NVIDIA said it teased its Pascal-based Drive PX 2 system at CES 2016 earlier this year, but we found out quickly after that it was just their Maxwell-based GPUs standing up for attention in the space of the Pascal GPUs. Well, now we're hearing that Volvo will be using NVIDIA's Drive PX 2 system in their self-driving cars, which will hit the road in 2017.

Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA said: "Volvo, well-known for its safety and reliability, will be the first to develop DRIVE PX 2, using it as the brain for its fleet of 100 self-driving cars to be publicly available next year in its hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden". Volvo will be using the Pascal-based Drive PX 2 for its self-driving capabilities, with NVIDIA providing both the hardware and software that will culminate in an array of cameras, lidar (light ray shooting radar), radar, and ultrasonic sensors.

All of this will create a 360-degree picture of everything going on around the vehicle. This will obviously require considerable horsepower, which is where the Pascal-based Drive PX 2 comes into play.

League of Legends fans will be happy to know that the 2016 World Championships will take place across the United States, later this year.

The 2016 World Championships will start with the Group Stages, which kicks off on September 29, and runs through to October 2. It starts back up on October 6, running through to October 9 at hte Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, California. The Quarterfinals will run from October 13-16 at the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. From there, four qualifying teams will participate in the semifinals, which takes place October 21-22 at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

After that, the final two teams will battle on October 29 at the Staples Center in LA, California. Riot Games adds that more information on ticket sales for the huge eSports event will be coming soon.

While most people instantly think 'gaming' when it comes to VR, the applications in which it will be used are virtually limitless. Doctors at the Angers University Hospital in western France have used a VR headset to map a patient's brain during surgery, removing the tumor late last month.

During the procedure, the patient was concious, with doctors using the virtual environment to map zones of the brain. Up until now, mappning and monitoring neural connections in certain areas of the brain wasn't easily done, especially in the operating room. Neurosurgeon Philippe Menei explains: "By totally controlling what the patient sees and hears, we can put him in situations that allow us to do tests on certain connections that were not possible before".

In this procedure, doctors needed to monitor the patient's vision carefully, as the tumor had spread to one eye. In order to know what was going on with the reactions in the brain, the surgical team created a VR environment without a single point of focus. Instead, they employed "luminous objects" in the patient's peripheral vision. These results were positive, as the patient's sight remains intact post-op, considering where the tumor was. Doctors are now planning to use the setup for future cases that are similar, where they're impacting the region of the brain that controls sight.

Theatrical ticket provider Fandango has just acquired Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster, which were both owned by Warner Bros. Entertainment, for an undisclosed sum of money.

Warner Bros. has secured itself a minority ownership in Fandango, and will continue to serve as an ongoing strategic partner. Warner Bros. said that both Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes receive around 20 million unique hits per month, but with Fandango's magic and combined audience, it projects these numbers to grow to over 63 million per month. Fandango and Flixster's mobile apps have been downloaded over 100 million times, according to Warner Bros.

Fandango President Paul Yanover said that Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster were invaluable resources for movie fans, and they look forward to seeing their new acquisitions grow. The company wants to increase theatrical ticketing and super-serving consumers with all of their movie needs, with both sites continuing as consumer-facing brands. Fandango will however add its ticketing capabilities to the Flixster app in the coming months.

Yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook published an open letter to the company's customers, explaining why Apple feels so strongly about supporting one's right to data encryption and privacy. Shortly afterward, Google CEO Sundar Pichai chimed in on Twitter, describing the letter as "important" before siding with Cook.

"Forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users' privacy," he writes. "We know that law enforcement and intelligence agencies face significant challenges in protecting the public against crime and terrorism. We build secure products to keep your information safe and we give law enforcement access to data based on valid legal orders, but that's wholly different than requiring companies to enable hacking of customer devices & data. Could be a troubling precedent. [I'm] looking forward to a thoughtful and open discussion on this important issue."

