more money into the technology.

The space agency has said it wants to use the space station as a platform for technologies that will enable, and perhaps lower the cost, of deep space exploration. With the Bigelow module NASA appears to be doing exactly that. “It’s a big step for us, because inflatables can be a big multiplier for us as we move further out into space,” explained Mark Geyer, deputy director of Johnson Space Center, during a recent meeting of NASA’s advisory council.

Jonathan Gitlin

The 2017 Porsche 718 Boxster looks a lot like the outgoing six-cylinder Boxster but shares very few body panels with that car.

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Porsches have long been a living dichotomy. No sports car manufacturer wears its engineering sobriety so blatantly on its sleeve. Yet, the human result is a clear polar opposite. Porsche fans are nearly as rabid as those that feverishly wave the Ferrari flag. After all, this is the company that made the rear-engine 911 not only live, but thrive through multiple generations despite air cooling and a rearward weight bias with the flawed nature of highly polar momentousness. Overcome fundamental deficiencies, find a way to turn them into advantages, then ring the cash register. For Porsche, this has worked for decades. The latest in that thinking are the two 718 Boxsters going on sale this June, in both a $58,000 standard and $64,800 S configuration.

One central argument of the 718 is that less is more. The Boxster convertible (as well as the Cayman coupes) move away from six-cylinder engines to a paltry four cylinders. And though nobody can drive a specifications table and should therefore not judge equipment based solely on stats, many do. So, Porsche purists are concerned. At the most aural level, six cylinders firing every 720 degrees of crank rotation sound better than four. Or so many people think. But no one should judge a book by its cover.

There is some historical precedent for the engine choice, however. Porsche's first cars had four cylinders. Porsche's first racing engine—the Ernst Fuhrmann-designed four-cam boxer—had four cylinders. The latter also had a complex camshaft drive system with multiple shafts and required frequent rebuilds, but that was then and this is now.