PLAYSTATION VR PS4

This was supposed to be the year virtual reality broke out. The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, the first two high-end consumer devices on the market, arrived this spring to critical praise and preorders that sold out within minutes. Then… they plateaued. Despite some great experiences, months of near-total unavailability dulled the post-release buzz for both headsets, particularly the Rift. Neither the Rift or the Vive ecosystems produced a killer app that was big enough to push VR out of the margins, especially given the high cost of a headset and gaming PC. While 360-degree video has at least gotten a toehold in popular culture, the dream of sophisticated VR gaming — which arguably resurrected virtual reality in the first place — remains far away for most people.

But there are three months left in the year, and one thing that could change that: PLAYSTATION VR PS4.

PlayStation VR is Sony’s attempt at bringing virtual reality to its PlayStation 4 console, starting next week. Arriving right in time for the holidays, it’s being positioned as a (relatively) cheap, unintimidating gaming headset, designed for a device that might already be sitting in your living room. The Rift and Vive had to be judged on a sort of abstract scale of quality — on whether they were good ambassadors for the medium of VR, and good harbingers of things to come. The question for PlayStation VR is simpler: if you’re one of the millions of people who own a PlayStation 4, should you get one?

layStation VR was initially announced as something called "Project Morpheus" in 2014, and despite some visual tweaks, the core design hasn’t changed. Where Oculus goes for an understated, late-Gibsonian cyberpunk aesthetic and the Vive is aggressively industrial, Sony’s design has the clean white curves of a ‘60s science fiction spaceship interior, setting off a black front panel and rubber face mask. The external PlayStation Camera tracks it with a matrix of glowing blue lights: six lining the headset’s edges, two on the back, and one right in the middle of the front panel. The shape echoes Sony’s old HMZ personal viewer, but without the futile effort at making a headset seem small and sleek. PlayStation VR is unapologetically eye-catching, and whether that’s a good or bad thing is a matter of personal taste.

Looks aside, PlayStation VR is ridiculously comfortable. Your average virtual reality headset is strapped on like a ski mask, which ensures a snug fit but can also squeeze your face unpleasantly. PSVR, by contrast, has a padded plastic ring that rests on your head a bit like a hard hat. To put it on, you’ll push a button to loosen the sides, stretch it over your upper skull, and fine-tune the tightness with a dial on the back. The screen is anchored to the front of the ring, where it almost floats in front of your face. Another button lets you adjust the focus by sliding the screen in and out, which also means it fits easily over glasses.

PSVR still asks you to clamp something around your head, and it’s certainly possible to give yourself a headache by putting it on wrong. But its weight is distributed much more evenly than other headsets, so it’s not constantly pushing down on your forehead and cheekbones. At 610 grams, it’s the heaviest of the VR headsets, but it feels like the lightest. The design also neatly solves a few of VR’s subtler problems. I didn’t come out of sessions with telltale mask lines around my eyes, just a small dent at my hairline. I’d still worry about smudging makeup, but far less than with any other headset. And since the face mask is made of rubber sheets instead of foam, it’s not going to be soaking up dirt or sweat. That rubber also blocks out light incredibly well, neatly closing the gaps between your face and the screen. The only major downside is that it starts slipping out of place if you look straight up or rapidly shake your head, something that becomes an issue with gaze-controlled arcade games like PlayStation VR Worlds’ "Danger Ball."

The thing that’s going to draw a lot of people to PlayStation VR, though, is the price: $399. Well, that’s technically the price, although it’s also a bit of a sneaky move on Sony’s part. This base system doesn’t contain the PlayStation’s tracking camera, which is mandatory for PSVR, or the two Move controllers, which are highly encouraged. The reasoning is that since both these products were already on the market, some users will already have them. But unless you were a really big fan of Johann Sebastian Joust or some other game that used one of Sony’s niche peripherals, you should consider the $499 PSVR bundle — which comes with two Move controllers and a camera — your default choice.

To make things more complicated, you’ll also have to decide whether to buy the more powerful PlayStation 4 Pro console when it comes out in November. The Pro is supposed to improve the frame rate and image quality of PSVR, but we haven’t been able to test the performance for ourselves — and Sony is still promising that PSVR will work fine with the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Slim.

