Technologies

HTC’s New Standalone VR Headset Is Like Nothing We’ve Ever Seen

Best of CES: The compact, depth-sensing, $1,099 headset arrives in February. Vive boss Dan O’Brien explains the strategy.

VR has suddenly gotten more expensive. It seems like the worst possible timing, but HTC’s newest high-end headset announced at CES, the Vive XR Elite, follows a similar playbook to Meta’s recent Quest Pro, and possibly Apple’s awaited device as well. It raises a question: Are we truly ready for the rise of the $1,000-plus VR rigs? The standalone Vive XR Elite is sleek and looks a lot more compact than the Quest Pro, and is trying to test the higher-end waters.

The $1,099 headset, available for preorder Thursday, is arriving by the end of February — remarkably soon for a CES product. That means it’ll be available alongside Sony’s PlayStation 5-connected PSVR 2. While less expensive than the Quest Pro, the XR Elite’s price costs about as much as buying a PS5 and a PSVR 2 together. It’s far from an impulse purchase. But the hardware, which shrinks down the VR form to a pair of nearly glasses-like goggles and includes mixed-reality capabilities that could allow for AR apps, looks to solve how we’ll be using the metaverse for more in our lives than just games, simulation and fitness.

No other company has really cracked this challenge either. But this Vive headset looks, more than ever, like it’s a stepping stone to future AR glasses.

«We see where mixed reality is going to create a whole new suite of use cases. We know the virtual reality use cases are great. I think the AR side is amazing, too,» Dan O’Brien, HTC’s general manager of Vive, told me in a conversation at CES in Las Vegas. He acknowledged that HTC tried to make an AR device in 2015 but stopped because of the complications. O’Brien sees 5G and cloud computing as a key next step. «You need a 5G network, a really robust one to make AR go to scale — you need a cloud infrastructure to deliver to those types of wearables.»

The XR Elite is primarily a standalone VR headset, and it looks like an impressive piece of tech: It has a familiar Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 chip much like the Meta Quest 2, Quest Pro and Vive’s existing business-focused Focus 3. But it adds a higher-resolution 110-degree field of view, LCD displays with 2K resolution per eye that can run at 90Hz. There’s also a boosted 12GB of RAM along with 128GB of storage. It can connect to PCs to run SteamVR or HTC’s VivePort software, or connect with Android phones. But its potential as a bridge to AR experiences seems like the most impressive feature.

Those are just specs, though. The XR Elite is a VR headset with a similar proposition to previous models, but with expanded capabilities. Its compact size is the most surprising part: At 340 grams, it’s less than half the weight of the Quest Pro. The rear hot-swappable battery gives about two hours of life. It gets even smaller by unclipping the back battery strap and adding glasses arms that can turn the headset into a modified pair of VR glasses, which could just plug into an external USB-C charger or battery for power. It’s small enough to fit in a compact carrying case tube.

But that compact size comes with a twist: Instead of fitting on top of glasses, the XR Elite uses adjusting dials, or diopters, which can change the lens prescription on the fly without you needing to wear glasses at all — for some people, at least. The diopters only accommodate up to a -6 prescription, but my own vision is over -8 for nearsightedness. It’s a challenge HTC faced with its even smaller Vive Flow phone-connected VR goggles, which also went for the glasses-free approach.

The XR Elite has a dedicated depth sensor on the front, along with color passthrough cameras that can eventually show mixed reality-experiences, similar to the Quest Pro. The Quest Pro doesn’t have the Elite’s added depth sensor, but it accommodates for that with its onboard cameras.

The XR Elite could also adapt further. While the hardware doesn’t have its own eye-tracking tools onboard, eye- and face-tracking add-ons are coming later in the year. The headset’s controllers are the same standard ones that HTC has for the Vive Focus 3, which follow the same game controller-like playbook as the Meta Quest 2 and others. But HTC already has its own line of wearable VR body trackers and wristbands, and more accessories could follow.

O’Brien acknowledges that the sticky, mass-market appeal of VR and AR aren’t here yet. «I think developers will be using cloud computing, being able to actually get their content into the metaverse much faster, and much more efficiently,» he said. «If you think about the streaming business, these streamers, these TikTokkers, all these kids that create the really compelling, fun experiences that just keep drawing you back in? That’s not in the metaverse today, We need to create more opportunities for less sophisticated immersive content creators to get involved, and then create more [of an] economy.»

