The Future of Virtual Reality: What Happens When the Digital World Feels Real? From Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro to AI-generated worlds, brain interfaces, and the science of presence. What happens when the digital world begins to feel real? Virtual reality is transforming how we experience space, perception, and the boundaries of reality. The room that isn’t there Imagine standing at the edge of a cliff. You know perfectly well that you are in your living room. You remember putting on a headset. Yet when you look down, your stomach tightens and your feet hesitate. Nothing below you is real. Your reaction is. That strange split between knowledge and instinct is the secret of virtual reality—and perhaps its most important scientific achievement. VR does not need to convince you intellectually that a digital world exists. It needs to persuade the perceptual systems that normally keep you alive. For decades, the popular promise was straightforward: put on a headset and go somewh...

The Internet Is Not Disappearing. The Way We Use It Is. From ARPANET and the dot-com crash to AI agents, digital borders and a web that may no longer need a browser. From a small network connecting research computers to a global infrastructure serving billions, the internet has transformed how humanity communicates. Now AI agents may change how we experience it once again. Imagine this: you need to replace a broken washing machine. You tell an assistant your budget, the size of your apartment and the delivery date. It compares independent reviews, checks which models actually fit through your doorway, finds a reputable retailer and returns with three sensible choices. You approve one. The machine arrives on Tuesday. You never visit a search results page. You never open ten browser tabs. You may never see the retailer’s website at all. For most of the web’s history, this would have sounded like a triumph. The internet was built to move information between computers, and the web ...

 Who Will Own the Next Space Station? The Private Race to Replace the ISS NASA wants to move from operating the International Space Station to buying time aboard privately owned successors. Vast, Axiom, Starlab and Orbital Reef promise new science and new markets. But who gets access when an essential laboratory becomes a business? Private companies are racing to build the next generation of orbital stations. But who will control humanity's future in low Earth orbit?

Alan Turing and the Machines We Haven't Finished Building By Alex Kennedy   |   Minds That Changed the Future   |   October 29, 2026 Alan Turing helped define the foundations of modern computing, explored the limits of algorithms and raised questions about machine intelligence that remain relevant today. Editorial illustration by Next Horizon. Two text conversations. Five minutes to decide which correspondent is human. In a study published in May 2026, judges chose GPT-4.5 over a real human as the human participant in 73% of trials when the model had been prompted to adopt a convincing persona. Without that prompt, its success rate fell to 36%. The finding tells us something remarkable about how machines converse. It tells us considerably less about what they understand. The result has an obvious connection to Alan Turing, whose name has become shorthand for making a computer sound human. Yet that shorthand misses the larger story. Before chatbots, before ele...