Try Oculus at Best Buy

Today Oculus announced details of their plan to let users try out the Oculus Rift in Best Buy stores starting May 7th. Initially in 48 Best Buys, you’ll get to try demos like Oculus Dreamdeck, The Climb, and in the coming weeks, you’ll be able to explore the beautiful alien world of Farland.

There will also be a small number of Oculus Rifts to purchase at Best Buy and Amazon stores on May 7th. You don’t have to get angry if you’re still on that 3 month pre-order waiting list though. Oculus says you can opt to buy one of these Rifts in store at Best Buy and you’ll still get to keep your pre-order bonuses, just let them know so they won’t charge you again.

You can schedule your Rift demo with Oculus Live at Best Buy locations up to a month in advance. Guess they’re expecting quiet the rush.

Oculus Rift Delivery

The first consumer versions of the Oculus rift arrived this week and the internets have been going crazy. The very first rift was hand delivered in Alaska by founder Palmer Luckey to the 1st person who preorder it. Luckey live streamed the event on Facebook Live. Overall the reviews of the rift, with its included games Lucky’s Tale and Eve Valkyrie, have been very positive. However, take into account that there’s not anything else to compare it to right now since it’s the only consumer VR headset available. The HTC Vive ships in April.

http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/26/oculus-founder-palmer-luckey-hand-delivers-first-rift-vr-headset-to-customer/?ncid=rss

The biggest announcements from Oculus Connect

This past week the VR company Facebook bought for $2 Billion dollars showed some of their future plans at Oculus Connect, the virtual reality professional development conference sponsored by Oculus. We have a wrap up of the biggest stories to come out of the conference:

Gear VR will get New Streaming options including Netflix, Hulu, and Twitch

Gear VR is the virtual realty project that created a portable virtual reality headset that uses Samsung phones to work. Well now Oculus has shown some of the non-gaming content coming to the portable headset. Streaming content like Hulu and Twitch will be coming later this year but Netflix was announced to be available right now.

We had a chance to test out the VR Netflix option and found it to be very smooth and comfortable. The Netflix TV app puts the user on a couch in a virtual room decorated in popular Netflix content (think posters of Daredevil on the walls). While on the couch user watches Netflix on a big screen TV. The interface is almost exactly like the one you'd use on your traditional PC, phone, or smart TV. 

100s of games listed to be ready for Oculus Launch in 2016

Oculus has had their developer kits out for over a year now allowing hundreds of game developers a chance to create game content for the device. The new games announced for the recently announced touch controllers include: Final Approach, Moon Strike, Pulsar Arena, Job Simulator, I Expect You To Die, Nimbus Nights, Dead & Buried,  and Surgeon Simulator.

However, the biggest game announcement had to be Minecraft. That's right Minecraft for Windows 10 was added to the list of games to be available for the consumer version of Oculus. Now you can build from a overhead 3rd person view or jump right into the world you create in 1st person virtual reality. 

Oculus Ready computers at $1,000

Oculus Ready is a partnership with manufacturers including Asus, Dell, and Alienware, which will guarantee a simple, plug-in-and-go VR experience on PCs carrying the logo. All the PCs in the program are built on Intel and Nvidia hardware, and pricing will begin at under $1000.

This means that you no longer have to worry about building a custom PC for your VR needs. Just look for the Oculus logo on a new PC and know it'll be able to handle the first consumer version of the Oculus Rift. 

New Gear VR headset that will work with all Galaxy 2015 phones for $99

The most exciting VR news that came out of Oculus Connect was likely the hefty price drop of the Gear VR from $250 to $99. The additional compatibility with any 2015 Samsung Galaxy phone is a great since it adds a much wider potential audience for the device. Previous versions of Gear VR only worked with one model of the Samsung phone.

The new price plus the added phone compatibility options for the Gear VR make the virtual reality headset much more appealing to the average consumer and may just kick off a new trend for affordable portable VR rigs.