Author: Kyle Orland

Sure, roller coasters are fun and all. Visually, though, looking around at the sky and the track and the back of other passengers' heads and the massive amusement park parking lot can be a bit dull. Samsung and Six Flags Entertainment are teaming up to try to fix this apparent problem, equipping roller coasters at nine North American parks with Gear VR headsets that will sync their virtual worlds to the usual thrill ride movements.

This seems like a best-of-both worlds solution to the sometimes sickening disconnect between apparent virtual-world motion and real-world motion in seated VR experiences. By timing a pre-planned VR experience precisely to the predictable dips, turns, and loops of a roller coaster, passengers' bodies will actually feel the same movements that they're seeing in the 360° virtual world flying by on their headset screens. It certainly sounds like a step up from the usual theme park "simulator" rides, which simply tilt and bounce the cabin to fool the body into the sensation of screen-matching movement.

The revamped coasters also seem like a smart way for a massive chain like Six Flags to use its size and space to build onto consumer-grade VR, creating an experience that even early adopting users can't recreate at home. They're not the only ones with the same kind of idea; outfits like VRcade in Seattle are working to build arena-sized virtual playspaces, with untethered headsets and real-world barriers that correspond to the virtual environment.

Do not be afraid! Though it seems like you are underwater, you are not actually drowning. It is a virtual reality! (credit: Dr. Waldern/Virtuality Group)

Back in 2014, we were equal parts tickled and scared by the laundry list of legal-ese health warnings that accompanied the first consumer units of Samsung's Gear VR. The HTC Vive Pre comes with a booklet of Health and Safety Warnings that's largely similar, but HTC goes a bit further in warning about some surprisingly specific potential hazards of virtual reality.

The booklet includes the kind of boilerplate warnings you'd expect before using a device that requires physical activity: users should consult a doctor if they have a heart condition and/or are pregnant or elderly. But the Vive warnings booklet goes on to urge users with "psychiatric conditions (such as anxiety disorders or post-traumatic stress disorder)" to be cautious with the device:

"Content viewed using the product can be intense, immersive, and appear very life-like and may cause your brain and body to react accordingly. Certain types of content (e.g. violent, scary, emotional, or adrenaline-based content) could trigger increased heart rate, spikes in blood pressure, panic attacks, anxiety, PTSD, fainting, and other adverse effects. If you have a history of negative physical or psychological reactions to certain real life circumstances, avoid using the product to view similar content. (emphasis added)

That's not all that surprising, considering that doctors have been using virtual reality as an immersive PTSD treatment for years. Dr. Albert "Skip" Rizzo told Ars that even rudimentary, '90s-era VR was real enough for traumatized users to feel immersed in their memories:

Marshall Allman appears in the full-motion episodes but not in the actual game.

The idea of requiring an Internet connection for single-player gaming has been controversial for Microsoft in the past. So it's a bit surprising that Microsoft will require players to have a high-speed Internet connection to enjoy the cut scenes in the story-heavy Quantum Break when it launches on Windows 10 next month (the Xbox One version will also be available as a full download ahead of time for those who don't want to stream).

At least there's a technical excuse for the requirement this time beyond some sort of privacy-limiting security check. As narrative designer Greg Louden told Game Informer at a recent event, the variety of branching, live-action "episodes" played after each act of the game are too large to fit on a disc or work as a hard drive download:

We have 40 different variations of the show in total where basically your choices get to make it evolve and change whether it’s from a junction choice or we have these things called "Quantum Ripples" which essentially unlocked sort of deleted scenes from the show. Then combined with that, the show length can change based on your decisions because some episodes are longer as a result and some episodes are shorter. It basically evolves and that’s why we needed to stream it... When we figured out how big the data was, we had to backpedal and think of some good solutions, and this made sense.

While Louden wouldn't go into detail on the exact size of the video files in question, the PC version of the game was shot and will stream in 4K, which can eat up hard drive space incredibly quickly as a download (the Xbox One version will be limited to 1080p video files). Most PC gamers in the West are connected to the Internet 24/7 these days anyway, so this won't be a material issue for most of the game's target audience.

Sam Machkovech

Say hello to the HTC Vive Pre—the near-final version of the VR system. The headset comes complete with two tracking wands and two laser-tracking stations.

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Nine years ago, when the first iPhone was about to debut, not many people envisioned a revolution that would fundamentally change the shape of the game industry (for good or for ill). Today, as we await the impending release of high-end consumer virtual reality headsets from the likes of Oculus, Valve, and Sony, it feels like we're at a similar crossroads.

Unlike the slow, quiet dawn of smartphone gaming, the hype around VR has been building to a relentless, deafening pitch for years. Yet despite this hype, the industry and those watching it seem relatively split on the eventual impact of VR gaming. It could be a smartphone-level technological change—the biggest the gaming industry has seen in years—or it could be a quickly irrelevant fad on the order of the Wii or Kinect.

The answer to that question will determine the state of the video game market for years to come. So as many of the industry's biggest names gathered for the DICE Summit and Awards ceremony in late February, I asked everyone I could get my hands on what they thought virtual reality gaming would look like a decade from now. The range of responses shows just how unsettled, and unsettling, the fate of the latest virtual reality boom really is.

This promotional image from the PS4's unveiling is now woefully out of date.

One of the PS4's most useful features—in-home remote streaming over a high-speed router—will finally be widely available without the need for proprietary Sony hardware soon. Sony announced on Tuesday that PS4 System Update version 3.5 will bring Remote Play to Windows and Macintosh computers. While the system update will launch in beta tomorrow, the streaming feature won't be available until a full release expected later in the month.

