Sundance is one of the most well-known film festivals around, and increasingly we’ve seen an influx of virtual reality content shown at recent installments. This year, Los Angeles-based startup Positron used the event to announce the next generation of its VR motion chair, Voyager.
Voyager is intended to offer an unparalleled experience that adds to the immersive quality of VR content. While seated, users can rotate 360 degrees without ever standing up, and can recline through a 35-degree range of motion, according to a report from Road to VR.
The Voyager chair houses a PC capable of running VR content, that features a GTX 1070 GPU. Several different units can be synchronized, so that a group of viewers can enjoy the same content at the same time.
Many VR experiences allow the user to turn their head to look around their environment. The Voyager is designed such that they can do so, while remaining in a comfortable seated position, allowing for longer viewing sessions.
The first generation was present at Sundance 2017, and later used to facilitate the VR experience that accompanied last year’s reboot of The Mummy. This year, Positron brought an upgraded version that was made a VR experience called Space Explorers: A New Dawn all the more immersive.
At Sundance 2018, Positron announced that it had secured $1.4 million in seed funding for the next generation of the Voyager chair, inking deals with Other World Computing and Lazar Ventures. Jennifer Rundell, the company’s chief operating officer and founder, stated that this money will be used to add advanced functionality like six degrees of freedom tracking, scent, wind, and motion tracking.
While hardcore VR enthusiasts might like a Voyager for their living room, Positron’s focus is on public venues like cinemas, hotels, museums, and airports. It can be expensive to build a comprehensive VR setup from scratch, so it’s long been predicted that offering up access to the tech in this manner could be one way to grow the medium as a whole.
Of course, content is still key — without VR experiences that people want to pay for, it’ll be difficult to encourage businesses to make that initial investment in the hardware.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.