Author: Lee Hutchinson

My name is Lee and I’m a hardware-a-holic.

(Hi, Lee.)

In walking the long path to VR on the PC, I’ve built a new gaming computer from scratch, bought peripherals out the wazoo, and, of course, pre-ordered both an Oculus Rift and an HTC Vive so I wouldn't have to choose between the two. If we’re including things like the peripherals I use when playing some VR games—like my Warthog HOTAS and Slaw Device pedals—then my grand total is hovering at $4,000 or so in VR-related expenses.

A few weeks ago, I finally tried Tesla Motors' "autopilot" feature. A Tesla rep and I tooled around Houston's I-45 in a Model X crossover SUV for 15 minutes, just long enough to test the vehicle's adaptive cruise/automatic lane-keeping wizardry. Once I toggled on the autopilot, the rep relaxed by checking e-mail on her phone. This sent a clear message: keep an eye on the dumb journalist when he's driving the $140,000 SUV, but once the machine takes over, everything’s fine.

As we pulled back into the showroom (or whatever Texas’ insane dealership protection laws demand Tesla call the places it’s not allowed to sell or service vehicles), I told the rep that I was driving to Austin soon; Autopilot would be just the thing for the long stretches of empty road out on I-10 and TX-71. Without missing a beat, she offered me a loaner Model S.

Ars has officially driven a Model S with autopilot before, but only under controlled circumstances. The Austin trip would let me take the car out for nearly four hundred miles of driving in a big mix of traffic scenarios. Plus, I'd get to log more cockpit time in a Tesla. Of course I said yes. Who wouldn’t?

VIDEO: The ZUS cable versus bullets. Video produced and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Attention PR folks: On average, I get about 100 pitch e-mails a day, and most of them get ignored. But this is how you get my attention:

SUBJECT: What do bulletproof vest and our charging cable have in common?

Hello Lee,

We at Nonda have developed an indestructible charging cable.

Introducing the ZUS charging cable built with Kevlar by DuPont with lifetime warranty.

The cable in question comes in USB-C, micro-USB, and Apple Lighting forms. It's also currently the subject of an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that has massively exceeded its $10,000 funding goal (it’s up to about $157,000 this morning, about $10,000 more than it had yesterday). The standout feature, Nonda PR says, is the set of Kevlar reinforcements that run through the cable’s core, strengthening it and in theory preventing it from tearing or breaking on repeated bending.

In a blog post today on MassEffect.com, Bioware General Manager Aaryn Flynn announced the next game in the Mass Effect series has a new release date: early 2017. First teased at E3 in 2014 with a short video and then given a more formal reveal and an official name at last year’s E3, Mass Effect: Andromeda was tentatively targeted at a late 2016 release.

Last month, Electronic Arts CFO Blake Jorgensen appeared to indicate in a financial presentation that Andromeda would arrive during EA’s fourth fiscal quarter, which aligns with the first calendar quarter of 2017. Today’s announcement by Bioware dovetails nicely with that rumor.

We’ve reached out to Bioware with some requests for additional information and a couple of questions, and we’ll update this story if they’re able to reply.

I’ve been pretty happy with my switch to Ubiquiti Unifi enterprise (or "enterprise lite," depending on whom you ask) networking gear at my home. But, as explained at length in our review of the system, the Unifi UAP line isn’t necessarily the easiest thing for a home user to buy and set up. The kit requires a separate router and separate management software, and it includes a lot of advanced features that less-technical home users might not care about.

However, this morning Ubiquiti announced a new product line targeted squarely at home users who want the reliability of higher-end business Wi-Fi without the setup and admin hassle: Amplifi. Designed to compete directly against "set it and forget it" mesh Wi-Fi products like eero, Amplifi kits will include a router/AP base station with a touch screen for configuration and four gigabit Ethernet ports, as well as two pre-paired Wi-Fi extenders that can be placed wherever you’d like in your house or apartment. Unlike the business-oriented Unifi gear, the Amplifi router doesn’t require you to run a separate management station application or use a Ubiquiti Cloud Key.

There will be four different Amplifi kits available: the base Amplifi bundle for $199, the Amplifi LR for $299, and the Amplifi HD for $349. There are a few big differentiators across the lines—maximum transmission power, supported Wi-Fi standards, MIMO configuration, and subsequent maximum speed. For the entry-level model, the max TX power of the base station is 24dBm, and the extenders can do 22dBm. The LR pushes the base station to 26dBm and the extenders to 24dBm. With the HD kit, both the base station and extenders can hit a max of 26dBm.

It’s Monday night and you finally collapse into your favorite chair after a day that started at 5:00am. The dogs are crated, the kids are in bed, and your spouse has graciously agreed to do dinner clean-up. You lean your head back and sigh. There’s a whole week’s worth of worry stacked up in your forebrain, but for the next 20 minutes, none of it will matter. The tablet is warm in your hands as you tap the Netflix app, and you smile in anticipation of the one truly good thing that you’ll get to experience today. The theme song is already playing in your head: "Un—BREAKABLE! They’re alive, dammit! It’s a mir-a-cle!" For the next 20 minutes, you can escape.

…except you can’t, because instead of transporting you away from your worries, the stupid screen is showing a giant-ass error message: "Netflix is not available."

