From Oculus Touch to Oculus Santa Cruz; here are 5 major announcements from Facebook

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After Google unveiled the Daydream View virtual reality headset earlier this week, it was only a matter of time before other companies responded. At the Oculus Connect 3 event in San Jose, California, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will be investing another $250 million in Oculus’ developer community. He also made some major announcements regarding virtual reality, ranging from new controllers, an upcoming standalone VR headset and loads of games. Here’s a look at the five major announcements from the event.

Oculus Santa Cruz: Zuckerberg demoed an Oculus prototype, called Santa Cruz, which is basically a wireless headset that is placed between Samsung’s Gear VR and the Oculus Rift. The idea is to build a standalone headset that doesn’t need to be tethered to either a mobile phone or a PC. According to The Verge, the Santa Cruz looks a lot like the Rift, but is packed with sensors and four wide-angle cameras around the edges up front. The headset demonstrates the ‘inside-out-tracking’ feature, wherein the cameras on the headset detect motion, and translate it into your virtual environment. The following video gives a fair idea on what the Santa Cruz can do.

Minimum specs : When you think of the Oculus Rift, you immediately have to worry about buying an expensive PC that will support the VR system. Not anymore. At the conference,
Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe announced how it is lowering the minimum specs required to smoothly run the Oculus Rift. He even revealed that an Oculus-ready PC will now start as low as $499 (Rs 33,300 approximately). In essence, the PC requires a minimum of dual-core Intel Core i3 processor, and an Nvidia GTX 960 graphics card. Iribe also announced that the company will be extending support to more AMD CPUs soon. This is possible due to a technique Oculus calls ‘Asynchronous spacewarp’, which allows the company to run the same games on less powerful computers.
Oculus Touch: It is basically a pair of handheld controllers for the Oculus Rift, which will be up for pre-orders later this month. The Touch controllers are priced at $199 (Rs 13,300 approximately), and will start shipping from from December 6. The Oculus Touch will also come with a third camera sensor, priced at $79 (Rs 5,300 approximately). This enables Oculus’ ‘room scale’ VR, which means a walk-around Holodeck-like environment like the HTC Vive.

Oculus in-ear headphones: Oculus also introduced a new way of listening to audio when you are busy in your virtual world. Instead of the on-ear headphones, now users can opt for a pair of in-ear headphones, which is priced at $49 (Rs 3,300 approximately). These earbuds will start shipping sometime in December.

Games : There were more than enough games announced on stage to keep everyone happy. Those present at the event got to preview a dozen of games, including the likes of
Arktika.1, Luna, Quill, Landfall, Kingspray, and The Unspoken to name a few .

From Oculus Touch to Oculus Santa Cruz; here are 5 major announcements from Facebook’s Connect 3 conference
 
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