Latest news with #immersion
WIRED
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- WIRED
Feeling Is Believing With Razer's Freyja Haptic Gaming Cushion
I remember the first time I played a first-person shooter. It was Star Wars: Battlefront 2 , the 2005 version, on the Playstation 2 in my friend's basement, when I was a kid. I felt like I was right there. The frigid winds of Hoth ripped across my face, and the chatter of comms was right up against my ear. I felt the heat of blaster bolts zipping through the air, and heard them crackling as they shot past my face. I brought the scope up to my eye, aimed, steadied my breath, and pulled the trigger. A stormtrooper fell to the ground, and I felt like I'd earned a small victory for the Rebellion. As a child, games felt immersive to me. They felt real, like I was in that world. A large part of that was my suspension of disbelief—I wanted the game to be real, and I was willing to accept it as real, so I overlooked the low-resolution textures, the polygons that I could count, and the compressed 32-bit audio. The scan lines of the CRT television in my friend's basement faded away, and the controller felt less like a tool and more like an extension of myself. It's an experience that slowly slipped away as I got older, one I've been chasing ever since. In chasing that feeling, I've tweaked my setup with fine-tuned keyboards, open-back headphones, ultrawide monitors, racing wheels, and even virtual reality headsets. They help, but they're still external to my senses. The Razer Freyja, on the other hand, is a $300 haptic gaming cushion that brings gaming a step closer to a full-body experience. Sounds and actions rumble through my body and make the game world feel just a bit more like I'm sitting inside of it, instead of being an external force looking in through a window. It doesn't suspend my disbelief like when I was a kid, but it makes it much easier for all the details of the external world to disappear. Gaming Seat Photograph: Henri Robbins The Freyja can strap onto nearly any gaming or office chair to create physical feedback while you game. The system can either directly connect to some games or it can vibrate based on the audio coming from your computer. It's exactly what you might think a gaming cushion looks like, and unlike some pricier alternatives, it means you don't have to replace your current chair. It is entirely dependent on the software it works with and how developers implement it. To connect the Freyja, you'll need both a nearby electrical socket and a free USB-A port on your system for Razer's 2.4-GHz wireless dongle. The cushion doesn't have any batteries, so your chair will lose some mobility whenever the Freyja is connected. If you need to roll around, disconnect the barrel jack connector on the side of the cushion. It's robust, with vibration zones that react quickly. It could get to the point where I was being shaken in my chair, without ever eliciting a slight rattling or a stray noise. The integration into Razer's Chroma software never had any issues and worked well. However, I ran into a few hiccups, especially with intermediary software like SimHub. The game I was playing would lose connection with SimHub, and I would have to restart my system or spend some time troubleshooting to get it working again. The Freyja didn't have connectivity issues itself, but some outlets in my house didn't want to keep it powered. I suspect that's a voltage issue more than anything else. As of publication, the Freyja has full native support for 12 games and one simulation racing app, SimHub, which opens it up to countless racing games. During my testing, I focused mainly on racing games: Assetto Corsa , Forza Horizon 4 , Forza Horizon 5 , and DiRT Rally 2.0 , all of which used SimHub's built-in telemetry to create haptic feedback for pretty much every aspect of a car.
