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Virtual reality content is inherently difficult to advertise, especially when its targeted hardware doesn't exist in the wild. You might show a full-screen 2D simulation of what a headset-wearer might see, or you might use goofy-looking footage of people wearing monstrous, face-covering hardware, but neither of those are great at simulating the VR feeling.

VR-game screenshots are even worse, which the creators of VR music-rhythm game Audioshield conceded while trying to promote its upcoming title last month. I gushed at length about how fun the game was, but the screens that creator Dylan Fitterer provided me didn't match my words. Really, they were garbage.

On Monday, the day of the HTC Vive's retail pre-order kick-off, Fitterer finally made a preview video worthy of the Audioshield hype—and I imagine more VR content creators will start to copy Fitterer's impressive mixed-footage approach for future previews. In this trailer, a 2D camera has been set up behind the silhouetted player, while Audioshield's content—an endless barrage of colored orbs dropping from the sky—appears in the shot as if the player was actually standing inside this virtual world. Helping the effect is the additional rendering of the game's colored, handheld shields, which appear in the game as if you're holding them.

A Google autonomous vehicle struck a bus in California on Valentine’s Day, according to an incident report (PDF) published by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) on Monday. Google Automotive, the branch of Alphabet that handles self-driving car research, filed the incident report in accordance with California law.

No one was hurt, Google says.

According to the report, the vehicle was in autonomous mode and in the far right lane of a main thoroughfare in the California city of Mountain View. As it approached a red light, the car automatically signaled that it would make a right turn. Cars in the same lane ahead of the autonomous vehicle were waiting at the red light to proceed straight, so the autonomous vehicle got to the right of the lane to pass those other cars, but it sensed some sandbags around a storm drain in the road, and it stopped.

There can't be many job titles out there cooler than "futurist." And earlier this week, I sat down with Sheryl Connelly, who holds that position at the Ford Motor Company.

Connelly has been with Ford for two decades now, spending a few years in marketing before moving on to cover global trends and futuring 12 years ago. Her job isn't to think about the cars and trucks of tomorrow, though. "The company has no shortage of subject matter experts in that area," she told me. Rather, it's her job to look beyond the industry, identifying how patterns and forces in the wider world will influence consumer behavior. "Those are typically slow-moving, deeply societal-rooted trends, things like aging population, increasing urbanization. But we also try to engage more with the public about micro trends (that last two to five years rather than two to five decades)."

Ford recently released its 2016 trends, a list built after a series of workshops and consultations with experts around the world. Connelly said that when work began on the current collection last year, she saw there was a lot of disillusionment out there—the economy, a rise in global violence, widespread attention to police misconduct here in the US, and so on.

Researchers have uncovered what appears to be newly developed Mac malware from HackingTeam, a discovery that's prompting speculation that the disgraced malware-as-a-service provider has reemerged since last July's hack that spilled gigabytes worth of the group's private e-mail and source code.

The sample was uploaded on February 4 to the Google-owned VirusTotal scanning service, which at the time showed it wasn't detected by any of the major antivirus programs. (Ahead of this report on Monday, it was detected by 10 of 56 AV services.) A technical analysis published Monday morning by SentinelOne security researcher Pedro Vilaça showed that the installer was last updated in October or November, and an embedded encryption key is dated October 16, three months after the HackingTeam compromise.

The sample installs a copy of HackingTeam's signature Remote Code Systems compromise platform, leading Vilaça to conclude that the outfit's comeback mostly relies on old, largely unexceptional source code, despite the group vowing in July that it would return with new code.

Two British brothers convicted of selling marijuana are being sent to prison for two years after they mocked the judge on Facebook immediately after their court appearance. The judge had handed them two-year suspend sentences. The brothers, from Accrington, showed remorse when they appeared for sentencing earlier this month, but they sang a different tune on Facebook.

About an hour after a Burnley Crown Court judge issued the suspended sentences, one of the brothers, Daniel Sledden, 27, took to Facebook telling judge Beverley Lunt to suck his you-know-what. Younger brother Samuel, 22, wrote Lunt on Facebook "up ur ass aha nice 2year suspended," according to Sky News.

The elder brother apologized on Facebook, to no avail. "I want to say how sorry I am for what I wrote about Judge Lunt and my sentence," he wrote.

As we reported late last year, the scandal plaguing Volkswagen over its emissions-cheating hasn't had negative consequences for the group's halo brand Bugatti. It was widely expected that the scandal and its possible $40 billion impact on VW Group would result in the cancellation of the replacement for the Bugatti Veyron. Thankfully, its replacement, the Chiron, was unveiled formally to the world Monday in Geneva.

Named after a prewar Monegasque racing driver, Louis Chiron (pronounced shi'ron), the new car will cost about $2.6 million (£1.9 million) before tax. Behind the cockpit is a reworked version of the 8L turbocharged W16 engine (four banks of four cylinders with two common crankshafts), which will propel the all-wheel drive monster to 261mph (420km/h).

But it's no stripped-out racer—as you might expect for a marque renowned for building the ultimate in four-wheel excess, the interior is a riot of leather and machined aluminum. Expect it to be as easy to drive at regular speeds as the old car, too—it's said the Veyron was an easy drive even for one's grandmother as long as she didn't floor it.