EMERGING TECH NEWS
HTC EXPLORES BRAINCONTROLLED VR IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD.
While HTC has been funding novel VR projects through the Vive X project since 2016, its latest investment pushes the boundaries of VR further than ever before with Neurable, a company that wants to ditch the controllers in lieu of a brain signal control scheme. Neurable already has a working prototype of the hardware and has demonstrated it with a custom game called Awakening where you have to escape a room using your telekinetic powers.
VALVE’S TRIPLE-A VR TITLES ARE STILL ON THE WAY UNKNOWN GAMES STILL IN THE PIPELINE.
While it’s been some time since Valve’s president Gabe Newell confirmed the company was working on three games for its VR platform, there’s still no details on exactly what those may be or when we’ll see them. Vive GM for the Americas, Dan O’Brien, told Rolling Stone in December that the company behind Half-Life,
Portal, Counter-Strike and Team Fortress is still “very committed to delivering on that promise”.
EVE ONLINE CLOSES VR DEVELOPMENT WING THE ORIGINAL VR DOGFIGHTING GAME GOES TO VALHALLA.
What was arguably the most anticipated VR title to launch alongside the Oculus Rift in 2016, Eve: Valkyrie seems bound to VR in the same way as Horizon: Zero Dawn is to PlayStation or Super Mario is to Nintendo. That connection is in part why it’s so devastating that Eve: Online is shuttering its VR division. Even just a few minutes of the beautifully animated, fast-paced space dogfighter was enough to make us very excited (and a little nauseous). Now we’re sad.
SAMSUNG OPENS AN AI RESEARCH HUB KOREAN TECH MANUFACTURER LOOKS TO LEARN MACHINE.
As the likes of Google, Apple and Huawei all integrate AI chips into their respective 2017 flagship phones, Samsung is a little behind the times with third parties expecting to bring their own AI chips to the table on the S9, at the earliest. To combat this, the South Korean tech giant announced in November that it’s setting up a dedicated AI research centre. Samsung will have to work hard to be competitive against Apple and Google who have been playing with AI assistants since 2010 and 2012.