Seattle's new Portal VR parlor feels reminiscent of the early days of arcades "where kids could play the coolest video games," according to GeekWire. Portal, which opened on April 1st, offers ten room-sized VR booths. Co-founder Tim Harader says, "Our primary target was twentysomethings, tech workers. But what we found is that the target market is just all over the place. Whether they’re 8 years old or 80, they’re all just blown away.” Unlike the video arcades that popped up all over the country during the early 1980's, Portal offers an environment free of the usual "cacophony of blaring arcade sounds": “Instead, you’ll enter an atmosphere of comfortable coolness," reads a message on the company website. – GW

The late David Bowie's musical, "Lazarus," will be "restaged" as part of a VR exhibit in London. The musical, co-written by Bowie, and based on the same source material as the 1976 film "The Man Who Fell To Earth" (in which Bowie starred), is built around songs from Bowie's "Blackstar" album as well as selections from his older work. The show had limited sold-out runs in New York and London, but visitors to the V&A Museum’s Performance Festival will be invited to strap on a headset and watch a 360 degree VR recording of one of the show's performances. – VERGE

A new short film from the UK examines the potential dark side of a world submerged in augmented reality. The film, "Strange Beasts," focuses on Victor, who is in charge of promoting a new AR app that allows users to "grow a creature of their choosing" to serve as a companion. Writer and director Magali Barbe conceived of the short early last year initially as a hoax video before settling on a more traditional narrative. – FUTURISM

A new VR project out of Stanford University gives medical students the ability to "travel inside" a series of three-dimensional beating hearts. Visualizing the heart in three dimensions has long represented a challenge for medical trainees. “If you can’t understand what the geometry is, what the anatomy and physiology are of the heart, you can make a mistake," says co-developer Dr. David Axelrod. However, when students don a VR headset and enter the system software company Lighthaus engineered for Stanford, they can see the inner workings of one of a dozen 3D defective hearts "as if (the students) had been shrunken to the size of a peanut." The hearts can be spun on their axis or "exploded" into sections. The students can also see a view from inside a heart, and fix defects "surgically." – STAT NEWS

Semiconductor film Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) has purchased Texas chipmaker Nitero Inc. in the hopes that the latter company's tech can foster extra fast Wi-Fi to speed the adoption of VR headsets. The Texas company designed a 60 gigahertz wireless chip that can send high-res video with little or no lag. AMD VP Rod Taylor (no relation to this guy), speaking at a conference in England, blamed sluggish VR growth on the need for a headset to be tied to gaming devices via cables. No word on when the new headsets, enabled by the Nitero super-chip, will hit the market. – ORLANDO SENTINEL