On stage at Oculus Connect 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg teased that Oculus is developing a new, standalone, wireless VR headset with inside-out positional tracking. Following the keynote, I was whisked away behind closed doors to see the so-called ‘Santa Cruz’ prototype in action.
Remember that friends list you made back when you got your Samsung Gear VR or Oculus Rift? Yeah. It’s been pretty useless. Today Oculus announced that they’ll soon be turning on social with the help of two new social app functions.
Oculus’ developer conference Connect is in full swing and in the opening keynote, the news many were waiting for has finally been announces. Oculus’ VR motion controllers Touch will go up for pre-order Monday October 10th for $199 and will ship to them on December 6th.
It was back at the end of 2015 that Epic Games Founder Tim Sweeney teased “something much bigger” than the VR tech demos the company has done in the past. Now the company plans to launch Robo Recall, the evolution of their critically acclaimed Bullet Train tech demo. We’ve played it and it’s awesome (and beautiful).
Today revealed at Oculus Connect, Lone Echo is a narrative-driven first-person game for Touch from Ready at Dawn, the same studio that brought you The Order: 1886 (2015), a number of mobile God of War games.
Today at Oculus Connect 3, 4A Games publicly debuted their first VR FPS title for Oculus Touch, titled Arktika.1. Previously, they had teased the game leading up to the reveal and was met with anticipation, as the high quality assets, as well as their elevated pedigree with the Metro series, were evidence enough. Today we finally know what that title is, and I’ve had the opportunity to give the demo a shot. Needless to say, it was an impressively rendered experience with high quality art rarely seen in current VR games, but let’s dive into what buttons it really pushed (and those it might not have).
Facebook is plugging away on creating their perfect VR app that promises to integrate the social platform into 3D virtual worlds. Last we saw of the prototype in April that introduced a number of features, all of which hinge on Touch, the natural input controller from Oculus.
Revealed today on stage at Oculus Connect, Mark Zuckerberg teased “the next phase of virtual reality,” an inside-out tracking solution that would allow a headset to go entirely without the need of an outside tracking tech like the Rift’s IR camera and Constellation tracking.
Connect, Oculus’s annual developer conference, is already in full swing, but if you didn’t manage to book the flight and hotel to San Jose, CA, you can still pop your head in to see what this year’s hubbub is about.
Amazon’s UK retailer seems to have already jumped the gun on today’s supposed announcement taking place at Oculus Connect opening keynote, where we’ll likely hear official word on price, release date, and everything else surrounding the long awaited Touch controllers.
PlayStation VR is almost here, with its October 13th launch creeping ever closer. Although we’ve already had our paws all over the headset in our comprehensive review—a deep dive into the platform that any prospective buyer should read before forking over the $400 for the PS VR—we’re just as excited as you to play what PlayStation today revealed in a blogpost to be over 30 launch titles including another 20+ to follow in Q4 2016.
On October 4th, Google revealed Daydream View, which is their reference design for their mobile VR headset. Google CEO Sandar Pichai also announced the first Daydream-ready phone designed called Pixel, which also has native hardware support for their artificial intelligent Google Assistant technology. Pichai emphasized that Google and the wider tech industry are moving from mobile-first to AI-first, and so they showed off more demos of their AI conversational interface with Google Home.
PlayStation VR launches on October 13th, but today is review day and we’ve got a detailed PSVR review ready for you!
Today was the big reveal for Google’s first Daydream ready phone, Pixel, and the Daydream View headset, the first high-end VR headset from the company. We’ve got a high res gallery of the new headset and have rounded up all of today’s coverage into one handy list for you.
