Among Android and software update announcements the Google I/O conference reveals a piece of hardware Amazon might find very familiar-- Home, a cylindrical speaker featuring voice-controlled smarts.

Similar in shape to an oversized salt shaker, the Home performs more or less the same functions as the Echo. It uses a set of far-field microphones to continuously listen to users and answer questions, control music, control some connected devices and even stream media from a smartphone or tablet to a Google Cast.

Powering such voice-controlled smarts is Assistant, a self-explanatory piece of cloud-powered Google software also first announced at I/O. Also available on Android smartphones, Assistant searches the internet to adjust itself to users' schedules, and can even provide images and other information for improved search results.

Silicon Valley chip maker Movidius presents what amounts to a supercomputer inside a USB stick-- the Fathom Neural Compute Stick, a device the company describes as "the world's first embedded neural network accelerator."

Neural networks are used for sophisticated computing tasks, such as identifying and analysing objects or the mapping of 3D spaces for augmented or mixed reality navigation. Movidius is a specialist in the field, being the company behind the technology allowing the DJI Phantom 4 drone to avoid collisions.

The technology in question is the Movidius Myriad 2 MA2450 chip-- and it is the same found inside the Fathom stick (as paired with 512MB of LPDDR3 RAM). How did Movidius manage to boil down a neural network in such a small package? The answer lies in architecture designed specifically for running the aforementioned environmental analysis tasks at under 1W of power. However, one has to keep in mind the stick can do nothing else.

Customers dabbling in game livestreaming might be interested in the Ripsaw, a capture card allowing users to easily push game footage to Twitch and YouTube with easy-to-use USB 3.0 connectivity.

According to Razer the Ripsaw offers "industry-leading" 1080p game capture at 60fps and "nearly" zero latency. In addition it also features onboard audio and microphone inputs for users wanting to do commentary while playing games. Video input and output comes through HDMI and analog component port.

Sony takes to the 2016 Games Developer Conference (GDC) to reveal the release date of the PlayStation VR-- the headset is coming out October 2016, later than the Q1 release of both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

First announced back in 2014 as "Project Morpheus," the PlayStation VR has at least one advantage over the competition in not requiring a high-end PC. Instead, as the name suggests, the headset runs VR experiences using the PlayStation 4, making it a less costly proposition to customers. Also making less expensive is a price tag of €399, lower than either Rift or Vive.

Mind, on a pure technical specification basis the PlayStation VR might look less technically capable than the competition, since it pushes lower resolution images with a smaller field of view-- something even PlayStation VP Ito Masayasu admits in an interview with games site Polygon, where he states "if you just talk about the high-end quality, yes, I would admit that Oculus may have better VR."