The vein in your forehead—you know the one, right at your hairline—starts throbbing. You can feel it. You know what comes next. You can already see it in your mind. You’re going to have to go upstairs into your youngest’s room—because for some incredibly insane reason the cable drop is in there, which makes you want to find the person who built the damn house and throttle them to death with six feet of coax—and you’re going to have to reach back under the kid’s bed, over the dust and the dog hair and the Lego bricks and broken Star Wars toys and whatever the hell else is under there and find the damn plug for the damn router. After you unplug and plug it back in, you’re going to have to lie there watching the damn lights on the stupid thing blink for minutes—whole minutes!—while your tiny window of Netflix time slowly trickles away.

It’s been a bit over six months since I made the switch from consumer-grade Wi-Fi at home to a more sophisticated set-up, tossing out my old Apple Airport Extreme base station in favor of three linked Ubiquiti Unifi UAP-AC-PRO access points. The change from consumer to enterprise gear (or "enterprise lite," as a lot of folks have e-mailed in to tell me) has been very positive and aside from a bit of management overhead and the pain of actually crawling around in my attic to run cables for the things, I don’t believe I have encountered any real downsides.

One major difference with the Ubiquiti Unifi APs is that they run on Power Over Ethernet (POE) rather than directly off of an electrical outlet. You don’t have to have a POE-compatible switch to use them, since the APs come with small POE injectors which can tap power from regular outlets, but having a POE switch simplifies set-up and also (assuming you connect the switch to a UPS) gives you an easy way to keep your Wi-Fi powered in the event of a power outage. After getting my Unifi gear installed, the first thing I looked for was a POE switch so I could ditch the little POE injectors.

The first installment of the reborn Star Wars is now out for people to watch at home, and the second mainline movie is in production for a December 2017 release. But fans of the Force won’t have to wait until the end of next year to revisit that far, far away galaxy: Disney’s next Star Wars movie actually hits this Christmas. It’s the first in a set of spin-off movies, and as we learned about a year ago, it’s called Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The first teaser for it landed this morning.

The teaser opens with a soft piano variation on the classic "Force theme" leitmotif (soft piano variations on old movie themes are all the rage these days in trailers!). We’re quickly introduced to plucky cynical misfit Jyn Erso, played by Felicity Jones, who it seems has quite the criminal record in the Galactic Empire. The trailer shows us where and when the film takes place: Erso is recruited by Rebellion leader Mon Mothma for a mission to steal the plans for the Death Star (presumably the first one).

The teaser is short on details and dialog but long on visuals, and the visuals tugged at this old Star Wars fan’s heartstrings. Star Destroyers, Stormtroopers, and spaceships abound; the Death Star’s signature hooting alert klaxon dominates the audio for a big chunk of the trailer as the action ramps up, culminating in a hand-held shot of (again, presumably) Rebellion fighters running along the sand of a beach while Imperial AT-ATs tower over them, firing down at the camera.

If you are ready to jump feet-first into triple-A virtual reality gaming as soon as humanly possible, you have three main choices: the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and Sony's PS VR. None of these devices is actually in the hands of the general public yet—we’ll have to wait until next week for the Oculus Rift to start its first round of shipping—but all three are available for preorder right now. The Vive is the most expensive option at $799, but it comes with 3D controllers. The Rift costs less at $599, but it doesn’t come with 3D controllers. And the PS VR is the cheapest at $399, but then you’re locked to a console and don’t get to play any computer-based VR games.

There is no way to prove yet which of the three front-runners is best. Indeed, "best" is a hard word to define in context—best based on what? Best resolution? The Rift and Vive seem to be the winners there—but they use a Pentile subpixel arrangement, and the Sony kit doesn’t, so the resolution numbers don’t tell the entire story. Best VR experience? Well, that depends on what "experience" means to you—are you primarily going to be playing cockpit-based flight or racing sims where seated play is the main point, or do you want to run around your room playing virtual golf or tennis or shooting virtual guns?

Because how and what you play is a massively subjective experience—and because there’s still so much we don’t know about the final retail versions of all of these VR solutions—it’s hard to make blanket recommendations at this point. The absolute best answer right now to the question of "Which one of these things should I buy?!" is "You should probably wait until this summer when they’ve been in everybody’s hands for a few months and then decide."

In a Skype interview with Ars Technica, Frontier Developments founder and CEO David Braben was finally able to make the formal announcement he’s been waiting to make. "We’re going to be on the Oculus store," he confirmed. "We’re supporting [the Oculus Rift runtime] one point naught and the consumer release at launch, which is March 28."

There has been quite a lot of discontent brewing in the Elite: Dangerous fan community when it comes to VR support. Though Elite was one of the first big titles to fully support the developer kit versions of the Oculus Rift, that support has gotten muddy in the last year—Frontier Developments hasn’t kept Elite directly compatible with the fast-evolving prerelease Oculus Rift SDK, forcing Rift DK1 and DK2 owners to go through some contortions to play the game in VR.

The company has added SteamVR support, and it’s currently possible to play Elite via SteamVR with Rift DK2 and Vive/Vive Pre headsets. Until today, however, Frontier hasn’t issued any formal, clear statements on exactly what is and is not going to work as of the March 28 launch day for the Oculus Rift.