Author: Sam Machkovech

SEATTLE, Washington—How many times can a publication attend a virtual reality showcase and walk away stunned by something it's never seen before? Judging by the past few years of Ars' VR explorations, quite a few.

As such, we don't blame readers who might say, "Tap the VR brakes, Ars." Still, this week's SteamVR Developer Showcase event is forcing us to reach into the hyperbole bag once more. The event blew us away thanks to a number of never-before-seen stunners, along with previously announced HTC Vive titles that have only gotten better in the oven before their retail launch later this year. (April, we hope.)

"Room scale" VR is a tough sell, especially for people whose homes don't easily accommodate enough cleared-out space for walking around with a headset on, but while we've already been impressed with what the platform can support, we didn't think we could be impressed any further. We were wrong. Read below to see why we're currently trying to put our kids, pets, beds, and significant others up for adoption—so we can hurry up and make space for this incredible new platform. (Sorry, sweeties.)

Sam Machkovech

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

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SEATTLE, Washington—Valve and HTC took the wraps off of their latest, near-final version of the Vive virtual reality system at this month's CES, but we barely got a chance to play with the refreshed headset. That changed on Wednesday thanks to an event hosted in Valve's hometown of Seattle, where the company offered Ars 12 lengthy demos of upcoming games and apps.

Our detailed impressions of those dozen demos are forthcoming, but in the meantime, we have good news. The pre-release Vive Pre hardware may not be phenomenally better than the original Vive dev kit, but every change has made an already-impressive VR system feel that much more complete, comfortable, and worth salivating over.

Like the original HTC Vive dev kit, the Vive Pre asks users to wear a VR headset whilst walking around a pre-defined, real-life space and holding motion-tracked wands in each hand. These wands' main buttons are still a gun-like trigger and a thumb-accessible, clickable trackpad; in addition, the handle has a button on each side of the controller's grip, and those are now positioned for easier hand access. New menu buttons have been placed above and below the trackpad, as well.

The last known image of whatever Google Glass has become; now, we're pretty confident that it won't bear the name Google Glass.

2015 came and went without any sign of a refreshed version of Google Glass, in spite of a late December FCC filing packed full of photos of a fancier, foldable take on the augmented-eyeglasses device. While we're not entirely sure when to expect a new Google product that will rest comfortably on our faces, we're pretty sure it won't have the "Google Glass" name.

That's because every single official social media channel for the product—the only remaining public faces for the device, since it hasn't been for sale since January 2015—went dark over the weekend. A 9to5Google report pointed to Glass' official statement to the Glass Explorers group on Google Plus, which directed any remaining Glassholes Glass wearers to a new support page with little more than a phone number and a Web contact form. Around the same time, the rest of Google Glass' Facebook and Twitter pages received a full delete, as opposed to the product's Google Plus page, which was left with an image of a sandals-wearing person taking a Glassified photo of an ocean sunset. The fact that the pages received total wipes, as opposed to placeholders, leads us to believe the company is shying away from old associations with the name.

But a Glass by any other name might still be sweet, as signs point to the augmented-eyeglasses device coming back to life. That momentum began nearly a year ago when Nest CEO Tony Fadell took the product line over and said it would receive a redesign "from scratch." News followed in September that Google had swooped up a number of ex-Amazonians, who'd worked on the underperforming Fire Phone, to work on the refreshed Glass, now internally dubbed "Project Aura."

The smaller screen shows off Churchill Solitaire's "devil's six" row, whose cards can never be placed in the descending columns and must be played in order. (credit: Churchill Solitaire)

Aspiring video game designers are often pointed to a simple exercise: take a deck of cards and invent a new game. Apparently, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did just that (albeit with two decks) in inventing his own twist on solitaire during the 20th century.

That game could have easily been lost to the sands of time. Instead, it now exists as a free-to-try app on the iOS App Store all thanks to... Donald Rumsfeld?

As the Wall Street Journal reported, the former US Secretary of Defense teamed up with a game developer to develop and launch Churchill Solitaire for iOS devices. Rumsfeld told the paper he learned to play the game during an ambassadorship in the 1970s. Churchill's invention was shared with Rumsfeld by a Belgian ambassador who had been friends with Churchill, and while the Churchill family never found a reference to the game in his collection of letters, a family representative told the WSJ that Rumsfeld's story "is entirely credible."

One of the game's many sculptures.

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After 30 hours of intense play, I had not beaten The Witness, the latest video game from acclaimed designer Jonathan Blow. I'd reached an ending sequence, but I knew damn well the Myst-like game had more puzzles for me to solve. Three months later, between occasional returns to the game and a very recent speed run, in which I retraced my steps on its virtual island and re-solved most of its puzzles, I still have not "completed" the game, as far as I can tell.

At the moment, I have remained stumped about a few of its most intense puzzles, the ones still staring me in the face. That won't last too much longer, I imagine, because I will eventually muster the brainpower and discover some hidden in-game clues to beat them, or because I'll cave in and seek help from thousands of fervent fans devouring this long-awaited follow-up to indie classic Braid.

What will persist after that moment—after the final circle has been connected along the final line to the final neat-tipped conclusion on the panel—is a sensation that this video game is not meant to be "completed." I've made my peace with that belief after months of play, which has included many long walks along its beautiful environs, many reflections upon its toughest puzzles, and many questions about its mysterious decorations.

Ars Technica's staffers have attended enough gaming and tech expos to drink VR's Kool-Aid, but we're not kidding ourselves. We know the upcoming wave of virtual reality headsets, from companies like Sony, HTC, and Oculus, will likely enjoy "niche" status in their earliest days, thanks to high prices and a lack of major mainstream demand.