Even at nearly $500, PSVR is still cheaper than the Rift and Vive, which respectively cost $599 and $799 plus the cost of a PC. That’s partly because Sony isn’t pushing for the highest specs on the market. Where the Rift and Vive incorporate two separate screens with a resolution of 1080 x 1200 pixels per eye, PlayStation VR has a single screen that offers 1080 x 960 pixels per eye, comparable to the second Oculus Rift development kit. On paper, this is the system’s biggest technical limitation. It’s grainier than its two big competitors, which still look a little fuzzy in their own right, and dark colors can appear muddy. But screen resolution isn’t the only factor in how good something looks. Sony likes to tout the PSVR’s high screen refresh rate as a way to compensate for its lower resolution. And games are in fact quite smooth, with very little juddering or latency — which, far more than pixel density, was the big problem with the Rift DK2. The field of view feels comparable to the current Rift and Vive, and bright, cartoonish games like Job Simulator look very similar on any high-end headset.

PlayStation VR isn’t just competing against tethered headsets. With Samsung’s Gear VR on its third generation and Google’s first Daydream headset launching in November, mobile VR is an increasingly viable option — and a cheaper one, if you already own a phone that supports it. But it’s not in the same class as PSVR. Mobile headsets don’t have things like positional tracking, which can help cut down on motion sickness and open up new gameplay options, and they can’t touch PSVR’s comfort levels or graphical performance. They’re not necessarily a worse category of virtual reality, but they’re a very different one.

PSVR also includes some interesting touches that aren’t present on any major headset, tethered or untethered. Midway down the cable, for example, there’s an inline remote with buttons for power, volume, and toggling a built-in microphone. Headphones aren’t built directly into the hardware, but the remote has a jack for either Sony’s included earbuds or your own wired set. Compared to the awkward dangling headset jack on the HTC Vive, this feels convenient and natural, although I accidentally yanked my earbuds out a couple of times by kneeling in VR and catching the cord on my leg. You can pair wireless headphones with the PlayStation 4 for stereo sound, but Sony says you can only get 3D audio directly through the jack.

For every thoughtful design decision, though, there’s a reminder that PlayStation VR isn’t a totally novel gaming system, but a patchwork of various weird Sony experiments that may have finally found their purpose. It’s a new headset inspired by a personal 3D theater from 2012, paired with a set of motion controllers that were released in 2010, plus a camera peripheral that’s been around in some form since 2003.

On one hand, Sony deserves credit for seeing the potential in all these things. On the other, it’s saddled PlayStation VR with the worst motion controls of any major headset. The PlayStation Move controllers are painfully limited compared to either Oculus Touch or the HTC Vive remotes, simply because their interface is a bad fit for VR. They’re pimpled with four miniscule face buttons that are almost pointless for anything but menu selections, with inlaid, difficult-to-find options buttons along the sides. The only useful elements are a single trigger and one large, awkwardly positioned button at the top. The Move was originally paired with a second, smaller peripheral bearing an analog stick and directional pads; without it, navigating menus (including the main PS4 interface) involves dragging your controller like the world’s clumsiest mouse.

They can also be frustratingly inconsistent. In the leisurely Job Simulator, I had almost no problems using them. But during the frantic rail shooter Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, where precision was a matter of virtual life or death, I had to repeatedly reorient them after they drifted out of place. Since I haven’t had a chance to fully review the Oculus Touch motion controllers, I can’t make a final call on how much of this is a weakness of the Move specifically or of camera-based tracking in general, but Move has enough shortcomings to put it on the bottom of the pile no matter what. If the first generation of PSVR does well, Sony will almost certainly have to follow up with something better, but for now, the motion controllers are the system’s biggest shortcoming.

Even setting PSVR up in the first place is a bit more complicated than its unintimidating heritage suggests. Instead of plugging directly into the PlayStation 4, the headset uses a separate processor box that helps mix 3D audio and supply video to both PSVR and TV. You connect the box to a power outlet and your TV’s HDMI port, then connect it to your PS4 via a Micro USB and HDMI cable. The camera goes into a dedicated port on the console, and finally, the headset connects to the other side of the box. This can create a bit of a rat’s nest around your console, and it leaves precious little space for juicing up your Move and DualShock controllers, unless you buy a separate charging dock. It’s not quite as involved as the HTC Vive’s room-scale setup, but it’s several more steps than the Oculus Rift requires.

Unlike with the Rift or Vive, though, the setup is nearly impossible to screw up. There’s no third-party PC software to install or drivers to track down, just a few screens that guide you through setup and make any necessary updates. Once you’re in, you’ll see the ordinary PlayStation VR interface, as though viewed on a big-screen TV in front of you. In some ways, this feels like a letdown — you have to launch a game to experience PSVR’s full impact. But it’s immediately easy to understand, and after a while, any decent electronic interface tends to fade into the background, even in VR.

