Category: Tech News

• Sony Joins Virtual Reality Race with New Headset for PlayStation

  Inspired by Oculus Rift, Sony is adding virtual reality to the PlayStation 4.

  Sony unveiled its long-rumored virtual reality headset on Tuesday at the 2014 Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, stood in front of a packed auditorium of game developers and said: “Virtual reality is the next innovation from PlayStation that could shape the future of video games.”

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• Apps by the Dashboard Light

  New cars will soon come with high-bandwidth connections and app stores.

  Starting next month, many car buyers will be getting a novel feature: Internet connections with speeds similar to those on the fastest smartphones—and even a few early dashboard-based apps, engineered to be as dumbed-down as possible.

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• Spying Is Bad for Business

  Can we trust an Internet that’s become a weapon of governments?

  Following a one-day summit in Brasilia this February, negotiators from Brazil and Europe reached a deal to lay a $185 million fiber-optic cable spanning the 3,476 miles between Fortaleza and Lisbon. The cable will be built by a consortium of Spanish and Brazilian companies. According to Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, it will “protect freedom.” No longer will South America’s Internet traffic get routed through Miami, where American spies might see it.

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• Look, Smartphone: No Hands!

  Controlling an iPhone or Android phone with just your voice and a noise-cancelling headset is doable, but frustrating.

  I usually enjoy making fun of people who walk around wearing Bluetooth headsets, seemingly talking to themselves. So of course I felt like a hypocrite last week wandering around downtown San Francisco doing exactly that.

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• SpaceX Set to Launch the World’s First Reusable Booster

  SpaceX’s reusable booster rocket, the first of its kind, could pave the way for radically cheaper access to space.

  On Sunday, if all goes well, Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, will achieve a spaceflight first.

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• The Numbers Behind Japan’s Renewed Embrace of Nuclear

  The Fukushima disaster led Japan to shut down nuclear power plants, but three years of rising costs and carbon dioxide emissions are forcing it to reverse course.

  In the three years since the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Japan has tried to replace nuclear energy with fossil fuels. But the costs have proved prohibitive, and now the government is convinced it must turn its reactors back on.

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• Entrepreneur Hopes to Use Interference to Improve the Mobile Internet

  WebTV’s creator thinks his forthcoming wireless technology will give us faster, better mobile Internet access.

  Ten years ago, when most of us still had no idea what a smartphone was, Steve Perlman was contemplating a future in which we’d be watching so many YouTube videos over cellular networks that the radio frequency bands available to wireless carriers would get clogged up.

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• Virtual Reality Startups Look Back to the Future

  Thirty years after the first wave of virtual reality, new startups are determined to take it mainstream.

  It’s been almost 30 years since the computer scientist Jaron Lanier formed VPL Research, the first company to sell the high-tech goggles and gloves that once defined humanity’s concept of where technology might soon take our species. In the late 1980s, a person could pull on a $100,000 head-mounted display and electronic gauntlet and fool their brain into thinking they had stepped inside the simulated space rendered on the screen.

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• Artificial Organs May Finally Get a Blood Supply

  Artificial tissue has always lacked a key ingredient: blood vessels. A new 3-D printing technique seems poised to change that.

  In what may be a critical breakthrough for creating artificial organs, Harvard researchers say they have created tissue interlaced with blood vessels.

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• Google Glass Still Needs a Killer App

  Glass is still a pain to use, but a few apps reveal what it could become.

  Aside from the fact that it’s not yet publicly available, there are plenty of reasons to not wear Google Glass even if you get the chance. To name just a few: it’s expensive, it looks and feels weird, it doesn’t work that well, and, whether you’re at home or walking down the street, people will stare at you and the small, prismatic display on your face.

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