O’Brien sees cloud computing, driven by eye tracking’s ability to compress graphics data via a technology called foveated rendering, as a way of eventually shrinking the processors on future headsets, getting smaller and fitting on more people.

My concern is about the limited prescription options at the moment. «As we get to much lighter glasses, people will probably be bringing more of their prescriptions to it in the future,» says O’Brien. «For now, what we can do is just try to address the majority of the market as best we can with these types of setting changes, because we have to get the headsets lighter. We’ve got to get them more comfortable. And if you’re going to have these big eye relief areas inside of these headsets, they’re going to stay really big.»

O’Brien sees the included VR controllers as possibly becoming optional one day, even maybe being left out of the box and bought separately, but not yet. Hand tracking isn’t reliable enough. «Hand tracking has to make massive advancements over the next two to three years to really become much more of a natural input tool.» But O’Brien suggests it’s a way for future headsets to get more affordable. «If a user can just put on glasses and interact with content [with their hands], that’s going to be a much less expensive product.»

This product has been selected as one of the best products of CES 2023. Check out the other Best of CES 2023 award winners.

Technologies

Scientists Are Using AI to Help Identify Dinosaur Footprints

The Dinotracker app was trained on eight major characteristics of dinosaur footprints to quickly determine the species.

An international team of researchers has devised a futuristic tool to examine the footprints left by dinosaurs in our ancient past. The AI-powered app, Dinotracker, can identify dinosaur footprints in moments.

The research comes from a joint project by the Helmholtz-Zentrum research center in Berlin and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the paper on Monday.

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Identifying a dinosaur species from a footprint isn’t always easy. The footprint is hundreds of millions of years old, often preserved in layers of rock that have shifted over the eons since the track was laid.

Also, we still have a lot to learn about dinosaurs, and it’s not always clear which species left a footprint. Subjectivity or bias can come into play when identifying them, and scientists don’t always agree with the results.

Gregor Hartmann of Helmholtz-Zentrum, who led the project, told CNET that the research team sought to remove this propensity from the identification process by developing an algorithm that could be neutral.

«We bring a mathematical, unbiased point of view to the table to assist human experts in interpreting the data,» Hartmann said.

Researchers trained the algorithm on thousands of real fossil footprints, as well as millions of simulated versions that could recreate «natural distortions such as compression and shifting edges.»

How AI is being used on dinosaur tracks

The system was trained to focus on eight major characteristics of dinosaur footprints, including the width of the toes, the position of the heel, the surface area of the foot that contacted the ground and the weight distribution across the foot.

The AI tool uses these traits to compare new footprints to existing fossils, and then determines which dinosaur was most likely responsible for the footprint.

The team tested it against human expert classifications and found that the AI agreed with them 90% of the time.

Hartmann made it clear that the AI system is «unsupervised.»

«We do not use any labels (like bird, theropod, ornithopod) during training. The network has no idea about it,» Hartmann said. «Only after training, we compare how the network encodes the silhouettes and compare this with the human labels.»

Hartmann said that the hope is for Dinotracker to be used by paleontologists and that the AI tool’s data pool grows as it’s used by more experts.

Bird vs. dinosaur

Using Dinotracker, the researchers have already uncovered some intriguing possibilities on the evolution of birds. When analyzing footprints more than 200 million years old, the AI found strong similarities with the foot structures of extinct and modern birds.

The team says one possibility is that birds originated tens of millions of years earlier than we thought. But it’s also possible that early dinosaur feet just look remarkably like bird feet.

This evidence, Hartmann notes, isn’t enough to rethink the evolution of birds, since a skeleton is the «true evidence» of earlier bird existence.

«It is essential to keep in mind that over these millions of years, lots of different things can happen to these tracks, starting from the moisture level of the mud where it was created, over the substrate it was created on, up to erosion later,» he said. «All this can heavily change the shape of the fossilized track we find, and ultimately makes it too difficult to interpret footprints, which was the motivation for our study.»

