Facebook has brought Beat Games into the Oculus fold, announcing the acquisition Tuesday afternoon. The virtual reality games studio will be an independently operated studio under Oculus in Prague. According to Facebook, Beat Saber content and updates will continue, but with additional support from the social media giant. Beat Saber is the top-selling VR game on …
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Verizon is throwing its 5G network into Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Thursday. It’ll make the annual event an “augmented reality and hologram experience,” Verizon announced last week. 5G, already available in some parts of the US by Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, is being tapped by smartphones to provide faster speeds and more capacity, as well as AR/VR experiences. .shortcode.newsletter h2 {width:100%!important;} For the Thanksgiving parade, Verizon is …
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Niantic will be hosting a final Pokemon Go Community Day for 2019, with the event expanding from the usual three-hour event to span two days. It’ll run from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Dec. 14 and 15, with the bonus times at 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. both days. Augmented reality mobile app game Pokemon Go has been downloaded …
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Facebook makes products, in case you didn’t know: Oculus VR headsets, and the Portal line of video-chat tablets and cameras. FWIW, they’ll be on sale through the holidays, but maybe not at the deals you were looking for. The best VR headset of the year, and a CNET Editors’ Choice, is the Oculus Quest. Bad news: It won’t be on …
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One VR headset that can plug into everything would cut down on the pile of goggles in my office. Facebook’s standalone Oculus Quest, which is already my favorite VR headset ever made, gets a step closer to that today by connecting with PCs and doubling as an Oculus Rift. The technology, called Oculus Link, is available starting today as a beta …
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John Carmack, the video game legend behind Facebook‘s VR push, is stepping down as chief technology officer at Oculus. He announced the move Wednesday afternoon, saying he’d transition to the role of “consulting CTO” at Oculus. “I will still have a voice in the development work, but it will only be consuming a modest slice of my time,” Carmack wrote …
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Google said Wednesday that it will open-source the software for Cardboard, the company’s low-cost phone-based VR experience. The move comes less than a month after Google said it would discontinue its Daydream VR program. The move will let developers continue to build virtual reality experiences and add Cardboard support for iOS and Android apps. The project’s tools provide APIs for …
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This story is part of The 2010s: A Decade in Review, a series on the memes, people, products, movies and so much more that have influenced the 2010s. When I started at CNET 10 years ago my beat was laptop reviews. I admitted, even then, that I wasn’t terribly interested in laptops, and I’m still not. What I was excited …
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What began as a way for Google to compete against Facebook’s high profile Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, Sony’s PlayStation VR and Samsung’s Gear VR came to an end Tuesday, when the search giant admitted its Daydream VR program wasn’t popular among consumers and would be ending. Google’s original vision for Daydream was to let people take high-end phones like …
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Voice recording is about to get a little easier with Google’s Pixel 4 phone, which will record and transcribe voice memos using a built-in app and without the need for an internet connection. The search giant said Tuesday its newest phone, which will cost $799 when it launches Oct. 24, has a new version of Google’s voice recognition software designed …
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