Overall, what’s great about PlayStation VR is that it fits into a popular, user-friendly system. But that also sets certain expectations that other headsets don’t have. Oculus and HTC can ask people to set up precisely calibrated personal holodecks without a second thought, because PC gaming is already a somewhat solitary activity that goes hand-in-hand with ridiculous hardware setups. PlayStation VR’s natural habitat is an all-purpose entertainment space that you might share with any number of people, including ones who couldn’t care less about VR. Like the PlayStation itself, PSVR feels best as something you can kick back and enjoy without rearranging your living room into a VR cave.

NREL investigates coatings needed for concentrating solar power

Next-generation concentrating solar power (CSP) plants require high-temperature fluids, like molten salts, in the range of 550-750 degrees Celsius to store heat and generate electricity. At those high temperatures, however, the molten salts eat away at common alloys used in the heat exchangers, piping, and storage vessels of CSP systems. New research at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is aimed at mitigating corrosion levels in CSP plants with nickel-based coatings.

"We are very excited about the potential implications of this research to provide corrosion-resistant coatings for CSP applications that could improve the economic viability of these systems," said Johney Green, associate laboratory director for mechanical and thermal engineering sciences.

CSP plants with low-cost thermal storage enable facilities to deliver electricity whenever it is needed, helping to support grid reliability. Molten salts are commonly used for both the heat-transfer fluid and thermal energy storage because they can withstand high temperatures and retain the collected solar heat for many hours.

To commercially use molten salt mixtures containing sodium chloride, potassium chloride, and magnesium chloride, the corrosion rate in the storage tanks must be slow - less than 20 micrometers per year - so that a concentrating solar power plant can achieve a 30-year life.

Bare stainless steel alloys tested in a molten chloride corroded as fast as 4,500 micrometers per year. The solution to the corrosion problem could lie in research conducted by NREL's Judith Gomez-Vidal and published in the Nature Materials Degradation journal article, "Corrosion Resistance of MCrAlX Coatings in a Molten Chloride for Thermal Storage in Concentrating Solar Power Applications."

Gomez-Vidal applied different types of nickel-based coatings, which are commonly used for reducing oxidation and corrosion, to stainless steel. One such coating, with the chemical formula NiCoCrAlYTa, showed the best performance so far.

It limited the corrosion rate to 190 micrometers per year - not yet at the goal but a large improvement compared to the uncoated steel by a 96% reduction in the corrosion rate. That particular coating was pre-oxidized over a 24-hour period, during which a uniform and dense layer of aluminum oxide was formed and served to further protect the stainless steel from corrosion.

"The use of surface protection is very promising to mitigate corrosion in molten salts in particular to those surfaces exposed to chlorine-containing vapor," said Gomez-Vidal, who holds a Ph.D. in metallurgical and materials engineering. "However, the rates of corrosion are still considerably high for CSP.

This effort highlights the relevance of testing materials durability in solar power applications. More R and D is needed to achieve the target corrosion level needed, which could include the synergy of combining surface protection with chemical control of the molten salt and the surrounding atmosphere."

Additional tests will require evaluation of the coatings under thermal cycling and the introduction of oxygen-containing atmospheres to increase the oxidation potential of the systems.

The addition of oxygen ensures the formation of protective scales that could reform in the presence of oxygen if cracks appear during operation. Gomez-Vidal has recently published other work in which such aluminum oxide layers were able to grow and remained adhered to the surface in the presence of air during thermal cycling of samples.

Also check the best portable solar panel GOAL ZERO NOMAD 7

How Does Solar Energy Work?

Our sun is a naturally occurring nuclear reactor. It releases tiny packets of energy called photons, which travel the 93 million miles from the sun to Earth in about eight-and-a-half minutes. Every hour, enough photons impact our planet to theoretically satisfy global energy needs for an entire year. However, solar-generated power currently accounts for just four-tenths of one percent of the total energy consumed in the United States. Solar technology is improving and costs are dropping rapidly, though, so our ability to harness the sun’s abundance of energy is on the rise. In fact, a report from the International Energy Agency indicates that solar energy could become the largest global source of electricity by 2050. In the coming years, we will all be enjoying the benefits of solar-generated electricity in one way or another.

Photovoltaic solar panels

Photovoltaic (PV) solar panels ( for example: GOAL ZERO VENTURE 30 SOLAR KIT )

 are made up of many solar cells. Solar cells are made of silicon, like semiconductors. They are constructed with a positive layer and a negative layer, which together create an electric field, just like in a battery. When photons hit a solar cell, they knock electrons loose from their atoms. If conductors are attached to the positive and negative sides of a cell, it forms an electrical circuit. When electrons flow through such a circuit, they generate electricity. Multiple cells make up a solar panel, and multiple panels (modules) can be wired together to form a solar array. The more panels you can deploy, the more energy you can expect to generate.
Basics of electricity

PV solar panels generate DC (direct current) electricity. With DC electricity, electrons flow in one direction around a circuit. This example shows a battery powering a light bulb. The electrons move from the negative side of the battery, through the lamp, and return to the positive side of the battery.

