At its F8 developer conference this morning, Facebook said starting today you can preorder its Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift S. The two VR headsets and controllers will ship May 21, the company said. The all-in-one Quest will start at $399 and is a solid step up from the company’s entry-level Oculus Go VR headset …
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Facebook’s latest makeover shines spotlight on groups
Your eyes aren’t deceiving you. The Facebook app on your smartphone will start to look different. Now playing: Watch this: Zuckerberg gives a first look at redesigned Facebook… 3:23 On Tuesday, Facebook said it’s redesigning its app to make it easier for users to find and join groups on the world’s largest social network. A Facebook group is a place …
Read More »Facebook will be overrun by the dead in 2100, study says
Deceased Facebook users will outnumber living users before the end of the century, according to a new study. The Oxford study, called “Are the dead taking over Facebook? A Big Data approach to the future of death online,” calculated the user growth of the social media platform. The researchers then determined that at Facebook’s current growth rate, 4.9 billion users will …
Read More »YouTube, MLB partner to stream 13 live games for free
Major League Baseball and YouTube are teaming up. In a new partnership announced Tuesday, the two entities revealed that 13 live MLB regular season games will be streamed for free on YouTube during the second half of 2019 season. The games will be broadcast globally with YouTube being the exclusive distribution method for fans in the United States, Canada and …
Read More »Oculus Quest will give life to an emotionally intelligent pink alien fuzzball
Last week, I befriended a fuzzy pink alien that my robot sidekick and I nicknamed Pork Bun. We played fetch around a bonfire and munched on virtual marshmallows. Pork Bun was so charming that, when I had to choose between protecting Pork Bun or saving the human race from extinction, I tacitly left planet Earth to fend for itself to …
Read More »Oculus Quest and Rift S available for preorder, both at $399, shipping May 21
Oculus ignited people’s interest in virtual reality when it announced a Kickstarter for the Rift headset in 2012, promising high quality VR for $300. Fast-forward seven years, after a more than $2 billion acquisition by Facebook and the 2016 release of the Rift, and Oculus is preparing to launch its next-generation VR headsets. They’re called the Oculus Quest and the …
Read More »How Facebook’s big ambitions for messaging will impact you
Sitting on a grey couch at Facebook’s headquarters, Stan Chudnovsky starts talking about what humans can’t live without. The head of the social network’s Messenger service isn’t speaking about food, shelter or water. Instead, he points to what he and I are doing at this very moment: communicating. Now playing: Watch this: Facebook launches Messenger for desktop 1:33 “There is …
Read More »Valve Index VR headset to start at $499, ship before July
As if there weren’t enough virtual reality headsets already, game maker Valve is preparing to release its own take on the technology. It may see odd that Valve — whose Steam online game store and popular adventure titles like Half-Life and Portal have made it a household fixture among gamers — is choosing to release its first headset now. The device, called …
Read More »¡Hola Alexa! Amazon’s assistant will speak Spanish in the US later this year
If you speak Spanish or want to learn, Amazon’s Alexa will soon be able to help. Alexa will be able to speak Spanish in the US later this year, Amazon said in a blog post on Monday. The company launched a new voice model so developers can build skills for Spanish-speaking users in the US using the Alexa Skills Kit. …
Read More »Facebook opens data trove for academics to study its influence on elections
How does Facebook affect elections? Sixty academics are getting the chance to find out. The social media giant is opening up its privacy-protected data to researchers from 30 academic institutions across 11 countries, according to a Facebook post on Monday. The data spans from January 2017 to February 2019. The researchers were chosen by Facebook’s partners at Social Science One and the Social …
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