With the Game Developers Conference less than a month away, I've been wondering when the GPU hype train would begin from both AMD and NVIDIA regarding their next-gen GPU technology. Well, AMD just fired the first shots, with AMD Marketing Director Chris Hook taking to Twitter, teasing Polaris.

Hook tweeted to Raja Koduri, boss of AMD's newly-formed Radeon Technologies Group: "Someone told me GDC is looking kind of bland this year. I think we need some Capsaicin to spice things up a bit.....". We know that this is code for Polaris, with Koduri tweeting back to AnandTech's Ryan Smith, and Hook: "no worries Ryan - we will make it interesting for everyone".

Last year, NVIDIA unveiled its behemoth at GDC - with the GeForce GTX Titan X being revealed at the Game Developers Conference in March 2015. This year, we should expect both sides to be firing shots constantly - with NVIDIA poised to unveil its Pascal-based Titan X successor at GDC, or a few weeks later at its own GPU Technology Conference (GTC).

Yesterday we reported India was getting a new $4 smartphone dubbed the Freedom 251. With a price that low, naturally, concerns have arisen over its quality and sourcing.

Turns out Ringing Bells -- the company behind the phone -- is expecting to get lot of breaks, allowing it to cut costs now in anticipation of future savings. Bells is expecting state governments to waive duty fees, with more waived through the Make in India initiative (amusingly, the phones will be 70 percent made in Taiwan) and startup schemes. Finally, they say the remaining cost reductions will be made through 'economies of scale.'

Without these breaks, they claim the phone would cost anywhere from $36 to $43. So why not do that anyway? Marketing. The idea is to sell the 251 on the cheap in order to make its new brand famous (and it's sure working so far), then use that fame to sell future higher-priced models. Keep in mind it plans to sell only about 200,000 phones at the $4 price. The scheme worked for Datawind, who manufactured the aforementioned tablet -- no doubt Ringing Bells is following their lead.

In an interview with 20 Minuten, John Romero revealed that he's working on a new FPS game, but of course he didn't want to give any details away quite yet.

While at the Zürich Game Festival, Ludicious, John Romero was asked about what game designers and developers, such as him, do when they become a bit older and more wise with experience. Of course he opened up a school to help teach prospective students the need for good level design, he also, surprisingly, opened up and confirmed that he's working on a new project. An as of yet unnamed FPS that has no details. I am currently also working on a new FPS, Romero said.

The new level he created for Doom might have just been a warm-up for his new project, or projects, that he's working on. The veteran game designer knows the intricacies of what a good game is, and hopefully whatever he churns out follows the same principles as some of his more successful titles, and not that of Daikatana.

VR has lot of possibilities, and can help us experience things we never could, like actually engaging in pitched sword-fights in the tight confines of a dungeon. This trailer for A Legend of Luca shows us precisely why that would be a great game idea. Just imagine using an actual (though not sharp or dangerous) sword-like controller to swing and destroy your enemies?

This FPS is inspired by The Legend of Zelda and takes the dungeon crawling aspect and puts you square in the middle of it. Smash through your enemies, shoot lighting from your sword and bash those pots to find precious Rupees.

The game will be available on Steam on April 29th and makes use of the HTC Vive's ability to let you use an entire room. There're multiple rooms that you can wander around in with smooth transitions so you don't end up walking into a wall. How they're doing that is likely a procedural technological marvel. Multiple weapon types will make their way into the game, potentially even with dual-wield capabilities. Earlier videos showed the use of a staff, while this lets you slash your enemies to bits with a lightning shooting sword.

So what exactly goes on at Area 51 in the Nevada desert these days? Well, we're no closer to the truth, but thanks to one incredibly ballsy drone pilot, we've got some new views over some of the world's most restricted airspace.

Pilot Hans Faulkner sent his drone up over a number of locations at the secretive base, North West Gate, and the Groom Lake from South Gate - a historically significant site which served as the airspace for some of the experimental aircraft and which the pilot uploaded to his YouTube channel.

Faulkner described the spot as "very difficult to move around" and that "white trucks follow us and hide when we record them". My hat's off to you, Hans.