Dinotracker is available for free on GitHub. It’s not in a download-and-use format, so you’ll have to know a bit about software to get it up and running.

Technologies

Belkin Is Ending Support for Wemo Smart Home Devices. Here’s What That Means for You

If you own certain Belkin Wemo devices, they’ll stop working as soon as Jan. 31. Here’s what to know before it happens.

Belkin is ending support for most of its Wemo smart home devices, a move that will shut down the Wemo app and cloud services and significantly reduce the functionality of many popular smart plugs, switches and sensors.

The change takes effect at the end of January, so you have only a few days to migrate compatible devices or start planning for replacements.

You can see the full list of affected devices on Belkin’s support page. Once support ends, features that rely on the cloud — including remote access, schedules and integrations with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant — will stop working. Those Wemo devices will no longer function as «smart» products, even if the hardware still powers on.

Since Belkin will also stop releasing firmware updates, affected devices won’t receive bug fixes or security improvements.

Belkin’s decision highlights a growing issue in the smart home world: Devices can stop being «smart» long before the hardware wears out.

Apple Home users get a limited lifeline

There is one major exception. Some Wemo devices that are compatible with Apple Home and HomeKit can continue working after the Wemo app shuts down, but only if you migrate them before the end-of-support deadline.

«Since the Wemo app will be ending, it’s very important that users switch to Apple Home/HomeKit by the end of the month,» says CNET smart home editor Tyler Lacoma. «Belkin has a long-term partnership with Apple, so for compatible devices, that transition is usually pretty simple.»

However, Lacoma warns that older Wemo products may not support Apple Home at all.

«If someone has a Wemo device that’s not on the list of Apple-compatible products, it won’t have much functionality left,» he says. «It won’t get firmware updates to fix bugs or improve security, so at that point, it makes sense to factory reset it and recycle it before the end of the month, then look for a replacement.»

Belkin has published a list of Wemo devices that support Apple HomeKit, and users need to complete the setup process before the Wemo app is retired. The following products will continue to work through Apple HomeKit:

Wemo Smart Light Switch 3-Way (WLS0403, WLS0503)
Wemo Wi-Fi Smart Light Switch with Dimmer (WDS060)
Wemo Smart Light Switch (WLS040)
Wemo HomeKit Bridge (F7C064)
Wemo Dimmer Light Switch (F7C059)
Wemo Mini Plugin Switch (F7C063)
Wemo Outdoor Plug (WSP090)
Wemo Mini Smart Plug (WSP080)
Wemo Stage Smart Scene Controller (WSC010)
Wemo Smart Plug with Thread (WSP100)
Wemo Smart Video Doorbell (WDC010)

What about refunds?

Belkin says customers with Wemo devices that are still under warranty when support ends may be eligible for a partial refund. You can find the warranty period for each device in the list of devices on Belkin’s support page linked above. Refund requests won’t be processed until after the end-of-support date, and eligibility will depend on the product and purchase date.

Because many Wemo products were released years ago, most people should not expect to qualify for a refund. We’ve reached out to Belkin to ask whether other products will lose support in the near future. We haven’t heard back at the time of publishing.

What Wemo owners should do now

If you own Wemo devices, the clock is ticking. Here’s what to do next:

Check whether your Wemo products support Apple Home and migrate them as soon as possible.
If your devices don’t support Apple Home, plan to replace them before support ends.
Consider recycling unsupported devices once they lose smart functionality.
Remove the Wemo app after services shut down to avoid confusion.

If you’re shopping for replacements, this is a good time to look at CNET’s list of the best smart plugs and review our guide on what to do when smart home devices lose support.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for Jan. 28 #696

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Jan. 28, No. 696.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle is a bit of an odd one, but it might calm you down — hint, hint. If you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Zen state

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Mellow out.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

COIL, COIF, COIFS, MATE, TAME, TAMED, CONE, CODE, NEST, NETS, LENS, TIED, DIET, MIND

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

FOCUS, RELAX, LISTEN, NOTICE, BREATHE, MEDITATE

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is MINDFULNESS. To find it, start with the M that’s the first letter on the top row, at the far left, and wind down and then over and up.

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