Month: January 2016

Those following virtual reality developments woke up to some surprising news this morning, with headlines blaring that Frontier's high-profile space sim Elite: Dangerous was dropping Oculus Rift support in favor of the SteamVR-powered HTC Vive. Those headlines were especially surprising considering that Elite: Dangerous had been one of the best showcases for the Oculus Rift development kits so far (just ask our own Lee Hutchinson).

It turns out that those initial headlines were wrong—or at the very least misleading. Elite: Dangerous is still planned for the Oculus Rift, as it has been all along. "This is not true. I wish people would check their facts," Elite CEO David Braben tweeted in response to one of those early headlines.

The source of the confusion seems to be a statement Frontier gave to Eurogamer, saying that "right now, we've chosen to focus on SteamVR. We haven't cut an exclusivity deal with any VR manufacturer, and we're still working with Oculus on Rift support."

(credit: Dsimic)

Google has—for years—kept secret the amount of money it has made from its Android operating system. But the cat is now out of the bag.

An Oracle lawyer has told a US court that the search and ad giant had generated £22 billion ($31 billion) in revenue, and £15 billion ($22 billion) in profit since the OS first launched in 2008, according to Bloomberg.

It was also disclosed that Google paid Apple £700 million ($1 billion) in 2014 to be the default search engine on the iPhone.

(credit: Steve Rhodes)

While nearly all of the big tech companies have some sort of plan in place to deal with the upcoming onslaught of virtual reality and augmented reality technology, there's been one rather large holdout: Apple. According to a report from the Financial Times, however, Apple now has its own VR/AR expert. Doug Bowman is joining Apple following a sabbatical from his position as a professor of computer science and the director of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech.

Bowman, who was the lead author of 3D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice, has an impressive background in virtual reality tech, with research focused on "three-dimensional user interface design and the benefits of immersion in virtual environments," according to his academic profile. He also collaborated on numerous articles, including Virtual Reality: How Much Immersion Is Enough? (PDF), 3D User Interfaces: New Directions and Perspectives (PDF), and The Effects of Visual Realism on Search Tasks in Mixed Reality Simulation (PDF).

Notably, last year Bowman was the recipient of a $100,000 (£70,000) research grant from Microsoft for using its HoloLens headset for a study on "collaborative analysis of large-scale mixed reality data."

Netflix, right on schedule, has started blocking some subscribers who are using VPNs.

Last week, on January 14, Netflix said that it would begin cracking down on customers who use VPNs, proxies, or other "unblocking" services to view content that shouldn't be available in their country. The move is almost certainly to appease copyright holders and broadcasters. Way back in 2014, Sony Pictures accused Netflix of "semi-sanctioning" piracy by allowing "illegal subscribers" to view geoblocked content.

The first report of Netflix blocking a VPN comes from uFlix, an Australian VPN service that charges AUD$2 (£1) per month for the ability to view Netflix content from around the globe: