VR

It's been a while since we saw a hardware update to the Vive line, but HTC has made up for it by launching two 5K-resolution virtual reality headsets at the same time: the PC-connected Vive Pro 2, and the standalone Vive Focus 3.

Eye tracking cameras and AI analysis can reveal your identity, gender, age, ethnicity, weight, personality traits, drug habits, emotions, skills, abilities, fears, interests, and sexual preferences, says a rather dystopian research review.

Just weeks after confirming a PlayStation 5 VR system is in development, Sony has now shown off the controllers. The new designs look lightyears ahead of the PS4’s clunky old sticks, and pack features from the PS5’s DualSense and Sony's competitors.

Currently, if you want a VR setup to "know" what your individual fingers are doing, you either have to wear special gloves or place your hands directly in front of a camera. A new system, however, keeps tabs on the fingers via a simple wristband.

The original Oculus Quest was one of the technology world's great game-changers, and the new Quest 2 makes big improvements everywhere while dropping the price. We've now spent a month with the world's latest, greatest standalone VR headset.

A new study has found integrating an immersive virtual reality system into a chronic pain treatment can significantly enhance a patient’s pain-relief outcome. The research suggests “digiceutical” therapies may be effective for patients suffering chronic pain.

It's huge, it's clunky, it's not pretty, but Marcel Reese claims his VR exoskeleton is "the first working system for realistic walking in VR with force feedback and balance feedback." It tracks your movement, and lets the virtual world push back.

One of the issues with VR gaming is that it's usually set on a scale that's bigger than your living room – so you have to stay in a very small part of the world or "teleport" around. The latest attempt to fix the issue are the Cybershoes.

Researchers at Stanford and Samsung have developed a proof-of-concept ultra-high-resolution OLED display. “Metaphotonic” tech could improve a screen's color purity and potentially boost the pixel density to an astounding 10,000 pixels per inch (ppi).

Nothing breaks the immersion of VR like putting your hand through a wall. Haptics can give som sense of touch, but a new study has a clever alternative – robots that move physical furniture around, so there’s a real chair or wall waiting for you.

Robots are an increasingly common sight in stores, and now they’re getting a bit more hands-on. Japanese company Telexistence has begun trials in convenience stores of a robot shelf-stacker that can be controlled by a human via VR.

Capturing the complexities of the human hand is very tricky. Now engineers have developed a new wearable system that uses thermal sensors to accurately predict hand positions, with potential applications in VR, robotics and translating sign language.