organisations regardless of size. that was our political correspondent. time to catch up with all the weather news now. sunshine and showers around, or longer spells of rain. some places are quite cool weather rain arrives. in the sunshine it is fairly pleasant. showers pushing into south—western parts of england and wales through the morning and they will spread northwards and eastwards. heavy downpours in southern areas and in central and southern areas and in central and southern scotland and north east england outbreaks of rain. but to the north of it it is nice and bright in northern ireland and scotland. overnight it looks like the rain in northern areas moved southwards and it turns dry and chile in the north. but it isn't dry and bright in northern areas with sunshine and central and southern eastern areas will see some showers.

but it is one in the sunshine further west. the headlinee,.4 prince william and prince harry have spoken of their regret that their last conversation with their mother was a "desperately rushed" phone call. some of the bbc‘s most high profile women have written to the director general, calling on him to correct gender disparity in pay. cctv footage has emerged of the officer wrestling the man to the floor of a shop in hackney. health secretaryjeremy hunt has described the abuse of staff at great ormond street hospital, where baby charlie gard is being treated, as "totally unacceptable". this week...

strange doorways... ..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. i6 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. once 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 oculus 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, oculus 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 i 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 octane 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 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 it is set 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 upon 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 iterating 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 powered -- it —— it gets fairly tired after about three hours of charge, 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 powering through sand,

—— paddling through sound, so not just landmines detection, but applications such as farming, for 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, in 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 moving through a 3—d 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 is a hard wall. itjust feels, it is bouncy,

so as the ball hits the wall, i can feel it kind of bounce back slightly. 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 ioooth of a second. any less and it will feel like everything is 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 things, 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. the director peterjackson, peterjackson, 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. 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 rules around camerawork and everything else, 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 will be 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 walk 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. these are some of the ar experiences that 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 its 3—d thing to the real world, so lots of extra programming for developers and a consistent ar experience between apps. —— and an inconsistent experience.

many of those apps rely on markers to make the magic happen, that is either a special image or normal pictures, like the images in this book which the app then recognises and pins with 3—d content to. apple's ar kit uses a new 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 attack, our realities could be —— putting their weight behind the tech, our realities could become a whole lot weirder. hi, my name is gareth. i am studying at university. i have had a stutter ever since i was 16 years old. i don't let it get in my way, in the way of things.

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 am creating a virtual reality exposure therapy, aiming to benefit people who stutter and to 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 movement 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, and official treatments. when the person is in

the environment, they see an animated avatar and can talk to the avatar about a certain topic, their favourite holiday, and over that time, i will be tracking their eye case 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, emulating a whole audience for them —— 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 is stories like gareth‘s that remind us that vr might not live or die just

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 will see you soon. hello. yesterday's weather turned out to be disappointing for some through the afternoon. rain and quite cool as well. but there was some sunshine in the forecast. today is looking similar with some areas having sunshine, others having showers or spells of rain. the culprit — this area of low pressure which will continue to bring unsettled conditions. bringing more persistent rain to some northern parts of the uk. to the south, it's all about the showers.

streaming in across south wales this morning and across the midlands into south—east england. some will be heavy. and they may merge to produce longer spells of rain. further north, clumps of cloud, outbreaks of rain but sunshine as well. sunshine appearing for much of northern ireland, into western scotland but this weather front will be bringing a wet afternoon for eastern areas with low cloud and an onshore breeze makes it feel quite cool. rain showers heavier through central and southern scotland. through the afternoon, pushes into northern england. but behind it, it brightens up for the northern half of scotland. a bright afternoon for northern ireland, where it will feel fairly warm. england and wales, plenty of showers, particularly southern areas, where they could be heavy and quite prolonged and feeling cool as well. for the open golf, it looks like it will be windy today. we are at birkdale for the final day and there could be the risk of showers. some sunshine, temperatures in the mid—teens celsius. looks like there could be some

interruptions to play for the women's world cup at lord's but a few showers developing and maybe even longer spells of rain. now, this evening and overnight, that rain across northern areas sinks south so it will bring a damp night. but further north and west, a dry, clear night. but for monday, northern and western areas see the best of the brightness to start the day. mist and fog clearing away. central, southern and eastern areas have a hang—back of cloud from that weather system and quite a cool breeze from the north. further west, with the sunshine, it will feel quite warm. on tuesday, we are between weather systems. a lot of dry weather around, good sunny spells, one or two showers. when we have the sunshine, it will feel quite warm, but the next weather system behind me will make inroads for wednesday. looks like it could be quite wet as that band of rain spreads across the uk. into thursday, a little drier with a mix of sunshine and showers. good afternoon.

some of the bbc‘s best known female personalities have written an open letter to the corporation's director general calling on him to take urgent action to ensure women are paid the same as men doing the samejob. the presenters claire balding, jane garvey and fiona bruce