Virtual Reality

I spent last week at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference, and I expect this will be the last year it will go by that name. The company has evolved significantly during the last decade with robotics, artificial intelligence, and even complete workstations and servers taking it well beyond its GPU root...

Facebook unveiled its Oculus Rift S virtual reality headset at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. It will be available this spring for $399. With the Rift 2, Oculus "is following some of the trends set by Vive -- inside-out tracking, incremental improvement, and focus on comfort," obse...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has defended the company's $479 million contract with the U.S. military -- a commitment that some Microsoft employees strongly opposed. While pledging to engage with employees and consider Microsoft's role as a corporate citizen, Nadella said the company would not withhol...

The Mobile World Congress is the annual event where everyone who hates Apple goes to grouse about their profits and point out Apple's lack of real progress. That's pretty much everyone who is anyone, aside from Apple itself. Much like CES often does, MWC tends to spin pretty hard toward the "I hate ...

The next upgrade of Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 12.2, will come with an annoying surprise for VR and AR developers. It reportedly will block Web access to the accelerometer and gyroscope in Apple mobile devices by default. That means users will have to grant permission to any Web apps or si...

Year over year, we see the numbers. In 2017, e-commerce represented 49 percent of all total retail growth, up 16 percent from the previous year. If this year's $119.99 billion holiday shopping season spend indicates anything, it's that 2018 is projected to be yet another banner year for commerce. It...

Nvidia has announced a breakthrough in 3D rendering research that may have far-reaching ramifications for future virtual worlds. A team led by Nvidia VP Bryan Catanzaro discovered a way to use a neural network to render synthetic 3D environments in real time, using a model trained on real-world vide...

When the Oculus Rift launched in 2014, industry stakeholders speculated that the new, high-end in-home virtual reality headset would disrupt the entertainment industry. Just four years later, the technology has reached a crossroads, still lacking adoption by mainstream consumers. In a recent survey,...

This year I thought I'd list my favorite unusual products as gift ideas. I'm a big fan of products most people don't have that solve a specific work problem, as well as those that could make your life easier, more comfortable or more fun. I like to give gifts that people actually would use. In some ...

Mae Jemison recently shared some illuminating recollections of her experiences as an astronaut, but they were neither the starting point nor the ending point of our conversation. This extraordinary woman's career is too packed with present and future endeavors to dwell very long on her stellar past....

Customers are crucial to a successful business. They can be one-off customers or repeat buyers. Ideally, a business wants a mix of both. Problems arise when marketing tactics fail to attract either type, which is why customer engagement is so critical in today's hypercompetitive e-commerce environme...

When I read the book Ready Player One, I really got excited about the future of virtual reality, but the movie really didn't do the book justice. Some blockbusters have succeeded in interspersing computer graphics with real people and making it hard to tell the difference. Still, a totally rendered ...

Nvidia has announced a powerful new graphics architecture with the potential to blur the line between virtual and actual reality. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the new chips at the company's SIGGRAPH 2018 event in Vancouver, Canada. The Turing architecture enables a new generation of hybrid rende...

Sony gave PlayStation fans a hefty sampling of what's coming to its gaming consoles this year at E3. It gave them a long look at a relatively few offerings. "Sony's E3 event was a break with tradition, an experiment to test the way it could present its first-party output to the media," said Piers Ha...