Tech Crunch – Meta is raising the price of Quest 2 virtual reality headsets by $100

Meta announced today that it’s raising the price of its Quest 2 virtual reality headsets due to increased production costs. Starting on August 1st, the Meta Quest 2 will cost $399.99 USD for the 128GB version, which is a $100 increase from the current $299.99 price tag. The 256GB version will cost $499.99, up from…

Tech Crunch – Roblox beefs up its developer tools as it looks to a future beyond games

When I spoke to Roblox in 2020, the company was in the midst of rebuilding its entire underlying infrastructure. It had been running into issues with downtime due to insufficient resources to meet demand and needed to build a modern, cloud-native system to handle its growing user base. But beyond the nuts and bolts of…

Tech Crunch – Meta’s next VR headset might be called the Quest Pro

The company formerly known as Facebook may soon release its first new piece of VR hardware since rebranding to Meta last year. According to developer Steve Moser in a report from Bloomberg, the next headset will be called the Quest Pro (sorry, Nintendo fans). Moser found the name “Quest Pro” in the code of Meta’s…

Tech Crunch – Meta is dumping Facebook logins as its metaverse ID system

Despite the name change and metaverse hyperbole, Facebook has always been at the center of the Meta suite of software for users engaging with its wider ecosystem. While that may continue to be the case indefinitely, it’s clear the company is taking steps to ensure that its next swath of users aren’t tied to a…

Tech Crunch – Amazon launches Ground Truth Synthetics to create virtual objects for AI model training

It takes massive amounts of data to train AI models. But sometimes, that data simply isn’t available from real-world sources, so data scientists use synthetic data to make up for that. In machine vision applications, that means creating different environments and objects to train robots or self-driving cars, for example. But while there are quite…

Tech Crunch – Meta’s latest VR headset prototypes will help it pass the ‘Visual Turing test’

Devindra Hardawar Contributor Devindra Hardawar is a Senior Editor at Engadget. More posts by this contributor Cadillac’s new self-driving concept is a luxury loveseat on wheels FDA authorizes Pfizer’s Covid antiviral pill for people 12 and older Meta wants to make it clear it’s not giving up on high-end VR experiences yet. So, in a…

Tech Crunch – Meta rolls out new parental controls for Instagram and Quest VR headsets

Meta announced today that it’s rolling out new tools on Instagram and Quest VR headsets that are designed to give parents additional supervision controls. On Instagram, parents and guardians can now send invitations to their teens to initiate supervision tools. Prior to this change, only teens could send invitations. Parents and guardians can now also…

Tech Crunch – Meta adds voice controls for Horizon Worlds, which defaults to live chat with strangers

Meta might soon want everyone to hop into its playful virtual realms, but some users are set up for a shock. In the service of pushing people to socialize in Horizon Worlds, the virtual social network has voice chat enabled by default. As anyone — particularly any woman — who’s played an online multiplayer game…

Tech Crunch – Meta rolls out Horizon Home, making it easier to meet up in the metaverse

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today that Horizon Home will roll out as part of a new update to the Quest 2 headset. Despite Meta’s insistence that virtual reality is the future of social networking, the Quest 2 hasn’t supported a straight-forward way to socialize so far. You could join a party with…