HTC Vive

Audi has revealed that the holoride tech for back-seat passengers demonstrated at CES 2019 will roll out to select vehicles from June. The platform adapts content to the car's movement, transforming a boring commute into a rolling VR theme park.

Autron VR has just launched in Melbourne, Australia, with a range of shooting games, escape rooms and other VR experiences, all tailored for groups. New Atlas went hands on to check it out – and may have ruined regular escape rooms for ourselves.

After briefly teasing it at CES back in January, HTC has now fully whipped the covers off the new VR headset, the Vive Cosmos. The new headset features inside-out tracking, improved displays, and a modular design.

Our sense of smell is now being used to help sell the illusion of virtual reality with the FeelReal VR Mask, which not only wafts certain scents your way but can also simulate rain, heat and wind on your face.

The virtual reality playing field is spreading out to fill all niches, and HTC is helping speed that along by getting its open source platform Vive Wave out to third party companies. Chinese manufacturer Shadow Creator is the latest to jump on board, unveiling the Shadow VR standalone headset.

​One of the more fun exhibits at this year's fairly dry Digility AR/VR expo in Cologne, Germany was this VR rock climbing wall game, which lets you climb around in a range of weird virtual and photo-realistic environments to help you safely conquer your fear of heights.

​​It has a critical average of just 56 on Metacritic, with writers praising the visuals and atmospherics but bemoaning the slow pace and lack of variety in its gameplay. More than two years after its release we revisit Adrift: a much-overlooked and underrated and misunderstood astronaut sim.​

Training firefighters can be dangerous, costly and time-consuming. To help train firefighters more often and more easily, a new virtual reality simulator called the FLAIM Trainer has been developed, made up of an HTC Vive VR headset, haptics systems and a vest that tracks the trainee’s vital signs.

VR is great at immersing us in gigantic worlds that seem to go on forever – until you bump into the living room wall. Now computer scientists have developed a system that tricks you into walking around in circles in the real world, while thinking you’re moving longer distances in the virtual world.

The New Atlas crew last tried Zero Latency, the free-roaming virtual reality system, two years ago. Now the tech has improved, the game library has expanded and there are 18 different sites in nine countries. So we thought it was about time we went in for a rematch – and we were not disappointed.

HTC has made a few major Vive announcements at CES 2018. The upgraded Vive Pro headset significantly boosts the resolution and adds built-in headphones, while a new wireless adapter frees users from tripping hazards of room-scale VR. The Viveport digital store has also been reworked.

By themselves, the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift create self-contained, fully digital virtual reality spaces, but the new ZED mini attachment adds an augmented reality twist. It sits on the front of a Rift or a Vive, feeding in a view of the real world that can be mixed with computer graphics.