Nintendo Labo VR, the cardboard accessory kit for the Switch, is up against a lot of expectations as the company’s official foray into virtual reality. It’s the fourth installment of the Labo series, which first launched one year ago to mixed reviews. Parents and schools lauded its tactile building experience and programming features as creative educational tools for kids, while some critics dismissed it as a novelty item that lost its fun after the first few plays.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the best-selling consumer electronics products aren’t necessarily a company’s latest or highest-end products; mass-market customers often gravitate instead towards affordable models with good enough performance. That’s the reason console makers keep last-generation models around after launching superior sequels: as long as there’s a promise of at least token continued support, “old” hardware is still viable.

Facebook said it accidentally hid bizarre and “inappropriate” messages inside “tens of thousands” of virtual-reality controllers, including “Big Brother is Watching” and “The Masons Were Here.” Nate Mitchell, the cofounder of Oculus, the Facebook-owned VR company, said on Twitter on Friday that the company inadvertently printed some unusual messages in its Touch controllers, handheld devices for playing games and navigating VR environments.

It's been a few years since the PlayStation VR for the PS4 and PS4 Pro launched onto the virtual reality scene, bringing with it an excellent virtual reality headset experience for console gamers. As of writing this article, it's still one of the best-selling virtual reality headsets on the market, which makes sense considering several of the others need high-end computers to get up-and-running such as the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive.

Combining cognitive-behavioral therapy with virtual reality technology could help people suffering from social anxiety disorder, according to preliminary research published in the journal Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy. “I am interested in the topic of virtual reality (VR) based therapies as the open a lot of new possibilities. VR surroundings are accessible, interactive and customizable to fit the needs of a patient,” explained Chris N. W. Geraets, a PhD student at the University of Groningen and corresponding author of the study.

Boneworks from Stress Level Zero feels like the first game of PC VR’s second generation. The small team based in Los Angeles previously developed Duck Season and Hover Junkers. In Boneworks, they are applying years of refinement to physics, locomotion and object handling systems. You can feel the effort every second inside their virtual world. A recent demo of Boneworks from Stress Level Zero co-founder Brandon Laastch shows interactions tuned to a degree I’ve never seen before. First I held, loaded and fired a one-handed pistol. I dropped the gun, grabbed a bigger one, racked it with my other hand and started firing.

Unexpectedly on a Friday night, Valve has surprise launched a teaser site featuring a brand-new virtual reality headset, called the Valve Index, that appears to be a device of its own making and not one in partnership with its longtime VR partner HTC. The teaser site spotted by Ars Technica offers no information other than that the Index’s supposed release date is May 2019.

Finnish start-up Varjo launched its first virtual reality (VR) headset on Tuesday in a bid to capture the growing industrial market for the technology, despite slow pick-up among consumers. The $5,995 headset will be sold directly to businesses in industries like architecture, engineering and construction. Varjo has already collaborated with companies including Airbus, Audi and Volkswagen.

Google is shutting down its Emmy Award-winning VR film division, Spotlight Stories, after six years of building out content, Variety reports. We’ve reached out to Google for confirmation. Update: A Google spokesperson responded to TechCrunch with a statement confirming the shutdown.

IonVR’s Mobile VR Headset (Render Credit: IonVR) The E3 Expo, better known just as “E3”, was held two weeks ago in Los Angeles, and to the delight of gamers around the world watching on YouTube and Twitch, held some major game and game hardware announcements. E3 was also full of emerging [...]

Virtual reality has a less-than-obvious problem with how your eyes focus called vergence-accommodation conflict.

Virtual reality has been a long time coming, but the most notable strides have come in the past few years. Oculus has led a revitalization in VR tech, the development of which had slowed significantly over the preceding decade. Now, a resurgence in consumer VR products has resulted in great strides, and affordable virtual reality kits like the Samsung Gear VR make virtual reality accessible to nearly anyone.

When the $599 price for Facebook’s Oculus Rift was revealed this morning, I was honestly a little shocked the virtual reality headset would run that high. The price might not sound like too much for some people, but consider this: you’ll also need a PC that will likely cost you around $900 to run it, if we were to factor in the price with this earlier statement by Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe. But that would likely get you the barebones requirements, so PCWorld's...

Time to put the new Oculus Rift through its paces.

In an analyst note published on Wednesday, Goldman Sachs predicted that the virtual reality (VR) market will outpace the TV market in annual revenue by 2025.

A California U.S District Court has ruled that Oculus founder and Rift VR headset inventor Luckey Palmer must face a lawsuit filed by a former employer. U.S. District Court judge William Alsup (U.S. District Court, Northern District of California) in San Francisco ruled on Saturday that a breach of contract claim could proceed against Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. But it wasn’t a clean-cut victory for Total Recall Technologies; Judge Alsup also dismissed several claims including fraud.

Apple CEO Tim Cook this week said virtual reality "has some interesting applications," so much so the company has already compiled a secret team of hundreds of people to work on the technology, according to the Financial Times. The team was created, the FT says, through calculated acquisitions and the poaching of virtual and augmented reality experts from competitors like Microsoft and camera companies like Lytro.

Special effects pioneer Dennis Muren proclaimed the 1980 classic Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back the hardest film he ever worked on, because “we had to train people to do work that we barely knew how to do.” That’s a conundrum creative types face: How do you do what’s never been done? Star Wars creator George Lucas and the Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) team Muren worked with on the film ended up making their own machines and their own programming.