With AC (alternating current) electricity, electrons are pushed and pulled, periodically reversing direction, much like the cylinder of a car’s engine. Generators create AC electricity when a coil of wire is spun next to a magnet. Many different energy sources can “turn the handle” of this generator, such as gas or diesel fuel, hydroelectricity, nuclear, coal, wind, or solar.

AC electricity was chosen for the U.S. electrical power grid, primarily because it is less expensive to transmit over long distances. However, solar panels create DC electricity. How do we get DC electricity into the AC grid? We use an inverter.
Inverters

A solar inverter takes the DC electricity from the solar array and uses that to create AC electricity. Inverters are like the brains of the system. Along with inverting DC to AC power, they also provide ground fault protection and system stats including voltage and current on AC and DC circuits, energy production, and maximum power point tracking.

Central inverters have dominated the solar industry since the beginning. The introduction of micro-inverters is one of the biggest technology shifts in the PV industry. Micro-inverters optimize for each individual solar panel, not for an entire solar system, as central inverts do. This enables every solar panel to perform at maximum potential. One solar panel won't drag down the performance of entire solar array, as opposed to central inverters that optimize for the weakest link.

4 Tips for Succeeding in Business

Let’s face it! Starting and running a small business is inherently risky. Number of things could go wrong at any point – you may run out of cash, another large competitor could move in your space, customers may not like your new product. The list can go on and on. According to SBA show that only 50% of new businesses survive 5 years or more. And yet, every year large number of entrepreneurs jumps in to try their luck. You do not have to be one of those 50% businesses that fall in the failure category. With proper planning and execution you can succeed in building a lasting business. Here are just a few ways to increase your odds of securing fame and fortune in the business world.

Know What You Want

Why are you going into business in the first place? What’s your primary goal? Some people want to change the world with their products or revolutionize the industry with their services. Others are simply looking to make a profit. There’s no right or wrong answer when it comes to your personal desires; just make sure you’re being honest with yourself about your intentions before you actually invest capital in them.

Learn How to Delegate

This is especially critical if you’re hiring employees or outsourcing some of your work load to others. You probably won’t have enough time to make every decision yourself, so you’ll want to hire others that you can trust to make these choices when you can’t. If you don’t respect them enough to complete these tasks, you shouldn’t have gone into business with them in the first place. Learning to delegate is probably one of the most important skills you need to learn as a business owner.

Safety on the Job – Importance of Small Business Safety Checklists

Running a small business can be an exciting venture as profits begin to grow and new employees are added to the payroll. However, one thing that many small business owners often overlook is that with growth come additional risks. Safety procedures for a handful of employees can be totally different than when there are twenty or thirty people milling about at their duties. From the front end where visitors and clients are received to shipping and receiving in the back end, there are safety procedures which should be in place in order to prevent an unfortunate accident.

OSHA Small Business Handbook a Must

Provided by the United States Department of Labor, the Small Business Handbook distributed by OSHA is a must for every small business. In this booklet the Occupational Safety & Health Administration give precise instructions in regards to safety on the job. From ensuring that everything from dock lifts which need to have sides and/or railings to non-skid floor mats in areas where floors get wet or greasy, everything you need to know is detailed in the book.

4 Ways Businesses can Leverage Smartphone for Mobile Marketing

With a huge boom in smartphone ownership, these devices are now being used in more ways than ever imagined, especially in the marketing world. Smartphones are being used for more than just taking pictures or chatting with friends. Ignoring their marketing potential can cost you dearly in the future. Read on to find four ways you can take advantage of the booming smartphone industry to get your business out to more people.

1. Set up a Mobile Friendly Site

The first and most important part of a mobile marketing effort is making sure your website is mobile friendly. Nothing turns customers away like not being able to access your website easily or find the information they’re looking for, and without a specifically designed mobile site, customers may just see a jumble of disorganized information. Potential clients won’t know how to reach you, or what your services are, and if you’re a store, may skip out on purchasing an item because they can’t figure out the website. With your mobile website, make sure all the important information is easily accessible—you may want to weed out wordy intro paragraphs or extra graphics. If you’re a little more tech savvy and don’t want to mess with a website, getting an app made specifically for your store or business is an excellent move forward and can expand your clientele pool. Check out Perfecto Mobile to ensure your app and website are performing optimally on mobile devices.