Jim Ryan has a lot to get off his chest. If we’re honest, it’s a lot more than we’d prepared for. You see, usually when you interview someone – not least the president and chief executive officer of Sony Interactive Entertainment – you go into that conversation with some semblance of what’s to come. So when we got offered 20 minutes with the PlayStation boss out of the blue last week, it did seem a bit too easy-going to be true. “A follow-up to our PS5-related chat last November,” we thought, “should be a breeze.”

A new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says Apple's first VR headset will cost well over $900 and have a chip faster than the M1 Mac.

Remember the simple, ingenious app – Pokémon GO? If you wanted to train or catch Pokémon in the real world – and by that, we mean in the world of Augmented Reality – you’d have to use the Pokémon GO application. Fans, and sometimes even non-fans, went all out in their hunt to catch Pokémon.

A new study suggests that exposure therapy using virtual reality (VR) technology may be an effective way for patients with public speaking anxiety to overcome their fears. These findings were published in Cognitive Behavior Therapy.

Sony PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan says virtual reality won’t be a meaningful part of interactive entertainment in the near future. Ryan indicated to The Washington Post that VR still has a long way to go, although he emphasized that Sony isn’t giving up on the medium. The statement suggests that an update to Sony’s PlayStation VR headset is years away.

Calls for a Quest 2 ‘jailbreak’—a means of freeing the device from Facebook account requirements and other software-based restrictions—cropped up within days of the headset’s release. Today, less than two weeks later, the first jailbreak for the headset has reportedly been verified.

In a shocking move, Facebook's Oculus Support team has confirmed that users with multiple Oculus headsets may not use the same Facebook account on each headset at the same time. This means that folks with an Oculus Rift and an Oculus Quest headset, or even multiple Oculus Quest headsets (or any combination thereof) would not be able to use their legitimate Facebook-linked Oculus account on two or more headsets simultaneously.

Bad optics.

Issues big and small, and that's before we get into the Facebookening of this thing.

It looks like Oculus Quest 2 leaked again, and this time by Facebook itself, confirming a ton of information about the kit.

A US retailer & a UK retailer listed Oculus Quest as discontinued, while other retailers now only show 3rd party listings. This comes just two weeks before Facebook Connect.

And Oculus Connect is now called Facebook Connect

Opinion: No device should require a Facebook login—so what is Oculus doing?

Microsoft Flight Simulator will launch on Steam, and VR support is coming later this year as part of a free update. "Microsoft Flight Simulator for PC will support VR via the HP Reverb G2. This will be available later this fall," head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann revealed during a press briefing. In an accompanying post on the Xbox blog, it was announced that the game will be coming to Steam on launch day as well as Windows 10 and Xbox Game Pass for PC, which is currently in beta.

Virtual reality allows us to delve into amazing digital universes. To offer a complete experience, apart from the glasses to be able to visualize the environment, the platforms also have controls that transmit the position of the hands. However, accurate finger tracking is not an easy task, and this type of device still has a lot of room for improvement. A team of researchers from Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have created a bracelet that can track the position of the hands and fingers very precisely, and then transmit it to virtual reality systems.

Facebook and Sony are preparing to increase output of upcoming gaming devices by as much as 50%, showing how big tech companies are profiting from consumers' thirst for home entertainment during the global coronavirus pandemic, the Nikkei Asian Review has learned. Facebook's Oculus, the global leading provider of virtual reality headsets by market share, is eyeing growth of at least 50% from a year ago for its latest version of head-mounted VR devices, pushing production to 2 million units, sources said.

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.

Apple has purchased virtual reality company NextVR, Apple confirmed to CNBC. The purchase is further evidence of Apple’s plans to enter virtual reality and related augmented reality technologies as a new product category, although the company has not announced firm plans or a new hardware product, aside from AR software for iPhones.

Virtual reality tore me out of my filter bubble. I met people I probably would never have met in material reality. I felt close to people, I hung out with them in a social VR room for weeks — and only on my long journey to Kuwait, Israel, and the US, where I finally visited them in their material lives, did I realize how far away these people are “in reality.” But this distance did not hinder us from having real relationships.

I kinda feel bad for Valve. “Rejoice, ye faithful, for official Half-Life games have returned from their long hibernation in a giant coccoon of money! Now the true believers will be rewarded with – where the fuck is everyone?” We’re all in quarantine ‘cos of the global pandemic, Valve. “Oh. Would now be a bad time to ask people to buy our thousand dollar VR headset?” I rather suspect it would be, Valve, yes. Still, now could be the perfect time for the VR revolution since everyone’s stuck at home looking for ways to cover their eyes and ears and go la la la not listening to current events.