Oculus

The original Oculus Quest was one of the technology world's great game-changers, and the new Quest 2 makes big improvements everywhere while dropping the price. We've now spent a month with the world's latest, greatest standalone VR headset.

Nothing breaks the immersion of VR like putting your hand through a wall. Haptics can give som sense of touch, but a new study has a clever alternative – robots that move physical furniture around, so there’s a real chair or wall waiting for you.

The original Oculus Quest was a VR game-changer, and the new Quest 2 offers significant upgrades in power, memory, graphics, resolution, framerate and 3D cinematic audio, as well as being smaller and lighter. It's also a heck of a lot cheaper.

If virtual reality headgear is going to start gaining more mass appeal, making these wearables as light and as unobtrusive as possible is really going to help – and Facebook just unveiled some VR specs which look similar to a regular pair of glasses.

The Oculus Quest has cameras all over it, which it uses in many fascinating ways. One of those is to track your motion within a room. Another, which has been an experimental feature up until now, is to watch your hands.

For the next nine days, anyone with an Oculus Go or Oculus Quest can access a 15-film lineup of immersive 3D films from around the globe, free of charge, curated and presented by the Tribeca Film Festival. Cinema360 will run from April 17 to 26.

The Oculus Quest is a stunning piece of technology, an all-in-one, totally self-contained VR setup that drags virtual reality out of the lofty realms of nerd-dom and makes the incredible experience of VR something the unwashed masses can enjoy.

Oculus has released other virtual reality headsets since the original Oculus Rift launched to consumers in January 2016, but now we have its true successor. The Oculus Rift S increases the optical resolution, removes the need for external sensors, and improves the comfort and fit too.

Our sense of smell is now being used to help sell the illusion of virtual reality with the FeelReal VR Mask, which not only wafts certain scents your way but can also simulate rain, heat and wind on your face.

Facebook-owned Oculus has a new virtual reality headset to show off. The Oculus Quest sits between the portable Oculus Go and the PC-connected Oculus Rift in the range, needs no connecting wires or external sensors, and is arriving at the start of next year for $399.

Like most kinds of consumer electronics, VR is going through a phase of cord-cutting. At the Oculus Connect conference this week, the company announced the Oculus Go, a self-contained VR headset that doesn’t need to be tethered to a computer or require a phone.

​​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.​