..light warriors... ..and a robo hatchling. there are sharks all around me! virtual reality. it's action—packed. it's immersive. argh! there's a mouse! it's terrifying. argh! it's collaborative. laughter it's a knock—out! ok, you hit me. it's... oh, god. it's frozen. it's... ..frozen. it's fun, but it's not going to change the world. it's not going to change the world. it wouldn't fit in as much as, say, my phone would. it wouldn't fit in. it's just such a shame. it's so annoying! it's annoying. not really what you want to hear when you are talking about vr, especially since the technology has actually been around since the ‘60s. this helmet is from the mid ‘90s but it wouldn't be the first bit of amazing—looking tech to simply fade into novelty. one of the problems is the media goes mad over it and then everything gets over—hyped — not that we would be guilty, of course. this is amazeballs! but the truth is, sometimes stuff gets overblown and the people who buy the thing end up getting disappointed by the thing. well, this week, the bbc, in partnership with ipsos mori, has published research into the reality of virtual reality. 16 ordinary people were given samsung gear vr headsets for three months and asked to use them in their free time at home. and for any long—term observers of tech, the results probably aren't surprising. let's start with the sheer faff. actually finding your headset in the first place, it might be shoved in a drawer somewhere, or under your bed. dust it off, it might be dirty, and of course it might not be totally clean. getting your phone and putting it into the headset — if you have a mobile—driven vr headset — making sure that the phone has high battery because that will often be drained very quickly. finding a piece content to actually then watch, the phone might overheat and the experience will then stop. you might fear family, friends, or flatmates pranking you while you are doing it, so you will feel self—conscious if your hair is going to be messed up, or your make—up, whatever. and all of those various barriers come to be quite significant behavioural hurdles to get people to do this. these things just aren't ready for prime time yet. they're not easy to use and they're not easy to share. for example, as soon as i take this off my head, it switches off to save power, which means i can't get something going and then give it to someone else to enjoy. it will switch off, they'll have to navigate to the content all over again themselves. that means that i've ended up putting a sticker over the sensor so it doesn't know when it's been taken off, which is stupid! look, a doggy! there's really no argument that vr can blow your mind. i'm on a roller—coaster! look, i can go down! but after those initial experiences, keeping people interested is another huge problem. 0nce they've exhausted the kind of key experiences, the novelty experiences around sort of the roller—coaster rides and the horror experiences, that kind of thing, their enthusiasm ebbs away quite quickly. and one of the reasons people get bored is that there's not much new to watch. with vr content, i think there is a bit of a chicken—and—egg situation. because obviously, to encourage more people to buy vr headsets, it would be good to have more and more vr content. but that costs a lot of money to make, and so, you don't necessarily want to invest in making the content unless you're confident that a lot of people will see it. so it's difficult to put a lot of money into something if you do not know that people will buy the headset, but then to convince them to buy the headset, maybe you have to do that. it's a problem that's also beset blu—ray, ak, and 3—d tv. we've moved incredibly far in the last two years in terms of what's been produced but there's a lot of interdependent things here. there is consumer uptake of headsets, the technology needs to be betterfor production tools to produce that. all of these things are happening at once and incredibly fast, but not fast enough. this might explain why last week, facebook cut the price of its 0culus headset for the second time. it's a lot to shell out for something that mightjust end up being a novelty. by reducing its prices, 0culus will probably appeal to more people who were already considering buying the headset, but i'm not sure they'll convince many people to buy it, to try it. because it's still a lot. it's still about the same as a games console. and it's notjust the price of the headset itself — you need to have a pretty high—end machine to run these things on. and even sony, the company that provides a high—end playstation 4 with its vr headsets, and which has sold 1 million of the things, told us not to get too excited about it. i think that, in the last sort of six months to a year, we have seen a little bit of over—hyping of the category out there. certainly not by ourselves. we saw this as the start of a very long process of bringing vr into the mainstream. you'll lots more technology innovation. i think content makers, game makers, and others, including folks that are making television programmes, they're really only just starting to learn what the tools are to make really good vr content. everyone knows it will take some time before we produce really good, compelling content, but we are inventing a new medium here and that is obviously going to take time. but unless we start somewhere, we'll never do it. so we need to wait a few years while you guys get it right, so there's something worth watching? hmm... laughter you can't develop anything unless it's in conjunction with the audience, too. so if we had no audience, we would never be able to grow something that would really work for them. it certainly seems that vr is struggling to become commonplace in the home at the moment, but