The VR community is in an awkward place. HTC Vive headsets are shipping out to consumers as fast as they can order them, but the medium is really searching for a game it can sink it’s teeth into. At E3 this year, Bethesda announced that it wants to provide just that with Fallout 4 for the Vive.
E3 2016: Titanfall 2 goes meta in multiplayer mode
While the headsets are technically impressive, both the Vive and the Rift have been lacking the sort of sprawling, time-sucking titles that gamers are used to. Yes, you can play quite a few rounds of Hover Junkers without getting bored, and Audioshield’s pulsing rhythms will have you scouring Soundcloud for deep cuts, but they aren’t the kind of titles that will have you coming back for hundreds of hours.
But Fallout 4 will, and Bethesda is going to snatch that bottle of Nuka-Cola and quaff it right there. With the help of the HTC Vive’s room-scale capabilities and motion controllers, players will be slicing down super-mutants or assigning settlers with a flick of the wrist. A lot of the Fallout mechanics seem well suited to virtual reality too, like settlement building, melee combat, and VATS.
Among the big questions that remain about the upcoming VR port, the most important is how Bethesda will handle movement. We’ve seen games that do it with a teleporting function, like Valve’s The Lab, and it works quite well, but only with limited movement. A first person view might make users nauseous when running or moving around a lot, but the potential of a virtual pip-boy is certainly intriguing.
We’ve got boots on the ground in LA for E3 covering everything from the latest virtual reality announcements to the smallest indie games. You can bet all your caps we’ll be trying to charge around the virtual wasteland before the game’s wider release in 2017.
After five years with Apple silicon, from the original M1 MacBook Air to the M5 MacBook Air released earlier this year, I've watched these chips mature not just on the spec sheet, but in real-world workflows and overall efficiency.
The new M6 chip might sound like a routine generational upgrade, but it's the company's first chip built on a 2nm manufacturing process, which brings meaningful improvements over previous Apple chips.
Gemini Notebook’s mobile app now has a built-in recorder for capturing lectures and meetings as sources. You can record directly where you’ll use the material, skipping the separate recording app and the file upload afterward.
Google announced the feature on X, highlighting classroom lectures and team meetings as potential uses. It also works for capturing your own thoughts, so you can talk through an idea and bring that explanation into your notebook while it’s still fresh.
In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?