It’s pretty clear what Facebook wants with Oculus: for you to use VR to socialize with your network when you’re not physically with your network. Sound creepy? I hopped around a virtual arena and sat with other avatars during a VR broadcast of a basketball game last week for an hour, and I didn’t hate …

The next generation of VR headsets will most likely all have eye tracking built in. And in the meantime, eye-tracking technology company Tobii is developing ways to analyze where our eyes go in VR, and learn from it. I tried Tobii’s eye-tracking tech in an HTC Vive VR headset a few months ago, and it was astonishingly good. But what’s …

Maybe you didn’t catch the news at this year’s Google I/O conference, but Google’s developed a fascinating tool for enabling multiplayer AR on phones called Cloud Anchors, which syncs positions across devices. It even works across iOS and Android. The Just A Line app already existed on Android, and is a doodling app in AR. But the app just went …

I remember using a selfie stick to try out Google’s educational vision of AR, and it was impressive. My son tried it in his school one day, and felt the same way. Google’s AR Expeditions initiatives were originally designed to be used in classrooms, and still are, but before now schools had to be part of a pilot program to try …

You can’t teleport to a pro basketball game — yet — but the NBA is doing the next best thing: Using an augmented reality app to bring you courtside at the NBA Finals. A new update to the NBA’s AR app adds a way to create doorways where you can step into 360-degree snippets of the NBA experience. Consider it …

This story is part of WWDC 2022, CNET’s complete coverage from and about Apple’s annual developers conference. We’re about a week away from seeing what iOS 12 will be like, but in the meantime the latest version of iOS 11 is now available to download. iOS 11.4 is here, bringing two overdue features promised last year: AirPlay 2 and iMessages in …

Standalone VR headsets like Oculus Go have shown up to middling reviews, and smart glasses are still a mess. If AR and VR headsets don’t get smoother and cheaper, they may never catch on. Qualcomm’s trying to help with a new chip, the Snapdragon XR1, intended to get more affordable AR and VR wearables off the ground and possibly AI-assisted …

HTC’s newest phone, the HTC U12 Plus, was just revealed. And its newest mobile standalone VR headset, the Vive Focus, hasn’t come to the US yet. But these two gadgets now intertwine just a bit thanks to HTC’s newest software updates to Vive Focus. The news was announced Thursday at a Vive Ecosystem Conference in Shenzhen, China. Vive Focus is …

Hasbro’s first VR game just arrived in Oculus Rooms, the shared social space on the Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Go platforms. Boggle is now something you can play with your VR friends, if you have VR friends (I find it hard to make any). Facebook announced that Hasbro games were coming to Oculus at the F8 conference a few weeks ago, …

Will wearable tech end up being the next hackable maker frontier? Maybe, like Raspberry Pi and Arduino, we’ll see homemade smartwatches and heart rate monitors next. That’s the plan for zGlue, whose zOrigin is a chipset and platform to create wearable tech on your own. The zOrigin is aiming at becoming a reference design and a way for anyone building …