that is not the end of the story — not by any means. mark cieslak has been to hollywood to see vr that has been given the movie treatment. here in los angeles, a company with a pedigree in movies is hoping to kick—start vr. if the living room isn't the best place for virtual reality, where is? well, a space like this one. this place has been built by imax. imax are most famous for giant cinema screens which is probably why the foyer in its new virtual reality experience centre looks a bit like a cinema. here, players purchase tickets to try out a variety of different vr experiences. each one of these pods has got more than enough space in it for any virtual reality experience that requires the player to move around quite a bit. this space is, in effect, a modern version of a video games arcade. cables connecting the headset to a computer are fed overhead to avoid the player tripping up on them. so the game i'm playing here is basically a wave shooter. there's just waves and waves of robots attacking me and i have to fight them off. from the subpac i am wearing on my back, i can feel a little bit of rumbling when the gun goes off. so far, so straightforward, but there are some experiences in here pushing beyond normal vr. what they have built is a little bit of set here. this is a helicopter. it's a tie—in with the new tom cruise mummy movie. so i am sat on the side of the chopper and it feels like the helicopter has got a little bit of movement to it as well. it's great. laughter this is surprisingly effective! there's a little bit of rumble underneath the seat. so it feels like the rumble of the helicopter‘s blades. while the helicopter effect is convincing, the rest of the game play is a bit samey. spaces like this one at least allow people to try vr without all of the mess of having vr kit in the living room. but taking this experience to the next level needs even more room. and for that, we have to travel to a state which is all about wide—open spaces — arizona. scottsdale's 0ctane raceway is the home of the first large—scale vr space in america from a company called zero latency. the key with this next—level vr is in here. and it is a massive, empty room. the thing is, when you put on a vr headset, this empty space becomes a gigantic virtual canvas on which you can paint almost any picture. 64 cameras track the player's movement with the grid on the floor assisting and allowing the computer running the show to know where the players are in the room. so i'm suited up and ready to go. i've got my virtual reality headset on which has got tracking balls on top of it, so the system in there will actually know where i am in the virtual space. and on my back is a computer. all of the cables between the headset and the computer are hidden, so that i will have totalfreedom of movement when i'm in the room. i'll be completely untethered. zero latency is the brainchild of a team based in melbourne, australia. it's almost like a brief escape from reality but in the truer sense that you are transported to a different place. we find that the more games incorporate walking and the sense of moving through a much larger virtual space than the physical space, that seems to just ramp up the immersion. the game i'm playing today is called zombie survival. i'm equipped with a rifle which will provide the physical sensation of being fired when i pull the trigger as i try to ward off hordes of zombies. ok, i can see bad guys! i'm supposed to repair barricades, preventing the undead from getting close to me while i wait to be rescued by helicopter. unfortunately, i get a bit carried away. oh, you want some of this? you want a piece of me?! i can see zombies coming at me from every single direction! do you know what i need? i need a little bit of help! so it's time to recruit extra troops. up to six people can play in here at once. this is what you can't do this in your living room at home. move around with this much space with a whole bunch of other people. about to take on the undead! head shots, head shots! i'm voiceover: clear the area! die, zombies! all right, guys. good job! ok, so attempting that with a whole bunch of people made it a lot easier. i got by with a little help from some friends. welcome to the week in tech. this was the week google glass rose from the dead, atari revealed more details about its return to the scene with the atari box, and apple said its users can get more expressive with some more of these soon. and facebook revealed it'll launch a new subscription—based news service in october, allowing publishers to create a paywall for their content within its platform. and if you've still got a myspace account lurking around in that quiet corner of the internet, it may be time to think about deleting it. a massive security flaw in the account recovery procedure might mean others can gain access to your account. and let's face it, nobody wants to see these popping up again! steps, long the enemy of the daleks have claimed yet another victim. this is what happened to the to the knightscope robot when it failed to navigate its way around. so humans took the only logical next step and named him steve and built him a shrine. while one robot took a downwards plunge, this one sent its first pictures of the international space station back to earth. this 3—d printed adorable bundle of tech is controlled from the ground so the astronauts can spend their time doing other research. and you will soon be able to visit the iss for yourself. google announced it's creating a 360—degree view of the station which will be available on street view. or is that space view? this little fellow is called sea turtle. designed to move, like, you guessed it, a sea turtle, his arms are shaped like the fins found in nature. he has been developed by