Oculus Connect 2: all the news from VR’s biggest conference – The Verge

An ‘ethereal cube’ from the 1960s is the reason the Oculus Rift exists

2015-10-08T12:07:18-04:00

My favorite moment at last month's Oculus Connect conference actually happened before the show started. It was during the Proto Awards - virtual reality's (significantly younger and smaller) version of the Oscars, with categories for things like the year's "best graphical user interface" and "best social experience" alongside the more traditional awards for music and art direction.

There have definitely been some standout VR experiences this year; spy mini-thriller I Expect You To Die ended up winning best overall experience, and the whole slate can be found here. But a surprise award also went out to Ivan Sutherland, creator of the "Sword …

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Watching Netflix in the Gear VR is great, but it’s not social

2015-09-25T19:23:30-04:00

Social experiences are at the core of this year's Oculus Connect. This isn't surprising - Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg bought Oculus largely because of VR's social potential. But Oculus has only recently started focusing on shared experiences. Earlier this year, it showed off a very, very subtle two-viewer mode for its short VR film Lost. At E3, its Toybox demo let two people see each other as stylized heads and hands. At Connect, it expanded on this with the Medium sculpting app for the Rift. On the Gear VR, it had something more dramatic: streaming video apps that let people watch Twitch, Netflix, and more while sitting with their friends in …

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A close-up look at Samsung’s new $99 Gear VR

2015-09-25T13:33:48-04:00

The newly announced Gear VR is a milestone for Samsung and Oculus. It's the first virtual reality headset either has released without the safety net of an "Innovator Edition" or "Development Kit" label. It's coming out at the beginning of the holiday season - Samsung is openly hoping it becomes one of the year's hot gift items. It opens the platform up to anyone who owns one of Samsung's four new flagship phones: the Galaxy Note 5, the Galaxy S6, the Galaxy S6 Edge, and the Galaxy 6S Edge+. And at $99, it's selling at half the price of the Innovator Edition.

So it's a little surprising that the new model's pre-production mockup looks almost …

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Medium is like an awesome MS Paint for the Oculus Rift

2015-09-25T11:23:18-04:00

Before we go any further, I implore you to ignore the utter aesthetic bankruptcy of my creation above. But do look at it, because it's the product of 10 minutes in Oculus' new tool Medium - a remarkably natural sculpting system that uses the company's Touch motion controllers. Medium was announced yesterday at Oculus Connect, and it's not just one of the first official Rift demos to use motion control, it's the very first to offer some kind of creative experience.

On stage, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe said that "every platform has to have a paint app, and this is our paint app," which positions Medium a little bit like MS Paint. Valve's compet …

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What two years of VR development taught the studio behind Job Simulator

2015-09-24T14:21:37-04:00

Before the Oculus Rift, game studio Owlchemy Labs was possibly best known as the creator of Smuggle Truck (the rejected iOS physics game about undocumented immigrants) and Snuggle Truck (the accepted iOS physics game about stuffed animals.) But in 2013, the studio released Aaaaaculus!, a virtual reality adaptation of a skydiving game it created with Dejobaan Games in 2011. Coming at a point when virtual reality experiences tended towards small tech demos and ports of first-person shooters, Aaaaaculus! made Owlchemy one of the first serious developers for the Oculus Rift.

Now, the studio is preparing for the release of Job Simulator, an offb …

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Inside Epic’s incredible first attempt at real VR gaming

2015-09-24T14:02:06-04:00

Walking through the darkened hallways of Epic Games, I know three things about the secret project I'm about to see.

The first is that it bears the promisingly straightforward title Bullet Train. The second is that it's an experience built for Oculus Touch, arguably the most advanced motion control system that ordinary people stand a chance of using. The third is that it's the biggest step Epic has taken into the emerging medium of virtual reality.

Epic's VR war room is a small office space strewn with prototype equipment: an HTC Vive, a small stack of Oculus Rift cases, even an old Razer Hydra controller. It's also nearly deserted. After a …

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Minecraft is coming to Oculus Rift this spring

2015-09-24T13:54:10-04:00

The Windows 10 version of Minecraft will be compatible with the Oculus Rift headset, according to a Microsoft representative that took the stage at today's Oculus Connect 2. Further details are sparse, but we'll learn more closer to the update's release in spring 2016.

The event, centered around Oculus' virtual reality headset, has hosted a handful of video game-related announcements, but the inclusion of Minecraft is fascinating because of the role the game currently serves in Microsoft's own mixed-reality device. At this year's E3, Microsoft showed a special demonstration of Minecraft for its augmented reality headset, HoloLens. It was wi …

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The new Gear VR will work with any new Samsung phone and cost $99

2015-09-24T13:21:56-04:00

Samsung and Oculus have announced a new Gear VR mobile virtual reality headset, and it's coming before Black Friday. At today's Oculus Connect show, Samsung executive Peter Koo said that the latest Gear VR will work with Samsung's whole 2015 line of smartphones - previous editions worked with either the Galaxy S6 or the Note 4.

Read next: The Samsung Gear S2 review.

The new Gear VR looks a lot like its most recent iteration, with the exception of a redesigned trackpad, which has a D-pad-style cross that could make it easier to feel when you're in VR. But unlike the previous ones, it's not being referred to as an "innovator edition." It's al …

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