Facebook To Sell Virtual Reality Headset

In what could be seen as a real gift of innovation for Virtual Reality lovers from the house of Facebook, the social media networking giant will soon launch a new virtual reality headset that won’t require a separate computer to operate.

Taking the podium at a conference for virtual reality developers in America, Facebook’s Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the new headset, which is called Oculus Go, will allow more mobile uses than the company's existing Oculus Rift product.

Priced at $199, Oculus Go will be shipped early next year, too late for this year's holiday season but likely to stay ahead of rivals.

The new product is being pitched much simpler that Facebook’s Rift, which went live last year, or even the Vive system made by HTC Corp. Both of those headsets require the help of desktop computers to function.
According to Super Data research, HTC is expected to ship 305,000 Vive systems this year, while Facebook is expected to ship 213,000 Rift systems.

Talking about Oculus Go in an interview, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's chief technology officer said, "The Oculus Go has potential to be a huge driver of growth” for the company.

He further added, "I think you're going to see these a lot on airplanes, because it's way better than the back-of-the-seat monitor or my phone.”

Schroepfer also revealed that Oculus Go is especially meant for people who do not own a Samsung smartphone. Oculus and Samsung Electronics already sell the Gear VR, which when paired with certain Samsung smartphones is similar to Oculus Go.
Taking into account the new entry in the market, Facebook has also decided to permanently reduce the price of the Rift system to $399 from $499.
Facebook bought Palmer Freeman Luckey’s Oculus VR for a whopping $2 billion in 2014.

Back then, Mark Zuckerberg explained that he decided to buy the 21 year old's company as he saw Oculus Rift something far grander than a mere entertainment device. He wrote at that time, "Imagine enjoying a court-side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face—just by putting on goggles in your home."

For the uninitiated, Virtual reality is currently one of the hottest talks of the town. The technology, which has the potential of becoming a major aspect of future technology, offers its users a three-dimensional, computer generated environment which can be explored and interacted with by the person. The person becomes a part of this virtual world or is immersed within this environment for a brief period of time and, is able to manipulate objects or perform a series of actions whilst there.

Seeing the attention Virtual reality is garnering all around the world, a number of companies have invested their time and money in the technology and Facebook is one of the front runners in the race.

Besides slashing prices and introducing new VR products, Facebook is also currently developing a software called Facebook Spaces, which will allow friends to meet in virtual rooms. The company also plans on integrating live video soon with the software.

This development was first reported by Reuters.

[Image: Recode]

OnePlus 3 to launch in VR in June this year

In no time OnePlus has been able to charm its ways into the hearts of smartphones users with their unique offerings. It was only last year that the company had come up with the virtual reality offering in its OnePlus 2, which ended up making it the talk of the town.

In order to repeat its last year magic, OnePlus has once again taken to the VR technology. The company is expected to launch virtual reality with its next-generation OnePlus 3, sometime in June this year. This week's starting saw an interesting announcement being made by OnePlus about its Loop VR Headset, which will be a commendable upgrade of its Google Cardboard-inspired VR that it had brought out in the market last year.

Built by AntVR, the visor-style Loop Virtual reality Headset does look like a massive improvement from OnePlus' 2015's Cardboard. Apparently, the company is contemplating extending its usage beyond the launch event.

People wanting to get their hands on the Loop VR Headset will have to register themselves for it on the official Amazon Loop VR page. According to information made available by the company, the Loop VR Headset will be available for sale in India on the e-commerce website, Amazon India on June 3, 2016 and June 7, 2016 from 12 PM onwards. The headset would be available for buying exclusively through the Amazon app, at a mind boggling price of Re 1, including shipping. Yes, you read it right. Divulging further details about the sale, the company revealed that it just had 30,000 units of the headset up for sale.

According to various rumours doing round the tech rumour mill, the OnePlus 3 headset could be considerably similar to the HTC One devices in the looks department and run on OxygenOS, which is apparently based on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow. Having an attractive full-metal unibody, the phone is expected to have an alert slider, USB Type-C port and a fingerprint scanner. In addition to this, the 5.5-inch FullHD display will also reportedly come power packed with a 3,000mAh battery, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor and 32GB/64GB memory variants and 4GB/6GB RAM.