researchers at arizona state university to detect land mines, and sadly for him, detonate them. unsurprisingly, current deep mining bots on the market, cost a pretty penny, but sea turtle has been made on the cheap. powered by a raspberry pi zero computer, this disposable device is £50 a pop. not bad for a machine that learns as it goes. we put a robot in front of a camera. and every time a robot makes a good move, it essentially gives itself some positive reinforcement, in terms of, maybe i should try that again. if it gets negative, or it does not do very well, in trying a new type of control, then that is a negative reinforcement, then it does not try that type of motion again. in reinforcing it, by giving it good or bad feedback, it was able to learn to walk on its own. not only could the lightweight robot potentially save lives here on earth, it could also potentially be used to further research in space. one of our goals is to use this in order to manufacture robots in space. the idea is, rather than altering the design of the robot here on earth, where we do not have the environment, in which it is going to be deployed, we can actuallyjust ship the materials into space and manufacture the robot on the spot. currently battery—powered, sea turtle is fairly tired after about three hours, so researchers want to add solar cells to his back so that he can charge himself. they also plan to manufacture loads and alternate them, so swarms of bots working together could quickly cover large areas. this robot is really good at paddling through sand, so not just landmines detection, but applications such as farming, or anywhere where you do not want a very expensive robot, interacting with very dirty environments, this robot is very good and well tuned for that. back to virtual reality now and ifind myself in the immersive vr lab at university college london, where the object is projected onto the walls and floor shift and warp as i move around. from the point of view of my motion—sensitive specs, though, the perspective is correct and it actually looks, to me, like i'm moving through a 3d world. now, this research actually concerns how the environment feels, specifically if it really feels like this imaginary ball is hitting this imaginary wall. which it does. bang, that's a hard wall. itjust feels it's bouncy, so as the ball hits the wall i can feel it kind of bounce back slightly off the wall. the secret is in the superfast response time in the control. although video generally looks convincing if it runs at about 60 frames a second, your sense of touch is accurate to 1000th of a second. any less and it will feel like everything is slightly spongy. as it is, the wall feels rock hard, the walls in the foreground feel lighter, because i can knock them over. this is great, because this is one more step towards a fully immersive experience where i will feel like i really am in this virtual world. an alternative approach, of course, is to use virtual reality technology in the actual world that is around you. this is called augmented reality and that is what lara lewington has been trying out. i know many of you are eager to get started with augmented reality, but let's show you just how easy it is. launched at apple developer's conference injune, the apple ar kit is a set of software tools. it aims to make it easier for creative coders, to get ar into their ios apps and games and developers have not wasted any time in trying to kit out. there is the mouthwatering, the mundane, the magical and a whole host of other amazing ideas prototyped on the platform. apple says the ar kit could make it the biggest ar technology platform overnight, and they could be right. after all, there are a lot of apple fangirls and boys out there. nowhere more so than at apple's developer conference, where the audience were suitably wowed by a hearty dose of name—dropping. director, peterjackson, director of the lord of the rings, he is now really excited about ar and to show you what he has in the works, i am thrilled to introduce wingnut ar's creative director, alistair cool. alistair. since this augmented reality, you folks... peterjackson and his partner, fran walsh, they had seen some ar demos of the hardware and they were really excited about the creative possibilities, and ar it is like a medium like no other, it offers so many creative possibilities, and they want to explore that space. traditional storytelling and entertainment concepts, and roles around camerawork and everything else, they don't necessarily work in ar, so for the last year, they don't necessarily work in ar, so for the last year we have been exploring that and figuring out what is fun and what is entertaining. and of course, the question every lord of the rings fan is asking right now, how long before we have an augmented reality lord of the rings? i think it is an amazing idea, there are so many opportunities with that. i think people would probably love that experience, i don't know when we will see that in people's living rooms, it is hard to judge how fast ar will be, but we all know that it is coming over the next few years and it will be exciting, and it will ramp up so fast. these are the offices of amplified robot, a london based studio specialising in vr and ar, and they've been one of the first to get their hands dirty with apple's ar kit. there we go, yes, that looks like a man who is walking around and i can see him from all around. there are hundreds of areas that can be brought to life with augmented reality, the medicalfield is one, education for kids, entertainment, real estate, this is the promise of augmented reality. we are close to it now. these are some of the ar experiences matt and his team have already created here without using apple's ar kit. each app has to