Several announcements were made at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), which is running March 17–21 in San Francisco. Here are the ones that interested me: New VR Headsets Oculus VR has a demo of their latest VR headset for developers: Developers Kit 2 (DK2). There’s a video about it on the Oculus website. The cost is $350 USD and will ship around July. There’s still no word on when a consumer version will ship. I’m thinking 2015. Sony announced their competitor to the Oculus Rift, called Project Morpheus. Apparently it doesn’t suck. Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4 Games on the Web It will be possible to publish games made with Unity 5 or Unreal Engine 4 directly to the web (so players won’t need a browser plugin like Flash). The games published to the web will use technologies like WebGL and asm.js. Mozilla is helping out. WebGL graphics are quite primitive compared to what’s possible, but if you’re more interested in

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Isaac Asimov was known for being a prolific writer. He wrote more than 400 books. In July 1959, he had a lunch with one of his editors, who advised him, “…not to write so busily. He said my books would compete with each other…” The economist’s law of diminishing returns says that producing ten times the quantity does not yield ten times the return. Here’s how Asimov responded: I was rather glum that meal and gave the matter much thought afterward. What I decided was that I wasn’t writing ten times as many books in order to get ten times the monetary returns, but in order to have ten times the pleasure. As far as pleasure was concerned, I had not yet reached the stage of diminishing returns—so I continued to write as quickly and as copiously as ever. Source: Asimov, Isaac. In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954–1978. Doubleday, 1980, page 165.