Sierra On-Line spent most of the 1990s shipping adventure games with names like King’s Quest and Space Quest, then spent one Christmas trying to sell the board those games would run on. Screamin’ 3D reached stores in November 1996 at a suggested price of $199, the only graphics card the Oakhurst studio ever put its name on, and it vanished so completely that plenty of people who owned a Sierra box never knew the company had tried hardware at all.
Spending a full day inside a virtual world sounds simple until the hardware starts pressing on your face. Associate Professor Shogo Fukushima at Kyushu University heard that complaint from a student who wanted longer sessions and kept running into the weight of a headset on the head and neck. Fukushima already knew the feeling. Some days he spends more time in virtual scenes than outside them, and he has tried to sleep in one, only to find the goggles made rest nearly impossible. That friction led to a paper at SIGGRAPH Emerging Technologies in 2026, titled Mountless Aerial HMDs, which moves the entire optical assembly off the face and onto a chair.
Four brick-shaped lithium iron phosphate cells, each rated 3.2 volts and 15 amp-hours, sit in a row and form the whole energy store of a homemade power station small enough to close a hand around. Wired end to end, they make a 12.8-volt pack that climbs to 14.6 volts when full and holds about 192 watt-hours. A 100-amp battery management board watches cell voltage, balances the four cells, and cuts the circuit on overcurrent or a short. Spot-welded nickel strips, stacked so the joints can carry the current, tie the pack together. Cells of this chemistry tolerate a 3C discharge, which on paper means up to 45 amps, and they are rated for more than 3,000 charge cycles with less fire risk than the lithium-ion packs common in phone banks.
Across the room from a Linux PC, a Nintendo DSi is drawing Minecraft Java Edition on a pair of 256 by 192 screens that first shipped in 2008. Counter-Strike 2 shows up the same way. Video decoding happens on the handheld. A server on the computer only has to capture a window, squeeze each frame into a JPEG, and send the pile across the local network.
Google’s Pixel 11 Pro in the 256GB version, priced at $834 for Prime Day (was $1,100), pairs that storage with 12GB of memory and a Tensor G6 chip built on a 3-nanometer process, inside a glass and aluminum body that measures about 152.7 by 71.9 by 8.4 millimeters and weighs 204 grams. A 6.3-inch LTPO OLED panel runs from 1Hz to 120Hz at 1280 by 2856, with a peak rating of 3600 nits and Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on the front. Three rear cameras handle the photos: a 50-megapixel main sensor at f/1.7, a 48-megapixel ultrawide at 123 degrees, and a 48-megapixel periscope at 5x, with 8K video from the rear and a 42-megapixel camera up front. A 4,850mAh battery charges at 30 watts on a cable, reaching about 55 percent in 30 minutes, and at 25 watts on a magnetic Qi2.2 pad. Android 17 ships on the phone, with seven major OS updates on the schedule, and an ultrasonic fingerprint reader sits under the screen. IP68 covers dust and a short dip, with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and ultra-wideband for the connections.