Until now, Remote Play has only been available on Sony's own PlayStation Vita and PlayStation TV hardware. With the portable Vita all but dead in a tough mobile marketplace and the PlayStation TV in the process of being discontinued, Sony now seems willing to expand this useful feature to a much wider set of general computing devices.

Last year, Microsoft introduced the ability to stream Xbox One games from an in-home network to any Windows 10 computer, a feature that we found surprisingly robust in tests. Sony's new Remote Play expansion goes a bit further than Microsoft's in also allowing Mac owners to get in on the streaming.

This VR version of Pac-Man is kind of hard on the wrists... (credit: USPTO / Sony)

As someone who has tried a lot of virtual reality demos, trust me when I say that the ability to see your hands—and to use them to reach out and interact with the virtual world—makes all the difference. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that Sony Computer Entertainment has filed a patent application for a "glove interface object" that could help provide accurate virtual reality hand tracking without the need to actually hold a controller.

PlayStation VR already has a hand-tracking solution, of course, in the form of the PlayStation Move controllers that were first released for the PlayStation 3 in 2010. But this glove offers a bit more functionality than those handheld wands, including sensors that can "identify a flex of at least one finger portion," contact sensors that can detect when you touch a thumb to another fingertip, and sensors that measure the user's "finger position pose" (which can then be rendered on the screen).

The end goal is to "simply provide a way of touching, holding, playing, interfacing or contacting virtual objects shown on a display screen or objects associated with documents, text, images, and the like," according to the patent application.

With annualized 3DS sales peaking low and early, Nintendo no longer has the financial cushion it once did.

No matter how its console business is doing, Nintendo has always been able to lean on healthy portable system sales to prop up its finances. With the Wii U continuing to severely underperform sales expectations, though, it looks like the Nintendo 3DS is failing to pick up the slack as its predecessors once did.

A new revision to Nintendo's projected earnings, released today, sees Nintendo reducing its expectations of Nintendo 3DS sales for the full fiscal year, which ends in March. Nintendo now expects to sell 6.6 million 3DS units during the 12-month period, a 13 percent drop from previous projections and a 24 percent decline from the year before. That drop (and the accompanying drop in 3DS software sales projections) is a big reason why Nintendo is now also saying that its annual profits will be 50 percent lower than it had projected, though the company blames some of that decline on the weakening Japanese yen.

You might think this kind of decline is natural for a system like the 3DS, which is, after all, approaching its fifth birthday. But previous Nintendo handhelds have looked much more robust at this point in their lifecycles. The Nintendo DS was still near the peak of its hardware sales dominance in its fifth and sixth years, selling a whopping 31.18 million units in the 2009 fiscal year (and a healthy 27.11 million the next year). Game Boy Advance sales were still near a steady peak in the 2005-2006 period, bouncing up and down in the 15 million to 18 million annual sales range, thanks in part to the successful Game Boy Advance SP hardware refresh.

Don't worry, I've got plenty of time to step out of the way of that bullet.

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As I slowly transition from my early 30s to what is inarguably my mid-30s, there are moments when I explicitly notice that my reflexes aren't what they used to be. As someone who enjoys twitchy, reflex-based action games as a hobby and a large part of his career, this is more than a bit concerning for me. Thank god, then, for a game like Superhot, which slows down the gameplay of a traditional first-person shooter in a way that requires nearly no reflexes of any kind.

The game spells out its own chief gimmick in big block letters almost as soon as you start: "Time Moves Only When You Move." That's not quite true—time actually crawls forward at a snail's pace even if you stand perfectly still. For the most part, though, Superhot lets you get your bearings and think about how to deal with the stylized, often-armed red figures surrounding you before you have to commit to any one action.

Update: On at least some Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 cabinets, the EJB menu trick can also be used to set the cabinet to free play mode, letting you (and anyone else) grab a game without putting in any quarters, as shown in this video. Given that, it's probably a good thing for arcade owners everywhere that this trick remained secret for so long.

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Gamers of a certain age probably remember paging through dog-eared copies of GamePro and other monthly magazines to discover the numerous hidden characters and secrets embedded in the highly popular Mortal Kombat games. There's at least one Mortal Kombat secret that never made the pages of those magazines, however. It's a secret that was just recently revealed after over 20 years of secrecy.

It's hard to tell from this flat trade show demo image, but trust us, the 3D effect is impressive even without glasses. (credit: Ultra-D)

aQuite frankly, 3D glasses have never failed to be anything but a headache inducing, slightly blurry mess for me. That might be why a recent demo of a new glasses-free 3D TV from Ultra-D blew me away. It just works.

Six years or so after the industry declared that stereoscopic 3D displays were going to be the future of entertainment, 3D TVs are decidedly not the present of entertainment. A combination of relatively wonky glasses technology, high costs, and a general lack of interesting content have turned what was once a hot ticket into an overwhelming market flop, save for a few holdout TV set makers and aging devices like Nintendo's 3DS line.

At least one company thinks they finally have the right combination of technology and timing to give traditional 2D displays some added depth, though. After years of quiet development, StreamTV Networks has started manufacturing displays with its Ultra-D technology—displays that don't require glasses, focal "sweet spots," or much in the way of specially made 3D content. After seeing the technology on display at DICE recently, I found myself less-than-skeptical about stereoscopic TVs for quite possibly the first time ever.