Do you like Star Wars? Do you like virtual reality? The venn diagram of those two fan bases presumably has quite the overlap — and yet, there hasn’t been much official Star Wars VR stuff to date. That’s about to change. Read More

 If you’d like to dip your toe into the virtual world ahead of the coming consumer launches of Gear VR, Valve and HTC’s Vive, and the Oculus Rift, the Gear VR Innovator Edition for Galaxy S6 is available today. You still need $200, and either a Galaxy S6 or S6 Edge, and a willingness to forgive bumps with a product designed specifically for techie early adopters, but it’s… Read More

 Oculus is getting ready to launch its consumer Rift virtual reality headset so at TechCrunch Disrupt NY I’ll be sitting down with the man who made it. Nate Mitchell is the co-founder and VP of Product at Oculus. While visionary Palmer Luckey and CEO Brendan Iribe get a lot of attention, its Mitchell who’s in charge of engineering, product, its Story Studio content team, and making… Read More

 Earlier this week, I had a chance to meet with Playstation R&D senior director Richard Marks for a hands-on demo with Project Morpheus, Sony’s attempt at making a virtual reality headset. I got to try two demos during my time with the headset. The first was a simple intro experience, giving you a fun scene to look at that reacted based on your gaze. It then moved on to a scene that… Read More

 Google Cardboard has been a surprise hit among early adopters, giving an intentionally cheap, approachable device that opens the door to more people having their first virtual reality experience. Providing affordable hardware for optics and input and a software layer that ties into the tools app and game developers already use has made Android a major destination for those looking to experiment… Read More

 Communication mediums can be classified by their context. Example: if your audience is just one person, it’s a different communication experience then when your audience is a company or a crowd. Another metric is whether delivery is synchronous or asynchronous. By targeting a particular experience and delivery mode, a communications product is determining a language for our… Read More

 As if turning Facebook Messenger into a platform and laying the groundwork for virtual reality video on the News Feed weren’t enough, Facebook just announced Analytics for Apps, a new tool for marketers who want to better target campaigns based on aggregated social data. Read More

 The open-source OSVR virtual reality headset is getting one of its first peripherals in the form of an optional faceplate that brings hand tracking to virtual reality projects via an embedded camera. Read More

 In a session at GDC this morning, Walt Disney Imagineering Creative Technologies Lead Bei Yang gave a talk about the work the entertainment giant has done with virtual reality. Read More

 As I walked around Mobile World Congress this week, I couldn’t help but notice some big trends. The Internet of Things was certainly top of mind. Vendors are merging mobile into your biggest mobile device: your car. Smart watches are a growing force, but what really caught my attention is that we are teetering on the edge of mass market virtual reality. TechCrunch’s John Biggs got… Read More

 Golfers like to talk about their long game and their short game. Maybe it’s useful to look at Microsoft’s strategy that way too. Since Satya Nadella took over just over a year ago as CEO at Microsoft, he has started to redirect the company, looking at the short term, while perhaps beginning to formulate a plan for the next wave of computing. Microsoft is the quintessential… Read More

 Virtual reality is as different from movies as movies are from novels. It’s hard to port one into another without losing a lot. New storytelling mediums need new creation tools, and Visionary VR is making them. But this isn’t some Final Cut clone. Visionary’s editing suite lives entirely in VR. Directors use their hands to manipulate a 3D timeline, and select camera angles… Read More