Facebook Brings Movies, Board Games, and Sports to Virtual Reality
*By Alisha Haridasani*
Facebook’s new Oculus Go headset was designed to make virtual reality a shared experience, said Hugo Barra, the social media company's vice president of VR.
“We’re making three, strong, distinct bets in social entertainment with Oculus Go,” Barra said in an interview Wednesday with Cheddar’s Alex Heath at Facebook’s annual F8 developers’ conference.
Those three wagers include Oculus TV, Oculus Rooms, and Oculus Venues.
For Oculus TV, Facebook has partnered with ESPN, Netflix, Hulu, and Showtime to provide users on-demand and live content. The subscription service also lets users host virtual "watch parties."
Oculus Rooms is a virtual "hang out" where users can play board games like Monopoly and Boggle through a partnership with Hasbro, Barra said.
Oculus Venues is a way to join “public gatherings of people,” for concerts, comedy nights, and sporting events.
Virtual reality has been a niche technology, used mostly by hardcore video gamers since around 2012. The Oculus Rift, the company's first VR headset for the high-end user, was designed with gaming in mind. It offered such intense graphics that it needed to be plugged into a PC for computing power. Not so with the Oculus Go.
By making its new headset more affordable, eliminating the need for additional hardware, and introducing new user-oriented services, Facebook is trying to make VR appealing to less tech-savvy consumers.
"Part of what we wanted to do here was get it to the point where more people are going to try it and feel how cool it is so that they can start telling other people," Barra said.
As Facebook is working to [scale virtual reality](https://cheddar.com/videos/oculus-go-aims-to-be-facebooks-vr-gateway-for-the-masses) with the Oculus Go, the company isn’t abandoning investment in Rift. Barra said continued investment in the high-end headset will help enhance the mid-range consumer products.
He compared the Rift with a Formula 1 car equipped with cutting-edge technology.
“You’ll learn a ton from that and then you can pick and choose which technologies to bring down to your luxury sedan and eventually your mainstream car,” he said.
For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/facebooks-hugo-barra-on-making-vr-the-most-immersive-platform-possible).
President Donald Trump says he will allow Nvidia to sell its H200 computer chip used in the development of artificial intelligence to “approved customers” in China. Trump said Monday on his social media site that he had informed China’s leader Xi Jinping and “President Xi responded positively!” There had been concerns about allowing advanced computer chips into China as it could help them to compete against the U.S. in building out AI capabilities. But there has also been a desire to develop the AI ecosystem with American companies such as chipmaker Nvidia.
The end of 2025 is almost upon us. And it’s time to unpack Spotify Wrapped. On Wednesday, the music streaming giant delivered its annual recap — giving its hundreds of millions of users worldwide a look at the top songs, artists, podcasts and other audio they listened to over the past year. Spotify isn’t the only platform to roll out a yearly glimpse of data collected from consumers’ online lives. But since its launch about a decade ago, Wrapped has become one of the most anticipated. And Spotify is billing the 2025 edition to be the biggest yet, with a host of new features it hopes may also address some disappointments users had last year.
Elon Musk’s X unveiled a feature that lets users see where an account is based. Online sleuths and experts quickly found that many popular accounts, often posting in support of the U.S. MAGA movement with thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers, are based outside the U.S. This raises concerns about foreign influence in U.S. politics.
The Enhanced Games is going public in two ways — with a new listing on the Nadsaq stock exchange and also by offering a direct-to-consumer business focused on performance products.
Real estate software company RealPage has agreed to stop sharing nonpublic information between landlords as part of a settlement with the Department of Justice.
2025’s top Black Friday tech deals from smart speakers to wearables. Tom’s Guide editor Kate Kozuch shares expert picks and tips for smart holiday shopping.
Computer chipmaker Nvidia is poised to release a quarterly earnings report that is expected to either deepen a recent downturn in the stock market or prompt an ebullient sigh of relief among investors increasingly worried the world’s most valuable company is perched upon an artificial intelligence bubble about to burst.
