Versus Say More Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects Creator Playbook In My Bag Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Switch Off Mashable Voices All Series Valve's VR headset has arrived. But, should you get it? Matt Binder joined Mashable's tech vertical in 2018, where he covers social media, tech policy, cybersecurity, online scams, cryptocurrency, AI, creator news, weird tech, and other related tech beats. The Steam Frame VR headset is here. What do the reviewers think?

Polyarc, the developer behind virtual reality games Moss and Moss: Book II, has closed, according to a new post on the studio's LinkedIn page. Based on a reverse recruiting sheet shared alongside the announcement, at least 29 members of the studio's staff are now looking for work. "After nearly 12 years riding the joyous rollercoaster of emotions that is making video games, our time together has come to an end," Polyarc says. "As we wind down active development, we are saying our farewells to each other. Working together over all of these years has been an honor. Bringing surprise and delight to those who played our games has been a privilege. Thank you to everyone at Polyarc, our work is now finished."

Abstract--Virtual Reality (VR) has rapidly become a mainstream platform for gaming and interactive experiences, yet ensuring the quality, safety, and appropriateness of VR content remains a pressing challenge. Traditional human-based quality assurance is labor-intensive and cannot scale with the industry's rapid growth. While automated testing has been applied to traditional 2D and 3D games, extending it to VR introduces unique difficulties due to high-dimensional sensory inputs and strict real-time performance requirements. VRScout learns from human demonstrations using an enhanced Action Chunking Transformer that predicts multi-step action sequences. This enables our agent to capture higher-level strategies and generalize across diverse environments. T o balance responsiveness and precision, we introduce a dynamically adjustable sliding horizon that adapts the agent's temporal context at runtime. We evaluate VRScout on commercial VR titles and show that it achieves expert-level performance with only limited training data, while maintaining real-time inference at 60 FPS on consumer-grade hardware. These results position VRScout as a practical and scalable framework for automated VR game testing, with direct applications in both quality assurance and safety auditing.

Emotion understanding is a complex process that involves multiple components. The ability to recognise emotions not only leads to new context awareness methods but also enhances system interaction's effectiveness by perceiving and expressing emotions. Despite the attention to discrete and dimensional models, neuroscientific evidence supports those emotions as being complex and multi-faceted. One framework that resonated well with such findings is the Component Process Model (CPM), a theory that considers the complexity of emotions with five interconnected components: appraisal, expression, motivation, physiology and feeling. However, the relationship between CPM and discrete emotions has not yet been fully explored. Therefore, to better understand emotions underlying processes, we operationalised a data-driven approach using interactive Virtual Reality (VR) games and collected multimodal measures (self-reports, physiological and facial signals) from 39 participants. We used Machine Learning (ML) methods to identify the unique contributions of each component to emotion differentiation. Our results showed the role of different components in emotion differentiation, with the model including all components demonstrating the most significant contribution. Moreover, we found that at least five dimensions are needed to represent the variation of emotions in our dataset. These findings also have implications for using VR environments in emotion research and highlight the role of physiological signals in emotion recognition within such environments.

Researchers have used machine learning approaches to identify motion sickness in VR experience. These approaches demand an accurately-labeled, real-world, and diverse dataset for high accuracy and generalizability. As a starting point to address this need, we introduce `VR.net', a dataset offering approximately 12-hour gameplay videos from ten real-world games in 10 diverse genres. For each video frame, a rich set of motion sickness-related labels, such as camera/object movement, depth field, and motion flow, are accurately assigned. Building such a dataset is challenging since manual labeling would require an infeasible amount of time. Instead, we utilize a tool to automatically and precisely extract ground truth data from 3D engines' rendering pipelines without accessing VR games' source code. We illustrate the utility of VR.net through several applications, such as risk factor detection and sickness level prediction. We continuously expand VR.net and envision its next version offering 10X more data than the current form. We believe that the scale, accuracy, and diversity of VR.net can offer unparalleled opportunities for VR motion sickness research and beyond.

Virtual reality gamers (VR game) who finished it faster than their fellow gamers also have higher levels of general intelligence and processing capacity. This was the result of a study conducted by the University of Cologne, the University of Liechtenstein and Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences. The results also indicate that virtual reality games can be useful supplementary human resource management tools in companies for predicting the job performance of an applicant. The study "Intelligence at play: game-based assessment using a virtual-reality application" by Markus Weinmann of the University of Cologne and his fellow scientists was published in the journal Virtual Reality. Several studies have already shown that video games may indicate or even help to develop intellectual and cognitive abilities.

It's also now listed in the DLSS Unreal Engine changelog. Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) uses the Tensor cores in GeForce RTX graphics cards to power a detail-enhancing neural network. Nvidia claims the result is superior to native 4K rendering. "AI upscaling" algorithms have become popular in the last few years, with some websites even letting users upload any image on their PC or phone to be upscaled. Given enough training data, they can produce a significantly more detailed output than traditional upscaling, though the algorithm is technically only "hallucinating" what it expects the missing detail should look like.

Apple has acquired Spaces, a VR company that offered both VR experiences and, after the pandemic hit, a way of bringing your virtual avatar into Zoom meetings. Protocol quotes an unnamed Apple spokesperson offering the usual boilerplate confirmation, saying that it had nothing else to add. Spaces is, or was, a company that started out offering free-roam VR experiences, similar to what The Void offered in those heady pre-pandemic times. It was spun out of DreamWorks, and its first project was a Terminator-themed VR game for up to four players. But the most interesting thing about it was the facial tracking it used to try and make its VR games more immersive than the competition.

CHIBA – At this year's Tokyo Game Show, the big draw was next-generation 5G networking -- setting pulses racing with the prospect of a radically more immersive gaming experience. Offering data transmission speeds around 100 times faster than 4G, 5G is expected to enable more seamless imagery -- particularly lower latency, more vivid images -- and sharper motion. Industry experts say it will dramatically improve the quality of augmented and virtual reality games. "It was very smooth, responsive and consistent," said Omar Alshiji, a 23-year-old game designer from Bahrain, after trying out the fighting game Tekken at the NTT Docomo Inc. booth. The major mobile carrier installed 5G base stations at its booth this year, making the high-speed network available at the show. The four-day industry event, held in the city of Chiba, ended Sunday.

CHIBA – Next-generation 5G networking was the big draw at Tokyo Game Show 2019, setting pulses racing with the prospect of a radically more immersive gaming experience. Offering data transmission speeds around 100 times faster than 4G, 5G is expected to enable more seamless imagery with lower latency, more vivid images and sharper motion. Industry experts say it will dramatically improve the quality of augmented and virtual reality games. "It was very smooth, responsive and consistent," said Omar Alshiji, a 23-year-old game designer from Bahrain, after trying out the fighting game "Tekken" at the NTT Docomo Inc. booth at the four-day game show in Chiba. The major mobile carrier installed 5G base stations at its booth this year, making the high-speed network available at the show. "My country does not have 5G, only 4G so I wanted to try it.