Forbes
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Gwyneth Paltrow Shares Her Travel Rule For When Things Go Wrong
Gwyneth Paltrow leads visitors through a unique sensory experience at Genesis House. In the heart of Manhattan's Meatpacking District, Gwyneth Paltrow has helped turn a luxury showroom into something resembling a Korean forest. The Forest Within, a new immersive installation at Genesis House, is her latest collaboration—one that fuses nature, tech, and wellness into a multisensory sanctuary filled with peonies, LED-lit rock formations, and the scent of petrichor. But the project isn't just about aesthetics. 'I think we are at this crazy inflection point as a culture and society where we're tipping over into so much input all the time,' Paltrow told me at the opening. 'We have not adapted to it. Our nervous systems absolutely cannot cope with what's happening on any level.' Designed to pull visitors into a sensory reset—complete with guided meditation voiced by Paltrow herself—the installation is meant to be a reminder that, even in the middle of New York City, stillness is possible. 'We experience emails like a—like a bad email is like a gunshot,' she said. 'And it's not commensurate with what's happening.' This fascination with the nervous system and the need for presence isn't limited to pop-up installations—it's become central to how she travels. And when things go wrong, which of course they often do, Paltrow has a simple rule. 'I try to go in with the mindset of, like, this might not go according to plan, and let's just sort of try to roll with it, you know?' she said. 'There was one time I was stuck on the Eurostar for six hours when my kids were toddlers. You can lose your mind, or you can try to be calm and go a bit inward. What will losing your mind in a train car do for anybody?' Even when travel feels like chaos, she turns to what she calls her grounding rituals. 'I always walk,' she said. 'I was once in France, and I had this tour guide in a museum, and he said, Do you want to take the elevator or do you want to walk? And I said, I prefer to walk. And he said, 'Good, me too. I believe that walking brings the body and the soul together.' And I was like, that's true. I never articulated it like that.' She and her husband, Brad Falchuk, will often spend hours walking through a city—sometimes to dinner, sometimes just to get lost. 'Last summer, we were walking around Rome, and we had one of those days where we walked for about six hours and got lost. And we stumbled upon one of those ruins that had sort of a modern facade that had been peeled away, and it was like some 11th-century… you know what I mean?' she laughed. 'It was one of those moments where it was just a treasure that someone else had unearthed.' Hydration, she added, is the other essential. And when arriving somewhere new, especially across time zones, she avoids overindulging until she's settled. 'I try to mine like the food, the alcohol, and stuff until I get totally adjusted to the time,' she said. She lights up most when talking about the places that truly feel like sanctuaries. We go to Italy in the summer, in the hills of Umbria. It's like true countryside, very rustic. That's where I feel totally at peace,' she said. 'It's unmanicured, and there's a wildness to it. They call Umbria the Green Heart of Italy. And all the flora and fauna there… you know, all kinds of wild things running around in the bushes and olive trees. I just feel like beautifully insignificant when I'm there.' Paltrow is quick to draw distinctions between different types of nature. 'The forest is so gentle and it's so inward and it's so quiet and like, there's so much peace in the forest,' she said. 'But California, the coast—it's almost brutal. It's so raw and beautiful, and the waves are so strong, the ocean's so cold and brackish. There's something inhospitable about it that I love.' The daughter of a filmmaker, she grew up bouncing between coasts and continents—and hasn't slowed down. 'I've never been to Korea, which I'm dying to go to. Korean food's my favorite food,' she said. 'And I've only ever been to Tokyo in Japan, so I would love to kind of go out into the islands and do that whole trip.' When I mentioned my own desire to ski in Japan, she nodded. 'Yeah, people say you go in January and February, and it's unbelievable. That would be really cool.' While The Forest Within is open through June 29 and offers a stylized version of that immersive nature, she believes everyone can recreate their own version at home. 'If there's a spot outside in nature where somebody could go and do the thing that connects them most deeply to themselves—whether that's listening to a beautiful piece of music or reading a poem or just simply lying down on the grass—that's kind of what we're trying to achieve here,' she said. 'It doesn't cost anything and can be a powerful tool in shifting our consciousness.' And for fellow parents wondering how to bring little ones along for the ride, Paltrow had one final piece of advice. 'I always just sort of packed up my kids and went, and I tried not to be too precious. My dad always said, 'You're on the time you're on.' We'd be falling asleep at the table and he'd be like, 'We're going to the Pompidou.'' Because when it comes to travel, her rule is clear: expect disruption—and find calm anyway.
CTV News
08-05-2025
- General
- CTV News
Three-week camp teaches Anishinaabemowin language in North Bay
A three-week immersion camp being held at North Bay's Canadore College teaches students the Anishinaabemowin language.
