Virtual Reality

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.

It's huge, it's clunky, it's not pretty, but Marcel Reese claims his VR exoskeleton is "the first working system for realistic walking in VR with force feedback and balance feedback." It tracks your movement, and lets the virtual world push back.

One of the issues with VR gaming is that it's usually set on a scale that's bigger than your living room – so you have to stay in a very small part of the world or "teleport" around. The latest attempt to fix the issue are the Cybershoes.

The United States Army is developing augmented reality goggles for military dogs. The technology is being designed to enhance communication between the dog and its human handler, allowing for more remote commanding of the animal.

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.

We already have several major players when it comes to virtual reality for consumers, but XRSpace thinks there's room for another – and it wants to make social interaction the focus of its new VR hardware and software.

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.

By far the most extreme gaming and simulation platform we've seen, the Nova places you in a fully untethered ball that's free to spin in any direction, creating all sorts of wild gravity effects for total immersion in a range of different vehicles.

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.

Although there are already mobile VR systems that track what each of a user's fingers are doing, they typically take the form of expensive gloves. KupVR is designed to be a low-cost alternative, as it leaves the user's fingers open and free.