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SEATTLE—The HTC Vive isn't like any computing device I've ever put in a home. This "room-scale" virtual-reality system is at the bleeding edge of what I'd call "home-appropriate"—meaning, it's pretty ornate and complicated, but not so much that you need to dedicate an entire lab or office space to it.

Though you might assume that. Many question marks currently hover over the burgeoning VR industry, thanks to issues like high costs, required computing power, nausea potential, and an unproven field of early software. The Vive goes one step further by also asking its buyers to clear out some serious space so that they can walk across a room and feel fully transported to a game or app's impressive virtual space. The demands that Microsoft asked of Kinect buyers a few years ago are tame compared to the cleared floors and mounted motion trackers of HTC's dream future.

Demand for space has been easy to shrug off at nearly a year of expo and convention demos, where game developers have done the setup legwork for us. We at Ars have spent less of our HTC Vive preview time sorting out logistics and more time letting our jaws drop to the floor. When it's hitting all cylinders, the SteamVR vision of room-scale VR is crazy-bonkers compelling. But what happens when VR dreams collide with the reality of installing and using one of these things in a home?

With more ways than ever for players to document and share their experiences, ridiculous bugs and absurd oversights are no longer the stuff of playground rumor. You have one chance to make a good impression, or else faceless assassins and loot caves can become the defining features of your game in the public consciousness well before early problems can be patched.

In the case of The Division, we’ll always remember the queues: a dozen or so players, stacked in orderly horizontal piles, separated only by their own collision detection as they reach for the single laptop that will unlock the rest of the game. It’s among the first of the few times The Division naturally populates its world with large groups of other players, and it’s comedy gold. From that moment forward, however, The Division reveals itself to be curiously desolate for a game that requires a constant (and, so far, rather shaky) server connection.

You've been activated

That desolation makes some sense. Someone, somewhere has dosed cash in New York City (or at least the director’s cut version of Manhattan that we get) with a cocktail of smallpox, bird flu, and every other Fox News disease-of-the-year. This “dollar flu,” or “green poison,” has left the boroughs' streets either evacuated or full of corpses. Those who remain were either too slow or unwilling to escape quarantine.

This is where your protagonist comes in. As part of a secret and heavily-armed police force, aka The Division, you’ve stayed behind to, ostensibly, collect data on the virus and keep the peace (which you do by murdering tons of people, of course).

The story of the US' energy economy has become simple: natural gas has gotten incredibly cheap, wind is catching up, and solar will be competitive before the decade is out. All of this is driving a boom in renewable energy and pushing coal out of its dominant spot on the market.

But the US isn't the world—it's not even the largest carbon emitter anymore—and its experience doesn't always reflect what's happening in other countries. At the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (or AAAS), speakers had the chance to review what's happening with renewable energy in a number of other critical countries: Germany, India, and China.

Combined, these countries cover a broad spectrum of experiences. Germany's a mature industrial economy that's pushed renewables hard; China's binged on fossil fuels, but is now trying to change its trajectory; and India is the nation most likely to follow in China's footsteps.

Thoughts don't just flit around in our heads unobserved: humans know when something's going on in our own brains, and we evaluate our own thoughts. For example, we can judge when we're not certain about something, and act accordingly. This ability, called metacognition (thinking about thinking), has been found in a number of species, but humans are unusual in our ability to communicate what we know about our own thoughts and knowledge.

How early in life do we develop metacognition? Toddlers, who confidently proclaim knowledge of things they can’t possibly know, seem to be pretty bad at it. Babies, on the other hand, point at things to ask questions about them. They shouldn't be able to do this unless they've worked out that they don't know something.

It’s possible that previous experiments haven’t found evidence of metacognition in younger children because they just weren’t testing it in the right way. After all, other species have metacognition, and experimenters have found ways to test that even though the animals can’t talk about what they know. What if children under four years old experience and use metacognition, but are just bad at realizing it and letting anyone know?