As soon as we picked it up, it became clear that Minecraft on the GearVR is a winning combination. The immersive world and lively aesthetic are only more appealing when your field of view expands, but the one thing missing was the movement. Now, it looks like the Virtuix Omni is solving that with support for Minecraft for Gear VR. The omnidirectional treadmill lets you walk and run around your virtual block-based worlds with your own feet, and it couldn’t be easier.
While there are ways to play Minecraft on the Vive with a bit of hacking, the GearVR version is fully supported, with handheld Bluetooth controller support for actions and movement. There’s barely any setup to include the Omni, either. The game runs right out of the box with no tweaking, according to Virtuix. That’s thanks to the Omni’s Bluetooth controller emulation, which provides a natural sense of walking or running without motion sickness.
Which is a blessing, because that’s one of the main complaints with games like Minecraft on any VR headset. As the world around you spins and moves past you, but you stay still, it causes a sense of disassociation. This in turn leads to dizziness and even nausea. It’s not as prevalent in room-scale VR, so being able to physically run and move in-game at the same pace should alleviate some of the effects of that disassociation.
Virtuix started shipping finished Omni setups to its Kickstarter backers in December 2015, so if you planned far enough ahead, you should be able to boot this up right now. If not, you can always pre-order an Omni from the Virtuix site for $700, but keep in mind it also works with headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, depending on the game.
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?