Greg Kumparak talks to David Holz, Co-Founder of Leap Motion about their new, made for VR product. TechCrunch is a leading technology media property, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a surprise appearance at Samsung’s Mobile World Congress press conference Sunday to talk up progress in virtual reality and to promote VR in the future as “the most social platform.” Facebook, of course, paid some $2 billion in 2014 to buy Oculus which has been working with Samsung on its Gear VR consumer headsets. In fact, Zuckerberg appeared on stage during the MWC event just after audience...

The computing industry progresses in two mostly independent cycles: financial and product cycles. There has been a lot of handwringing lately about where we are in the financial cycle. Financial markets get a lot of attention. They tend to fluctuate unpredictably and sometimes wildly. The product cycle by comparison gets relatively little attention, even though it is what actually drives the computing industry forward. We can try to understand and predict the product...

In the photo, Mark Zuckerberg is half-smiling, dazed, as if he can’t quite fathom the spectacle he has achieved. He’s striding past his peons, heel-toe down the carpeted center aisle, as they swivel and grimace, oblivious to his presence, in their own virtual realities. Later, when the assembled journalists take the headsets off — they’re Samsung Gear VR headsets, for the record, and this is the Mobile World Congress in Spain...

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been stoking excitement about virtual reality—a technology he has described as “the next major computing and communication platform”—for a few years now. But in a new interview posted at Business Insider, he says the technology remains a long way from reaching the mass market. “I honestly don’t know how long it will take,” he said. “It could be five years, it could be 10 years...

Virtual reality is still in its early days, but it’s amazing how capable it is of making your bank account look a lot less impressive. HTC revealed today that is has sold more than 15,000 HTC Vive VR kits in the first 10 minutes after it went on sale for preorder. That’s not bad for an unproven technology that costs $800 and requires a $1,000 PC. This comes as companies like Facebook, Google, and Samsung are all moving into this sector.

In January, virtual reality specialist Oculus VR opened pre-orders for its long-awaited headset, the Rift, priced at $599. In order to use the device, the company recommends that you have a mighty PC with some pretty fierce specs, including an Intel Core i5 4590 processor (or above/newer), NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 graphics card (or better), 8GB of RAM, HDMI-out, and 3 USB 3.0 ports + 1 USB 2.0 port. However, Oculus is only supporting Windows PCs for now...

When Richard Marks was in 10th grade, his father opened a video game store that was ahead of its time. It was the early ’80s; used game sales weren’t common, and the store — Video Exchange — ran on the gimmick that customers could trade in their games. The store didn’t last long. But for the young Marks, who held the title of chief demo officer, working there was like living in an arcade. Surrounded by open boxes...

You may doubt that you’ll ever fall for the illusion of virtual reality, but your brain is already working against you. Kimberly Voll has a Ph.D. in computer science, specializing in artificial intelligence, and an honors degree in cognitive science. She is also one of the developers of the puzzle game Fantastic Contraption, built in virtual reality for the HTC Vive. Voll knows how your brain works, and at the 2016 Game Developers Conference she explained how it's specifically affected by VR.

Sony has announced that a PlayStation VR "launch bundle" will be available for preorder beginning Tuesday, and it'll be priced at $499. The bundle, Sony claims, is "exclusively for pre-sale and in limited quantities." You'll be able to get it from all the retailers you'd expect (Best Buy, GameStop, etc.), and it includes the core PlayStation VR device plus a PlayStation Camera and two PlayStation Move controllers.

After nearly four years, the finished Oculus Rift has shipped to its very first group of customers, and it’s time to see whether the headset that started it all is still pushing the cutting edge of virtual reality. For a long time, the hopes and dreams of many virtual reality fans could be summed up with two words: Oculus Rift. Helped by the rise of cheap smartphone displays, Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey took a technology that...

With all radical advances in technology, early adopters are doomed to look like complete fucking idiots until the rest of the world gets accustomed to seeing people in that context. For VR headsets, that day is a long way away. Lucky for you, we’ve put together a list of ways you can trick people into thinking you look cool.

As if riding on the tallest, fastest, steepest roller coasters weren’t enough, you can now up the ante by zipping around those turns while in a virtual reality. Six Flags Entertainment Corp. SIX, +4.87% was upgraded to outperform from market perform at FBR on Friday on the potential for virtual-reality technology to reinvigorate sales and park traffic after years of stale growth. Virtual reality is “extending the life of old coasters” and giving park theme operators the ability to...

We all knew it was coming, virtual reality sexy time. That’s just what one group of Japanese developers are trying to bring to market. While we have already seen adult content brought into the virtual reality space, a truly immersive experience would of course have to include one of the other five senses, touch.

Hoping to dramatically increase the amount of 360-degree video on its platform, Facebook today unveiled a reference design for a high-end video capture system and announced plans to release it as an open-source project on GitHub. Shaped like a flying saucer, Facebook Surround 360 uses a 17-camera array and accompanying web-based software to capture images in 360 degrees and render them automatically.

Once upon a time, in the middle of the night, there was a restless man pacing a residential street with a yellow tape measure in his hand. To the untrained eye, he appeared to be alone—some sort of compulsive insomniac bent on determining odd distances—but throughout the night he was kept company by visions of goblins, wizards and other enchanted creatures. Like the protagonist of most fairy tales, if this man were to be evaluated...

The race to create both the hardware and the software that will drive the emerging virtual reality market is heating up, and now GoPro has unveiled its latest plans to support VR filmmakers and fans. At this week's NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) event in Las Vegas, the company will unveil a new VR camera and launch a new VR platform for sharing immersive videos.