Oculus levels-up virtual reality with Touch controller
Culture
Move over, Power Glove.
Oculus has a new way to play games with your hands.
I'm Bridget Carey.
This is your CNet Update.
[MUSIC]
Oculus is leveling up the virtual reality experience with a new type of game controller that lets you use your hands to interact with the game.
Now when you look at people using virtual reality headsets, you see a whole bunch of this, people reaching out their hands while they look into a 3D environment.
Now that motivated the team at Oculus to create a new type of motion-sensing controller called the Oculus Touch.
This set of controllers has the usual analog sticks, buttons, and trigger but it also detects finger poses with how you hold it.
So you can give a thumbs up, or point or wave as part of the game.
It takes motion a bit further than our old friend, the Wiimote, but it's still a prototype.
The actual first Oculus Rift headsets are gonna be coming out sometime in the first quarter of next year, and they will come with an Xbox One wireless controller and a little sensor on your stand to detect How you move in the room.
But the company still isn't saying what all this is gonna cost.
Oculus, which is owned by Facebook, also showed off the final design of its headset at this press event.
It's gonna be wrapped in fabrics for a Smooth feel and the headphones are removable if you wanna use your own.
Oculus also teased some upcoming games that were made specifically for virtual reality.
Taking advantage of the illusion that you're inside of the game.
We're gonna hear more about that next week during the big E3 video game expo in Los Angeles.
While Facebook's Oculus wants to change the virtual world, Google Is going after another project to change the real world.
Google announced something called Sidewalk Labs.
It's an independent company that's dedicated to improving life in big cities.
That means looking into how to improve things like energy use, cost of living, and transportation.
Which goes with that whole self-driving cars thing.
It's the idea of the perfect tomorrowland world minus the jet packs.
Search and advertising are still Google's main revenue stream, bringing in $50 billion annually.
So why does Google stretch itself into these far out projects like self driving cars, Google glass, internet via balloons or like in announcement 2013 to go on a mission to extend the human life span.
It all comes down to making more money from data.
If a city is smart enough to know how we are moving through the Streets.
If you can report a pothole right when it happens.
If parking lots told you when they were full so you can get an alert to your phone.
If the mailbox told you when the postman came by or not.
Yeah, there's plenty more data for Google to turn into a business.
That's it for this tech news roundup.
And there's more at cnet.com.
From our studios in New York, I'm Bridget Carey.
