Opinion

Opinion

New Quest Update Reimagines the Landing Page, Once Again Sequestering Your App Library

Instead of taking you right to your library of installed apps, Meta is making yet another perplexing change to the Quest landing page in v57. Since the earliest days of Meta's VR platform, the company has been seemingly obsessed with not...

Whether Hit or Flop, Apple’s Entrance Will Be a Pivotal Moment for XR

If the avalanche of recent reports can indicate anything at all, it seems Apple is entering the VR/AR headset market fairly soon, bringing along with it the most inflated expectations the industry has ever seen. It's probably going to be...

In ‘Horizon’ Facebook Can Invisibly Observe Users in Real-time to Spot Rule Violations

Facebook Horizon is shaping up to be an interesting social VR offering with powerful building tools that will allow players to create and share their own worlds. But equally powerful are tools the company has baked into Horizon for monitoring users...

Here’s Where Facebook “Guaranteed” Users Would Never Need a Facebook Account to Use Oculus Headsets

If you wondered why yesterday's news stirred such a significant reaction from the VR community at large, it's not just because Facebook doesn't have a stellar reputation on privacy, it's also because the company specifically promised it wouldn't force...

Why You Shouldn’t Play ‘Half-Life: Alyx’ Without a VR Headset

Half-Life: Alyx (2020), Valve's made-for-VR entry into the fabled Half-Life series, launched late last month on SteamVR-compatible headsets to near-universal praise. If you don't own a VR headset but still want to play though, I'd caution you against playing it...

Digital Statues as ‘Stormland’s’ Pre-order Bonus Portend a Curious Future of Virtual Merch

Stormland, the VR open-world adventure from Insomniac Games, is set to launch tomorrow. The studio isn't only offering the chance to unlock virtual collectibles for display in your Oculus Home when you actually play the game (a function made available to...

PC Tethering on Quest is a Huge Upgrade, Making Rift S a Tough Sell

Oculus today announced an upcoming PC tethering feature coming to Quest headsets in November. Oculus Link, as it's called, will let users plug into VR ready PCs and play games originally designed for Rift. Oculus is calling it "the...

Viveport Has Earned a Second Chance Thanks to Infinity

HTC launched Viveport, their VR game marketplace, back in August 2016 to relatively little fanfare. It didn't boast any compelling exclusives or big draws when it came to content deals, and was notorious for being a buggy, unstable mess....

Rift S Isn’t the Headset Fans Want, But Facebook Wagers It’s What Their Ecosystem Needs

While to some Oculus' announcement of the Rift S represents the newest and best version of a good VR headset, to others it's a far cry from what they hoped Oculus would be able to deliver three years after...

‘Fortnite’s’ Massively Attended Virtual Concert is a Potent Glimpse of VR’s Future

Epic Games’ Fortnite is steadily moving from ‘just’ a massively popular battle royale game to a cultural touchstone for hundreds of millions of players. On Saturday, February 2nd, the title was host to an in-game performance by world-class EDM...

If ‘Ready Player One’ Doesn’t Suck, It Stands to Positively Impact the VR Industry

Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of Ernest Cline's best-selling novel Ready Player One is hitting the big screen later this month. As a story based in a world where virtual reality headsets are omnipresent and everyone is connected to the...

NBA Finals Prove That VR Sports Broadcasting is Maturing, But There’s Still Missing Pieces

Sports in VR is squarely in the realm of low-hanging VR that you often hear rattled off on five fingers when broaching the topic of industries VR will revolutionize. And while it's easy to imagine, actual execution is a...

Oculus’ VR Privacy Policy Serves the Needs of Facebook, Not Users

I had a chance to catch up with Oculus' Nate Mitchell at GDC where I asked him about privacy in VR. Oculus has delegated the design and maintenance of their privacy policy to their parent company of Facebook so...

Comparing Oculus Touch & HTC Vive Technology and Ecosystems

The Oculus Touch motion-tracked controllers have launched today after 8 months of the Rift solely supporting gamepad experiences. I wanted to take a moment to dig into some of the more subtle technical nuances when comparing the Oculus Rift...

HoloLens Inside-out Tracking Is Game Changing for AR & VR, and No One Is Talking about...

Augmented reality, while growing in buzz, has been around in some form or another for more than two decades. But immersive head-mounted AR for consumers has had one major hurdle that Microsoft may have just solved. Despite copious concept videos showing...
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