Category: Technica Aquarius

Enlarge / It’s not much to look at, but at least the name is official. (credit: Sony)

Sony’s trickle of information about its future in virtual reality continued on Tuesday with the surprise announcement of an unsurprising name: PlayStation VR2. Thankfully, the name comes with a dump of specs that confirm Sony’s aspirations to deliver one of the most robust VR systems yet on the consumer market.

The upcoming VR add-on, which will require a PlayStation 5 to function, is still missing crucial stats like a release date, a price, or even a photo of what the primary headset will look like. In some ways, it’s reminiscent the Meta Quest 2 (formerly Oculus Quest 2), as it includes a comparable pixel resolution (2,000 x 2,040 pixels per eye, or roughly 15.7 percent more than Quest 2’s per-eye count), a comparable field-of-view of 110 degrees, and a comparable “inside-out” array of cameras that will track a user’s space without requiring an external device like the original PSVR‘s webcam.

It’s thinking (and watching)

We previously knew that PSVR2 would require a hardwired connection to PlayStation 5 consoles, unlike the default wireless freedom of Quest 2. Today, however, Sony revealed two potentially huge differentiators over its VR headset competition: haptic feedback, and internal eye-tracking.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Perhaps the favorite thing I wrote in all of 2019 was about a research study that taught rats to drive, an activity that the rats appeared to enjoy. Today, we have another tale of lab animals learning to drive, but this time the motorists in question weren’t mammals—they were goldfish, who learned how to drive a fish-operated vehicle in a terrestrial environment.

The very first question most people will ask at this point is “Why?” In the driving-rat study from 2019, the researchers were trying to study environmental stress, and driving is an activity that turned out to reduce stress levels in the rats. This study, conducted by Shachar Givon and colleagues at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and published in Behavioral Brain Research, aimed to discover something a little different.

Specifically, the idea was to see if the fishes’ navigation skills are universal and work in extremely unfamiliar environments, a concept known as domain transfer methodology. And you have to admit, driving a tank inside an enclosure in a research lab is a pretty unfamiliar environment for a goldfish.

Enlarge / A Navy nurse prepares a syringe. (credit: Getty Images | petesphotography)

US Navy Seals who objected to COVID vaccination on religious grounds yesterday won a preliminary injunction that prohibits the Navy from enforcing its vaccine mandate.

“Thirty-five Navy Special Warfare service members allege that the military’s mandatory vaccination policy violates their religious freedoms under the First Amendment and Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” Judge Reed O’Connor wrote in the ruling out of US District Court for the Northern District of Texas. “The Navy provides a religious accommodation process, but by all accounts, it is theater. The Navy has not granted a religious exemption to any vaccine in recent memory. It merely rubber stamps each denial.”

O’Connor, who was nominated by President Bush in 2007, found that the Navy service members are likely to win the case on the merits. He granted the injunction prohibiting the Navy from enforcing its mandate against the plaintiffs and “from taking any adverse action against Plaintiffs on the basis of Plaintiffs’ requests for religious accommodation.”