Some of the big box retailers have already published their Black Friday deals, but there are still a few to go leading up to the November 23rd sale. But before Black Friday and Cyber Monday even begin, you can get an awesome deal on a new Windows VR headset, including controllers.
Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus who left the company in 2017, recently published an article with his thoughts on what it will take for VR to reach the mainstream. Price, he argues, matters little if the experience is not keeping people coming back to the technology on a regular basis.
Bell Helicopter challenged its Innovation Team to accelerate its aircraft design process. Turning to VR as a key improvement to their design pipeline, the team created the FCX-001, the company’s first “concept aircraft,” in just six months.
Back in July, many of VR’s biggest players announced the VirtualLink Consortium, a group unified around creating a connection standard for future VR headsets. HTC was seemingly the odd one out back at the initial announcement, but this week the company joined the group in support of the standard.
Oculus co-founder and Facebook’s head of PC VR Brendan Iribe is leaving the company amidst a TechCrunch report that Facebook cancelled its second iteration of Rift. Now, a new report maintains the company is heading in a different direction with a much less ambitious upgrade to Rift than the recent ‘Half Dome’ prototype would suggest.
Retailers are already gearing up for this year’s big Black Friday deals, and Target is advertising one of the cheapest prices on PSVR bundles we’ve ever seen.
According to a report from Business Insider, earlier this year Apple was on the verge of acquiring Leap Motion, but the deal fell through days before it was expected to close. According to the report, this is the second time in some six years that Apple had conversations with the company about an acquisition.
Last year, IMAX opened a number of VR Experience Centres in major cities across the world with the hopes of bringing movie-going crowds high-quality VR games and brand engagement experiences such as ILMxLab’s Star Wars: Trials on Tatoine. Now, the company has shut down their last remaining New York location, and has said they won’t be investing any more into VR during 2019.
Sony and Lenovo announced they’ve signed a two-year patent license agreement that will allow Lenovo to base a future VR headset off the PSVR industrial design.
Quill is Facebook’s first-party VR art tool. While users can view Quill artwork in the program itself and inside of Facebook Spaces, the company is hoping to unlock the artwork by making it viewable on Oculus Quest too.
Virginia’s Shenandoah University is the first in the state to offer a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science in AR/VR design. To further round out the department’s facilities, the university announced it’s partnering with Immersive VR Education, the company behind VR experiences such as Apollo 11 VR (2016) and the VR learning platform Engage.
FundamentalVR, the training and data analysis technology platform, today announced a three-year deal to jointly develop surgical VR simulation and education products with Mayo Clinic, the world-renowned academic medical center. FundamentalVR has also raised an additional $1.4 million in financing by its existing investor Tern Plc, bringing its total to $2.45 million.
HTC earlier this month revealed a 6DOF controller dev kit for the Vive Focus standalone headset. New details have emerged about the device this week.
Steam’s annual Halloween Sale is live, and it’s safe to say it’s the end-all of VR sales this Spooktober.
