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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Intel's Alloy headset, unveiled earlier this year, aims to offer VR without ungainly cables hooked up to a PC. Ever eager to keep you buying PCs, Microsoft and Intel are cooperating to bring virtual reality to the masses.

Today's more advanced virtual reality setups, like Facebook's Oculus Rift and HTC's Vive, require a high-powered PC with enough graphics horsepower to generate a convincing artificial 3D game for you to play or world to explore. There's progress to pare back the hardware requirements, but Microsoft and Intel are going farther with a project called Evo.

Project Evo's goal is to bring VR and related immersive technology to midrange laptops with the workable but unspectacular graphics performance of built-in Intel graphics. It's geared to handle VR and related augmented reality and mixed reality technology that blends computer-generated imagery with the real world.

Indeed, it's no coincidence the companies chose the Project Evo name: Evolution is famously unforgiving for entities that can't keep up with competitive challenges.

The project is "a deep collaboration with Microsoft to further push the boundaries of personal computing," Navin Shenoy, general manager of Intel's PC group, said in a statement. Microsoft and Intel will cooperate to ensure VR and mixed reality can fully exploit the power of Intel's sixth-generation "Skylake" Core processors and newer seventh-generation "Kaby Lake" models and their built-in graphics hardware.

It's also designed to improve other areas where mobile devices could struggle to keep up, like artificial intelligence and very detailed big-screen 4K graphics. Evo-class PCs will need at least 8GB of memory, USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI 1.4 graphics port and Bluetooth 4.0 wireless connections.

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