Tag Archives: virtual-reality

To learn about the future of VR, I met in VR. Qualcomm invited me to a briefing inside Spatial’s app on an Oculus Quest, where a virtual Hugo Swart (head of mixed reality tech for Qualcomm) floated, ready to show us slides and talk about where VR was heading. Midway through, Swart vanished into a …

Facebook’s Oculus Quest, a standalone VR headset, is one year old this week. Headsets are still hard to find in stock and the flow of games and apps for the hardware has been steady and high-quality. Facebook hasn’t announced any new version of the Quest yet (or any price drops), but there’s one big change rolling out — many upcoming games …

We were late to a Houseparty with my mom, my sister, my niece and nephews. We were all going to talk and play trivia and Pictionary, or whatever the app calls it. We huddled in on the sofa, taking turns. The kids wanted Fortnite trivia, which I was terrible at. I liked the sketching game better. We played rounds of …

Virtual reality got a little more real Thursday, with news that Apple bought the VR streaming sports company NextVR. The California startup is mostly known for partnerships with the NBA and Wimbledon to stream live sports from specialized cameras set up courtside to people’s headsets at home. The effect is meant to make people feel as though they’re sitting in premium seats, …

Apple’s long-rumored foray into the augmented headset market won’t happen until 2022 at the earliest, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reportedly said in a note to investors. Sources told CNET in 2018 that Apple would reveal its plans for an augmented reality and virtual reality headset sometime this year. But the coronavirus pandemic has created supply chain issues in China and a …

Samsung XR is being killed off, with the apps slowly bringing features to a close before fully terminating the service on Sept 30. From this week, 360-degree video is now unavailable, premium video purchases are suspended and updates have stopped for all Samsung XR and Samsung VR video clients, Samsung said Monday. From Jun 30, it will no longer support …

I never expected that so many people would care about AR animals. Google’s searchable 3D animals, which launched last summer, ended up being being something that tons of people wanted to hear about. I understand why: They’re adorable.  The animals were part of a Google push to make its search engine become an extension of augmented reality. I expected Google …

Supernatural, a new virtual reality fitness game you can play in your home, isn’t playing around. I sweat so hard I have to guzzle five glasses of water for every 15-minute workout. The first time I tried it, I was so sore the next morning I had trouble walking downstairs. I sometimes get so immersed bopping and throwing my arms …

A rocket to space. A disturbing reflection on suicide. A struggle for work in South Korea. A fairy tale told in outer space? You never know what you’re going to get in the still-untamed world of 360-degree art films, and for years, I’d hop over to the Tribeca Film Festival in New York to check out a new collection via …

Once upon a time, everyone wanted us to use our phones as VR headsets. Do you remember this? There was the folding, giveaway Google Cardboard, that ended up in magazines and promo giveaways. There was Samsung’s Gear VR, sold alongside every Samsung phone. There was Google Daydream View. I wrote a eulogy for phone VR last year, because for the …