Tag Archives: oculus

While Facebook deals with a privacy firestorm, its VR unit Oculus is moving forward with new privacy tools.

The social network may join other tech giants that're reducing dependence on chipmakers, Bloomberg reports. Its processors could help with AI and Oculus VR headsets.

An eagle-eyed Redditor may have just discovered that Oculus Rift is now supported in the latest stable version of Google Chrome. You'll have to do a little menu legwork to set it up by tracking down a setting in Chrome's flags, but the browser can su...

In the middle of testimony over Facebook’s privacy scandal, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas took a moment to grill Mark Zuckerberg over his company’s political loyalties. In the course of a testy exchange between Sen. Cruz and Zuckerberg, the senator brought up the dismissal of Palmer Luckey, the controversial founder of virtual reality tech development pioneer, Oculus . It was part of Cruz’s broader questioning about whether or not Facebook is biased in the ways it moderates the posts and accounts of members — and in its staffing policies. Here’s the exchange: Cruz : Do you know the political orientation of those 15 to 20,000 people engaged in content review? Zuckerberg : No senator, we do not generally ask people about their political orientation when they’re joining the company. Cruz: So, as CEO Have you ever made hiring or firing decisions based on political positions or what candidates they supported? Zuckerberg : No. Cruz : Why was Palmer Luckey fired? Zuckerberg: That is a specific personnel matter that seems like it would be inappropriate to speak to here. Cruz: You just made a specific representation that you didn’t make decisions based on political views, is that accurate

Hand-painted VR animation isn't new. Oculus developed Quill, a 3D painting package for the Rift, back in 2015 for its now defunct Story Studio. It was released to the public in Dec. 2016 and updated with a slew of filmmaking features three months ago...

Facebook is continuing to drive updates to their little-used virtual reality Spaces app, where users can explore 360 content and chat with other users in VR. Today, FB showcased some big new changes to the avatar system in Spaces that switches up the visual style quite a bit. The avatar system is a lot more three-dimensional in that the faces no longer seem to be blank canvases with 2D features slapped onto them. The evolution isn’t necessarily skewing more toward realism as much as it is toward more emotion that can come off in a less cartoon-like way. Facebook Spaces probably doesn’t have any crazy usage numbers, so it’s interesting to see the company refine things to this degree. On an anecdotal basis, I’ve only seen this feature pop up in my feed a couple of times, and quite a few of my FB friends work in virtual reality, so that should be a bit telling. That does make one question whether Facebook would ever look to integrate the avatar system into features outside of VR. Facebook says they are continuing to make these changes compatible with their machine learning-powered avatar creation tool, which takes recent photos of you and suggests appropriate avatars that you can use as starting points. This seems like something Facebook could easily integrate into a Bitmoji competitor if they ever choose to. Zuckerberg apologizes for his tone-deaf VR cartoon tour of Puerto Rico devastation The new system integrates more customization options so that users can dial in their look to make things more similar to how they themselves look in real life, which seems to be how Facebook would prefer you use this system. There seems to be a particularly large amount of progress in how users can dial in face shape and hairstyles. Notably, users are also able to change their body size for the first time, rather than all being the same thin size. Avatars being creepy is kind of a given, though I’m not sure Facebook is lessening the creepiness any in this update… The new avatar looks will be rolling out in Facebook Spaces over the next week, the company says.

It was a wet and wild week at the 2018 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The Engadget team spent our days wandering the show floor, meeting with developers and, of course, playing every game we could get our hands on. Here are a few highli...

Hey, good morning! You look fabulous. Welcome to Thursday. We touch on why deleting Facebook is hard for some of us, squeeze a sorry out of Mark Zuckerberg and test out the comfortable future of Oculus VR.

Virtual reality seems to have become a very tired topic to consumers, products are still getting made though because big tech companies are convinced of its eventual ubiquity. The challenge now becomes attracting attention from people whose attention spans for what you’re selling has perhaps already timed out. Oculus Go is the latest VR hardware to hit the market from ole Facebook.com and it seems to be a pretty thoughtful move with hardware that makes some solid improvements to existing products in a package that doesn’t push performance but drives down costs and complexity. I had a chance to demo the headset this afternoon and had largely positive first impressions. Oculus Go turns on when you press the power button and it works from there. For all the good things I’ve had to say about the Rift or Gear VR, a straightforward setup every time I want to use the headset has never been one of them. By owning the hardware completely, Oculus isn’t beholden to what updates need to be installed or what app you have to click, it’s all very simple and feels remarkably less labor-intensive. The headset manages to feel more high quality than the Rift in a lot of ways. Comfort-wise, I would say the Oculus Go bests even the first-gen Google Daydream View headset which pretty much felt like a tight sweater on your face — in a good way. The Oculus Go fabric “facial interface” is spongey and breathable and actually fit around my glasses which is a first for headsets from Oculus. The display is sharp and the lenses appear to be the best that Oculus has built yet. I’ll need to spend a bit more time with the screen to get a full impression on this front, but assuredly this feels like far less of a toy than the Gear VR does. It’s hard to judge the device’s sound quality because the Game Developers’ Conference kept a low roar even when demoing in private rooms, but I will say that the stereo speakers next to your ears seem to be more of a fallback option to headphones, delivering audio that is neither particularly loud nor crisp. That being said, I’m happy they were included given how many high-end headsets don’t have any integrated audio. Other notes, the controller is fine and is about as good as it is going to get for non-tracked input

Oculus Go might be the virtual reality industry's best chance at pushing the medium into the mainstream. Tethered VR devices are unwieldy and generally require a beefy PC rig to run properly; mobile headsets offer a taste of what full, immersive VR h...

The phone-free, PC-free headset launched in China but is arriving worldwide to compete with Google's Daydream View and Facebook's Oculus Go.

Once staunch rivals in high-end VR, it now seems Facebook-owned Oculus and HTC are treading different paths. While Oculus is gearing up to launch a more affordable standalone headset, HTC has gone in the opposite direction with the Vive Pro, a new to...

Ubergizmo Standalone Oculus Go Headset Could Be Launched In May Ubergizmo When headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive were first launched, one of the criticisms that they received was that the headsets required them to be tethered to a computer. This meant that mobility was kind of out the window, although companies like ... and more »

Last year Oculus teased its standalone "Go" VR headset saying it would go on sale for $199 early in 2018. Now Variety cites unnamed sources claiming that it will debut at Facebook's F8 conference May 1st. That should provide the kind of stage Zuckerb...

Today, CNN partnered with interactive entertainment company Magnopus, the company behind the Coco VR experience, to launch a VR app for its virtual reality news stories on the Oculus Rift. It was previously available on iOS and Android to use with Go...