While it’s not quite like what you’d find on the USS Enterprise, Nvidia showed off its Holodeck virtual reality experience at CES 2018.
Nvidia Senior Technical Marketing Analyst Joe Vivoli gave us a demo of the software at the Nvidia CES booth. Our first question was, naturally, just what is Holodeck? You won’t be loading up life-like environments to get lost in; instead, users will be able to engage in collaborative design while in VR. “The idea is you bring in a very complex model into virtual reality space,” Vivoli said. “You and your buddies get into your VR headsets, and you work together to do some design mockups on a very intricate model.”
These models can be anything from 3D models you’ve made, to CAD files directly from a manufacturer for super-fine detail. Holodeck currently supports 3Ds Max and Maya, two of the most popular 3D modeling programs.
The demo at the Nvidia booth featured the model of a Volkswagon bus that had been scanned into a 3D program, the loaded into Holodeck, which showed off just how finite you can get with the models. You will be able to get as finite as the literal nuts and bolts. This has the potential to make something like automotive design, which could be done with people across the world simultaneously through a virtual space.
Holodeck is exciting, but it is currently hard to get your hands on. VR programs are known for having high hardware requirements, but Holodeck is particularly resource-intensive. The software on display on the show floor was running on a PC equipped with a Titan XP graphics card, Nvidia’s most powerful GPU to date. You will at the very least need GTX 1080 Ti, which is the second most powerful graphics card currently made by Nvidia.
Holodeck is currently in open-beta early access. If you are curious, you can head over to Nvidia’s official Holodeck page and sign up to get access — just make sure you have the specs to run it first.
Be sure to check out the rest of our CES for our news about VR.
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).