Each year, the promised land for VR seems to be just on the horizon — always visible, yet too far to reach. However, Facebook is determined not to give up on VR with the launch of the aptly named Facebook Horizon. The company announced the virtual reality playground at this year’s Oculus Connect event in … continue reading
GitLab has announced the release of GitLab 11.4. According to the company, this update includes new features that will enable teams to more efficiently work together. The latest release will offer more efficient code reviews with new features such as Merge Request Reviews and a file tree for diffs. GitLab is also introducing Feature Flags, … continue reading
Oculus revealed it is trying to merge traditional PC apps and VR together with a new experimental technology. The company made the announcement at its Oculus Connect 5 (OC5) event in San Jose this week. According to the company, Hybrid Apps will help developers migrate traditional desktop apps to virtual reality and leverage Dash’s virtual … continue reading
JavaScript compiler Babel version 7 is now available. According to the team, this release was two years, 4k commits, and more than 50 pre-releases in the making. “Babel 7 is a huge release: we’ve made it faster, created an upgrade tool, JS configs, config ‘overrides,’ more options for size/minification, JSX Fragments, TypeScript, new proposals, and … continue reading
Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham have announced a new two-factor authentication method that uses wearables and speech signals. The method “Listening-Watch” uses wearable devices such as smartwatches, activity trackers, and browser-generated speech sounds to perform two-factor authentication. “Listening-Watch offers two key security features,” said Nitesh Saxena, professor in the UAB College of … continue reading
The Scala programming language team has announced plans for its 3.0 release. Currently the team is working on Scala 2.13, which is expected to be released in a couple of months, but says it is time to look towards future releases. Scala 3.0 is expected to be released shortly after version 2.14, which at the … continue reading
Oculus has launched a new developer program called Oculus Start. The program is designed to provide access, support and savings to qualifying virtual reality developers. According to Oculus, the program will offload some of the development costs for developers so their main focus can be creating VR applications. “We know there is no shortage of inspired … continue reading
This week’s Day of Action, an Internet-wide protest to “Save Net Neutrality” brought more than 125,000 websites, Internet users, and organizations together. As a result, the FCC received more than two million comments, and millions of emails and phone calls were made to Congress, reports Fight for the Future (FFF). “The FCC needs to listen … continue reading
Virtual reality developers are getting a new way to enhance their applications and solutions. Oculus has announced mixed reality capture for its VR device, Rift. This new feature will allow developers to build content that merges game footage with live footage. “Rather than presenting a user’s limited point of view, mixed reality actually gives people … continue reading
Facebook continues to drive into the future of virtual reality, and this week the Oculus team received a new leader: Hugo Barra, former vice president of Chinese company Xiaomi. Barra said that he is coming to Silicon Valley to lead Facebook as the new vice president of virtual reality, which includes Team Oculus. Mark Zuckerberg, … continue reading
The popular crowdfunding site Kickstarter has announced it is bringing its Android and iOS apps to open source. According to the Kickstarter engineering team, while building and maintaining features for their apps they have adopted functional programming techniques and written well-tested code. They decided to open-source the apps to share their experience and benefits with … continue reading
Virtual reality is going beyond gadgets and devices, and is now moving toward the web. Companies such as Google and Oculus are trying to make it easier for developers to bring virtual reality solutions online. Google recently introduced the WebVR API in Chrome for Android, while Oculus is announcing the React VR pre-release. “The power … continue reading
