Oculus

One of the many nice things about PC-based VR is the ability to display what the headset wearer is seeing on a monitor. Today display mirroring makes its way to mobile VR, courtesy of Chromecast support for the Samsung Gear VR​.

Samsung and Oculus are back with another Gear VR. While the headset itself is barely changed from the previous model​, it adds a Bluetooth motion controller that appears to be a direct answer to Google's Daydream​. Read on, as we review the 2017 Gear VR with controller.

​Whether you’re buying a new Samsung Gear VR or holding onto a previous edition, this could be a good time to refresh your content library and get behind the goggles. Oculus software updates have made the experience easier to navigate, and there are some intriguing new releases in the Oculus Store.

While the new Gear VR that's launching next week isn't much changed from the 2016 model, there are a few differences – including a new controller. Let's see how the specs and features of the 2017 Gear VR​ compare to those of the Oculus Rift​.

​The best VR experiences let users use their real-life bodies to maneuver in the virtual world. MindMaze wants to extend that immersion to include the user’s facial expressions: Its latest product, Mask, is a headset insert that tracks the wearer’s expressions and transmits them to their VR avatar.

When today’s virtual reality devices first hit the scene, we expected mobile VR to progress and grow at a striking pace. Fast forward to the present: Little has changed in mobile VR – to the point that its slow evolution could be dragging down the mainstream adoption of virtual reality as a whole.

​The NCAA March Madness Live VR app offers a virtual seat to the 2017 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship. Starting with the "Sweet 16" games in San Jose, viewers have a variety of viewing options for watching the collegiate tournament in VR.

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.​​

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.

At its Mobile World Congress event today, ​Samsung snuck in one announcement about the upcoming version of the Samsung Gear VR: The new headset will be bundled with a controller that rolls elements of a remote control and touchpad into one.

In a few short years, virtual reality has gone from something only a lucky few had tried in private demos to a consumer product advertised in prime time television (Samsung, Sony and Google all ran TV ads this year). Let's take a look back at VR's arrival on the scene in 2016.