In the case of at least one upcoming VR game project, that niche issue will be just fine—because it's possibly the "niche"-ist game imaginable. Gearbox Software co-founder Randy Pitchford and comedian Penn Jillette recently announced work on a VR version of Desert Bus, arguably the most boring video game ever made—originally a jab at censor-happy American legislators like Janet Reno in the early '90s. (I wrote at length about Desert Bus and its wacky charity offspring for Polygon in 2012.)

Long story short, the game was intentionally awful, which led to its inadvertent cult fanbase, and Desert Bus' virtual reality version will probably be just as much of a joke. That got us thinking: what other existing video game properties, when ported to VR, could reach similar so-bad-it's-good status?

A Tuesday announcement from Univision sent copyeditors and fact-checkers scrambling to secure confirmation that, no, this was not a satirical headline ripped from the pages of satirical news site The Onion: "Spanish-language television network buys controlling stake in The Onion."

Turns out, the news checks out, by way of the network becoming a "minority investor" of the combined entity known as Onion Inc—which includes The Onion, its sister publication AV Club, the dedicated Buzzfeed and listicle-site spoof Clickhole, and other Onion-branded content. An NPR report published before the announcement pegged the purchase at 40 percent of Onion Inc, which allegedly also includes "the right to buy the humor company outright" in the future.

Univision's announcement made no bones about the company's desire to reach younger, English-speaking audiences by way of this acquisition, complete with five uses of the word "millennial" (again, this is not a joke). However, the announcement didn't specify whether The Onion's content would become part of Univision's English-language, youth-targeting TV network Fusion; NPR's report contends that the network, which has recently hired Web-savvy hosts such as Alexis Madrigal, "appears to be a key element in the acquisition."

The World Economic Forum warns about what robots and other advances may do to the worldwide job market by the year 2020. (credit: World Economic Forum)

Are the robots coming to take our jobs? Advances in any tech that aids in automation always come with questions about the jobs they take versus the jobs they create, but the World Economic Forum warned in a report published on Monday that advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and other modern technologies are currently likely to lead to a net loss of 5.1 million jobs worldwide by the year 2020.

"Without urgent and targeted action today to manage the near-term transition and build a workforce with futureproof skills, governments will have to cope with ever-growing unemployment and inequality—and businesses with a shrinking consumer base," the report states in its introduction.

The workforce number estimate, which is based on surveys and data provided by 371 companies' chief HR officers worldwide (whose combined workforces include over 13 million employees in 15 "major, developed, and emerging economies"), includes numbers for different industries' gains and losses. The biggest loser, according to the WEF, will be in the office and administrative job sector to the tune of 4.76 million jobs—due to "a perfect storm of technological trends that have the potential to make many of [the job roles] redundant," the report states. Other fields with major expected losses include manufacturing and production (1.61 million) and construction and extraction (497,000).

You too could make up to $300 a year by coughing up this much data via an installed app on your phone—which Symphony Advanced Media used on Wednesday to help NBCUniversal estimate how much Netflix content Americans watch. (credit: Symphony Advanced Media)

The Television Critics Association's latest press tour in Pasadena, California included a long talk with an NBCUniversal executive about the changing nature of online video streaming. According to a Variety report, the executive unveiled a boatload of data that it sourced from a media tracking firm, much of which estimated how many people were watching the most popular series on platforms like Netflix and Amazon Video.

Alan Wurtzel, NBCU's president of research and media development, attributed its ratings estimates (the likes of which Netflix has never announced) to Symphony Advanced Media, whose free "Media Insiders" app tracked the viewing habits of "about 15,000" participating users between September and December 2015. The app does so, according to Symphony, by turning your smartphone into an unabashed tracking beacon—meaning that it turns your microphone on, keeps tabs on your location via GPS, and studies your browsing, app, SMS, and phone call history—in exchange for paid rewards.

In NBCU's case, the most interesting data was anything that tracked what programming viewers watched. The tracking app's combination of microphone and app surveillance allowed Symphony to hear when certain shows were broadcast around the house using platforms other than a standard TV signal, such as a smart TV, tablet, or game console—which presumably gathers more data than a standard Nielsen tracking box. Both Symphony and Nielsen base their national-viewing estimates on smaller sample sizes.

Choice Provisions

The interstitial art between rounds of Tharsis is pretty sick.

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A lot of dread accumulates during an average playthrough of new digital board game Tharsis. To some extent, the feeling is fostered by the game's lonely, hopeless setting on an interstellar outpost. In other ways, it's thanks to the zillions of disasters that befall the astronaut crew you're attempting to help dig their way out of seemingly endless crises. A lot of virtual death comes along the way, yet the game itself is incredibly approachable thanks to a mix of board and dice game mechanics—as if Yahtzee met the resource-management world of games like Alien Frontiers.

Sheer accessibility is possibly this game's scariest aspect. As in, we're addicted, and we're not sure if that's a good thing. It's fair to call Tharsis's combination of punishing difficulty, strategic depth, and hair-pulling emphasis on luck the devil's triad—the kind of game you might find while walking through Satan's most brimstone-loaded casino. We're ever so thankful that the designers didn't attach any microtransactions to its nearly impossible journey to Mars. Otherwise, we may be broke.

Having the pilot for dinner

The game opens aboard the space station Iktomi, staffed with experts in fields such as engineering, medicine, and piloting, en route to the first manned landing on Mars. Each gameplay session begins with an unexpected meteor destroying a vital station compartment weeks before the landing date, which sends the rest of the four-person crew on a dizzying, 10-round journey to keep both the ship functioning and its crew members alive.