'I donate to the Guardian, so I'm paying you." So begins Chet Faliszek as we sit down to lunch in one of the San Francisco hotels that satellite around the Game Developers Conference. One of the industry's most respected comedy writers and lead developers, the 53-year-old is here to recruit developers to his new studio Stray Bombay, named after his pet cat Boris. With Riot Games veteran and AI expert Dr Kimberly Voll, he is leading a studio that will focus on smart cooperative video games, made for (they say) smart cooperative players. It quickly becomes clear just how much cooperation has been a vital part of Faliszek's life, from pivotal relationships growing up in Parma, Cleveland, to a comedy writing double-act at infamous early-internet website Old Man Murray, to his run of successful collaborations at a behemoth developer, Valve. With every key moment in his life, he cites the generosity of another person, a pattern which appears to have informed his entire approach to games development, and the sorts of games he wants to make. At 17, in the early 80s, Faliszek had dropped out of a computer-science college course. "I was taking a course in [programming language] Fortran," he explains, "and one time I tripped and dropped my punchcards.

The Vive Pro Eye is the next evolution of HTC's virtual reality headset line, and its shiniest new feature is integrated eye-tracking. HTC America General Manager Dan O'Brien revealed the Vive Pro Eye at CES, explaining how built-in eye-tracking can benefit industries from auto technology to fitness and gaming. Integrated eye-tracking enables foveated rendering, a technique that creates sharper, more realistic images by blurring the scenery around the user's gaze. This means there's less power being spent on things that users aren't actually looking at. Integrated eye-tracking removes the need for controllers in certain scenarios, such as menu navigation, according to HTC.

The software connects a robot's arms and grippers as well as its onboard cameras and sensors to off-the-shelf virtual reality hardware via the internet. Using handheld controllers, users can control the position of the robot's arms to perform intricate manipulation tasks just by moving their own arms. Users can step into the robot's metal skin and get a first-person view of the environment, or can walk around the robot to survey the scene in the third person -- whichever is easier for accomplishing the task at hand. The data transferred between the robot and the virtual reality unit is compact enough to be sent over the internet with minimal lag, making it possible for users to guide robots from great distances. "We think this could be useful in any situation where we need some deft manipulation to be done, but where people shouldn't be," said David Whitney, a graduate student at Brown who co-led the development of the system.

Sunday evening, one of Uber's autonomous SUVs struck a woman who later died at the hospital as a result of her injuries. It appears to be the first time a pedestrian has died after a collision with an autonomous vehicle, and as a result, Uber has temporarily suspended all its testing. While an investigation is ongoing, the Tempe police chief provided an update based on video from the car itself, and said "it's very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway." Still, if there's a chance for widespread adoption of self-driving car technology, the amount of transparency Uber displays right now will be important. The idea of a data-science company no one has ever heard of attempting to poke around in a country's collective psyche sounds like a plot out of Black Mirror, and yet here we are.

When HTC unveiled its higher-end Vive Pro VR system back at CES, the company was suspiciously quiet about the dual cameras on this VR headset: there were no related demos, and the company reps remained tight-lipped. The smart-ass in me assumed that based on the similar looks, this module was probably a variant of the inside-out tracking sensor on the standalone Vive Focus, while others speculated that it would bring AR capability. Well, today we finally have an answer: it's actually a depth sensor, and it'll apparently enable basic hand tracking without additional hardware. This new bit of information came straight from the horse's mouth. By that I mean HTC Vive's Vice President Raymond Pao, who I bumped into at the company's Shenzhen event earlier this week -- it was celebrating the commencement of the Vive Focus' shipment, as well as introducing the Vive Pro to the Chinese media and partners.

File photo - A man takes a selfie in front of the CES logo during the 2018 CES in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. Jan. 10, 2018. While great laptops and 2-in-1s come out every year, we don't see significant innovation taking place in computing on an annual basis. But this year at CES, we saw some upending of the standard quo on a number of levels. The trends we saw from the show floor have us both curious and excited about the future of computing. Some will undoubtedly end up in dead ends -- and others will probably become the new status quo in just a few years.

There are plenty of ways virtual reality headsets could get better. They could offer higher-resolution screens (like the new Vive Pro), a wider field of view and improved built-in tracking sensors. But another feature might be even more essential: eye tracking. It's not a new concept -- we've been following FOVE's eye-tracking headset, as well as 7Invensun's Vive accessory, for a few years now. But it seems more important than ever as consumer VR winds up.

Cuddly robots just do not want to work for their corporate masters at the CES gadget show this year. Earlier in the day, LG's voice-activated counter-top bot CLOi experienced an early-morning hearing problem on stage. Then Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai experienced his own lack of robot love. Sony announced in November that it was reincarnating its Aibo pet dog. On Monday, Hirai braved the CES stage with what was supposed to be a working model, explaining that the dog-bot would soon become a member of the family -- at least for those lucky enough to order one.

HTC is upgrading its headsets for exploring virtual worlds. HTC says the new Vive Pro has better resolution and audio and weighs less than its existing VR model. The Taiwanese company hasn't yet revealed cost or shipping dates. The Vive competes with Facebook's Oculus among high-end systems. They require powerful personal computers to run and haven't been as widely used as cheaper headsets that use smartphones, including Samsung's Gear VR and Google's Daydream.

The virtual reality industry is exploding. Practically everywhere you look, VR is flooding into the mainstream consciousness at an increasingly rapid rate. Huge sums of money are being pumped in for content creation, and it's all thanks to 360-degree video. Let's be honest, we would not have the level of public interest in VR that we have now without easily accessible content. Reaching millions of individuals meant that the processing capabilities to power an experience needed to be'dumbed down.'