HughPickens.com writes Nick Wingfield reports at the NYT that for the last couple of years, the companies building virtual reality headsets have begged the public for patience as they strive to create virtual environments that don’t make people physically sick. “We’re going to hang ourselves out there and be judged, ” says John Carmack, chief technology officer of Oculus, describing what he calls a “nightmare scenario” that has worried him and other Oculus executives. “People like the demo, they take it home, and they start throwing up, ” says Carmack. “The fear is if a really bad V.R. product comes out, it could send the industry back to the ’90s.” In that era, virtual reality headsets flopped, disappointing investors and consumers. “It left a huge, smoking crater in the landscape, ” says Carmack, who is considered an important game designer for his work on Doom and Quake. “We’ve had people afraid to touch V.R. for 20 years.” This time around, the backing for virtual reality is of a different magnitude. Facebook paid $2 billion last year to acquire Oculus. Microsoft is developing its own headset, HoloLens, that mixes elements of virtual reality with augmented reality, a different medium that overlays virtual images on a view of the real world. Google has invested more than $500 million in Magic Leap, a company developing an augmented reality headset. “The challenge is there is so much expectation and anticipation that that could fall away quite quickly if you don’t get the type of traction you had hoped, ” says Neil Young. (More, below.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.
More here:
Developers Race To Develop VR Headsets That Won’t Make Users Nauseous
The man who built the free email encryption software used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, as well as hundreds of thousands of journalists, dissidents and security-minded people around the world, is running out of money to keep his project alive. Read more… 
According to a story from the UK edition of Vice (a story which, I hasten to add, relies on a source named ‘K2’ and should therefore be taken with the requisite gallon of salt), drug dealers in the fair city of Birmingham have turned to dumphones in an attempt to evade the police. Read more… 
On Friday Digital Einstein went live, bringing with it a treasure trove of Einstein letters, correspondences, postcards, and notes detailing the life of one of the world’s greatest thinkers. As The New York Times reports , these are The Dead Sea Scrolls of physics and you can read them today for free. Read more… 
Is o nly going up in the elevator getting you down? Not for much longer: ThyssenKrupp, the German steel and engineering company, has announced that it’s building the next generation of elevators that will use magnetic levitation to travel up, down and side-to-side at speed in the buildings of the future. Read more… 
HughPickens.com writes Justin Gillis writes in the NYT that Denmark is pursuing the world’s most ambitious policy against climate change, aiming to end the burning of fossil fuels in any form by 2050 — not just in electricity production, as some other countries hope to do, but in transportation as well. The trouble is that while renewable power sources like wind and solar cost nothing to run, once installed, as more of these types of power sources push their way onto the electric grid, they cause power prices to crash at what used to be the most profitable times of day. Conventional power plants, operating on gas or coal or uranium, are becoming uneconomical to run. Yet those plants are needed to supply backup power for times when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. With their prime assets throwing off less cash, electricity suppliers in Germany and Denmark have applied to shut down a slew of newly unprofitable power plants, but nervous governments are resisting, afraid of being caught short on some cold winter’s night with little wind. “We are really worried about this situation, ” says Anders Stouge, the deputy director general of the Danish Energy Association. “If we don’t do something, we will in the future face higher and higher risks of blackouts.” Environmental groups, for their part, have tended to sneer at the problems the utilities are having, contending that it is their own fault for not getting on the renewables bandwagon years ago. But according to Gillis, the political risks of the situation also ought to be obvious to the greens. The minute any European country — or an ambitious American state, like California — has a blackout attributable to the push for renewables, public support for the transition could weaken drastically. Rasmus Helveg Petersen, the Danish climate minister, says he is tempted by a market approach: real-time pricing of electricity for anyone using it — if the wind is blowing vigorously or the sun is shining brightly, prices would fall off a cliff, but in times of shortage they would rise just as sharply. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
On July 15th, 1942—in the midst of World War II’s long-running Battle of the Atlantic—a German U-boat and a Nicaraguan freighter were wrecked a mere 30 miles off the coast of North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras. Now, over seven decades later, their watery resting places have been (re)discovered . Read more… 
Cortana is coming to Windows 9 , according to these screenshots coming to us by way of German blog WinFuture , which show her off in a very experimental form. Not much of a surprise, but they seem to confirm what we’re already expecting—that the digital assistant will find a home on the PC, too. Read more…