Oculus Touch

​There are a few budget-friendly ways to get into VR these days, but if it's a high-end experience you're after then you'll typically need to shell out. Oculus continues to bridge the gap, however, today shaving around US$200 off its Rift headset bundled together with its Touch controllers.​

​​Among the Oculus demos we tried at GDC this past February was Mage's Tale, a role-playing game that uses Oculus Touch controls and full-body tracking to take the "role playing" part of RPGs literally. The Rift game launches June 20.​

​Last October, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at OC3 and demoed a seemingly far-off app where friends could speak and interact in VR. Today, the first day of the annual Facebook Developers Conference, a nearly identical app called Facebook Spaces launches in beta.​

Oculus is making good on promises to continually improve Medium, its VR sculpting tool, based on user feedback. Its first update debuts today with some significant improvements, such as the the ability to use reference images in your creative process.

The Rock Band game franchise – where you can live out your dreams of shredding the guitar in front of a packed crowd – has been reimagined for virtual reality. Rock Band VR hits the Oculus Store today.

Oculus has partnered with NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency to create an educational simulation of what it's like to be aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Mission: ISS allows you to virtually spacewalk and perform space station tasks like docking cargo.

When considering a virtual reality purchase, is room-scale VR really a major consideration over standing VR? Some recent demos gave us reason to question our previous conclusions.​​

If you were holding off on getting a high-end VR headset because of pricing, Oculus just made the hit on your wallet a bit lighter, with a significant price drop on both the Rift headset and Touch controllers​.

At Oculus' 2015 developer conference, much of the chatter at the Hollywood event centered around Epic Games' Bullet Train​, a furiously-paced demo that felt like a breakthrough in VR gameplay. The full game it ultimately spawned, Robo Recall, launches today.

This past weekend we spent about six hours hopping from demo-to-demo at a pre-GDC hands-on with Oculus. Our conclusion? VR gaming is about to take big leaps forward in depth, length, polish and quality.

For some sci-fi fans, today's virtual reality is The Matrix coming to fruition in the real world. But we haven't seen too many VR games that try to actually put you in Neo's shoes. Oculus Rift game Superhot does just that.

​Eight months after launch, we suspect the most fervent virtual reality enthusiasts have already settled on either the Oculus Rift​ or HTC Vive​. But maybe you're only now considering a high-end headset? We've been using the Rift and Vive since April, and have a few thoughts.