You’re running out of time to get Meta’s best virtual reality headset for a lower price. Almost two years after its release, Meta (formerly Oculus) has announced the Quest 2 is getting a price hike from $299.99 to $399.99. New customers will get one of the best VR games free with their Quest 2, but that hardly makes up for such a substantial increase at this late stage. The Oculus blog (yes, that’s still what it’s called) says that , but that’s no surprise considering high inflation around the globe. As a result, the company is boosting the price by $100 starting on August 1st.
Mars is a world of extremes. Not only does it have the largest volcano in the solar system (Olympus Mons), but it’s also home to the deepest known canyon, called Valles Marineris. The European Space Agency (ESA) recently captured new images of this grander canyon. The ESA didn’t need a fancy new mission to snap these images either. You can thank the venerable Mars Express orbiter, which has been in service for almost 20 years. Mars Express captured the stunning new images on its 23,123th orbit of the red planet. Using its High Resolution Stereo Camera, the probe captured so much detail the images could be confused with aerial shots.
The International Space Station was conceived and built as a symbol of post-Cold War cooperation between America and Russia. And for thirty years, it’s been sailing peacefully in low-earth orbit. However, all that is about to change. Yuri Borisov, the new head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, has finally put paid to his predecessor’s threats that Russia will leave the ISS after 2024 2028. The reason for the strikeout is because a few days after announcing that it would no-fooling leave the ISS by 2024, Roscosmos is now saying it will stick around until 2028. “The decision to leave the station after 2024 has been made,” said Borisov in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this week.
Most companies are waiting to see if the comes to be, but Facebook parent company Meta is trying to get in on the ground floor. Mark Zuckerberg is so sure of the benefits of the metaverse that he changed the name of his company to signal his commitment. Today, the metaverse is little more than a collection of ideas and predictions, but the VR-based Horizon Worlds is probably the closest thing we have right now, and Meta is making a big change to the content policy. Going forward, developers will be allowed to create “mature” content for the platform.
(Photo: Randy Fath/Unsplash)A relatively normal—well, as normal as human-vs-robot chess can be—chess game went awry last week when a 7-year-old boy’s robotic opponent broke the boy’s finger. The 7-year-old, as Christopher by the Russian news outlet Baza, is said to be one of Moscow’s best chess players under nine years of age. His opponent on July 19 was Chessbot, an artificial intelligence-equipped robot trained to simultaneously play up to three games of chess. Christopher was challenging Chessbot alongside two other human players when the machine grabbed hold of the boy’s finger and wouldn’t let go. By the time Christopher got free, his finger was broken.
The first Google-blessed tablet launched in 2011, and now more than a decade later, Google has rediscovered tablet apps. After neglecting large-screen devices for most of the intervening years, the company has announced new, tablet-friendly features in some of its most popular apps. Google itself is largely responsible for the dearth of Android tablets. When it gave up on tablets in the wake of the , it also stopped optimizing apps for the large screen, making an already bad problem that much worse. Whereas Apple has worked to standardize large-screen interfaces and provide developers with the tools to develop on the iPad, Google focused Android almost entirely on phones.
Western Digital (WD) is about to get some stiff competition from its main rival Seagate. The two companies control the majority of the spinning media market these days, and have been one-upping each other lately when it comes to storage capacity. WD recently took the capacity crown with its new . Now Seagate is set to leapfrog that number with 30TB hard drives it says will arrive a year from now. The secret to Seagate’s newfound aerial density is its second-generation Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording technology, or HAMR. It’s been using its first generation HAMR since 2018, but never on a high-volume product.
Even though a lot of us are galavanting around and enjoying summer, Intel is hard at work prepping Raptor Lake for its impending launch. This means more CPUs are getting into the hands of system builders, allowing for more benchmarks to “leak” to the public. The latest numbers to appear online show what kind of performance boost one might see by going from DDR4 memory to DDR5. Like Alder Lake, Raptor Lake supports both memory types, but this is the first time we can recall benchmarks being run on the same motherboard, albeit with different memory. Overall the DDR5 platform saw an almost 20 percent uplift in multi-core performance in Geekbench 5.
Nvidia has been tinkering with cloud gaming longer than just about anyone, but its GeForce Now service is often overlooked in the era of Xbox Cloud Gaming and Stadia. If you’ve already got a library of games, GeForce Now could be the best way to stream them, particularly now that it supports higher frame rates and smoother gameplay on Android phones. Nvidia has announced that all Android phones with 120 Hz screens can now stream at 120 FPS. GeForce Now is similar to Stadia and the other platforms — the games are rendered on a server, and the video streams to your chosen device.