figure out on its own how to attach a 3d thing to the real world, so lots of extra programming for developers and an inconsistent ar experience between apps. many of those apps rely on markers to make the magic happen, that's either special images or normal pictures like the images in this book, which the app then recognises and pins with 3d content to. apple's ar kit uses a newer technique that does away with markers, meaning that ar can go on any flat surface. clearly this is still very early days for ar as we know it, but, with so many big players like google, microsoft and now apple putting their weight behind the tech, our realities could be set to get a whole lot weirder. hi, my name is gareth. i'm studying at trent university. i have had a stutter ever since i was 16 years old. i don't let it get in the way of things that i do. although a stutter is incurable, gareth has dedicated his masters degree to finding a way to treat it as best he can through virtual reality. i'm creating a virtual reality exposure therapy, which is aimed to benefit people who stutter and to also treat social anxiety. gareth is using a headset, which has the ability to track eye movement, something that can be severely affected when someone is stuttering. the eyes can close, flicker orfixate on a certain place, and adjusting one's eye movements is part of established speech therapy for stutterers. by analysing the eye movements of his subjects, gareth is able to suggest similar exercises and techniques and, in the future, he hopes his research might be used by speech therapists in official treatments. from a person is in the environment, if they see an animated avatar and can talk to the avatar about a certain topic, like their favourite holiday, and over that time, i'll be tracking their eyes, behaviours and seeing what they do when they stutter. i will be advising them what to do and how to improve their speech as well. gareth has previously used a more basic headset to improve people's confidence by simulating an entire audience for them to speak in front of. and although he is only addressing the eye movement and not speech element directly, he hopes that this research will be able to improve the confidence of those who stutter and indeed those who do not. it's stories like gareth‘s that remind us that vr might not live or diejust on its entertainment values. that is it from our vr cave here at ucl. don't forget to follow us on facebook and twitter throughout the week. thanks for watching, and we'll see you soon. hello. there is some downpour dodging to be done during the day ahead and infact through the rest of this week. a mixed weather picture, some spells of sunshine, showers as well, with showers heavy, blown along on a blustery wind at times. low pressure in charge of the scene. the isobars fairly tightly packed. that shows that we will have strong wind and a few showers around as well. showers initially most widespread across northern ireland and western scotland and then develop more widely across the country. some heavy with rumbles of thunder mixed in and some fairly blustery wind as well. after a cloudy start in southern areas things will brighten up a little bit. by the afternoon, although there will be heavy showers around with gusty wind there will also be some decent spells of sunshine between those downpours. 19 degrees in london, 17 in hull. some hefty showers stretching up across north—east england into scotland as well. across 0rkney and shetland that is the place to be if you want reliably dry weather. not many showers here at all and plenty of sunshine through the afternoon. northern ireland, sunshine and showers. similar story across wales, 18 degrees in cardiff and down across the southwest of england. yes, sunshine and showers once again. as we head on through thursday night into the early hours of friday we still have our way of low pressure up to the north—west. some showers continuing. fewer showers further south, clear spells as well and overnight temperatures of 11—15 degrees. as we head on into friday, an area of low pressure still with us. and then there is this feature down here to the south. this will bring persistent rain later in the day. initially spells of sunshine, showers as well, they will fade for a while until they are replaced by a lump of rain pushing its way in from the west. most of the wet weather will move its way through fairly quickly during friday night and into the early part of saturday. once that clears away then, you guessed it, we are left with a mixture of sunshine and showers. still our area of low pressure close by, the temperature around 16—23 degrees. for sunday wherever you are across the country you can expect downpours. the far north of scotland and shetland likely to stay dry. where the showers pop up there could be heavy with hail and thunder, feeling cool in a blustery wind. welcome to bbc news, broadcasting to viewers in north america and around the globe. my name is mike embley. our top stories: anger as president trump reimposes a ban on transgender people serving in the us military. the president uses twitter to attack his own attorney general again. the new head of white house communications defends his boss's tactics. you know, one of the things i cannot stand about this town is the backstabbing that goes on here. where i grew up, in the neighbourhood i'm from, we're front—stabbers. wildfires tear through the countryside in southern france. thousands are fleeing homes and campsites to escape. poland's government faces legal action from the european commission over plans that would let politicians sack judges. warsaw complains of blackmail. and one of the most notorious serial murders in american history. nearly a century later, new light on the killing of the 0sage indians.