How Facebook is bringing virtual reality gaming within touching distance

Oculus Rift’s virtual reality headset has moved another step closer to serving up heart-in-mouth moments in gamers’ living rooms with news of a link-up with Microsoft that will see every headset ship with an Xbox One.

Having paid $2bn for VR startup Oculus in 2014, Facebook is making its plans to be one of the key providers of the technology, alongside companies including Sony, Google and games firm Valve. Its Oculus Rift VR headset can only be bought by developers at the moment, but will go on sale commercially in the first quarter of 2016.

Oculus held an event in San Francisco this week to provide more details on how VR will be controlled, and what kind of games people will be playing – while stoking anticipation for a technology that at various points in the past two decades has failed to live up to its hype.

“VR allows us to experience anything, anywhere … This is going to change everything. It is a fundamental shift: a paradigm change. And it all begins now,” said Oculus’ chief executive Brendan Iribe at the event.

The Oculus Rift is a head-worn device with a built-in screen, with a separate sensor that sits next to its user’s PC to detect their movements. VR enthusiasts can crane their necks upwards to take in the building-sized monster that they’ve got to slay, or peer into the deep abyss that they’re about to jump into, but after Oculus announced that every Rift will ship with an Xbox One gamepad made byMicrosoft, they now have the controls to do more than simply look.

Oculus is creating a $10m (£6.4m) fund to invest in VR games made by independent developers. The company also showed off its Oculus Home software, which Rift owners will use to browse and buy new games and applications, as well as launch the ones they already own.

Developers who attended the event were enthusiastic about the potential for virtual reality games in general, and the Oculus Rift specifically.

“We want to really make the player feel like they’re in the world. Sometimes it’s the little touches like having ants crawling on the ground, or a bird calling over your shoulder that, when you turn around, flaps off,” said David Adams of Gunfire Games.

“Or there’s the big cyclops guy that you might have seen before in games like God of War, but now it actually looks like a seven-storey-tall creature. I played one demo where you look up, and a spider drops down. I don’t think I’ve ever jumped so much in a game before!”

Besides scale and scares, developers see VR as a way to increase the emotional impact of their games.

“When you put on a headset, you do feel like you are there. To me, that makes the connection between you and the character even stronger,” said Ted Price of Insomniac Games.

“What’s happening to the character resonates more strongly with the player, and that’s exciting, because that’s what we’ve been going for for several decades: strengthening that player/character connection.”

Price warned that developers would need to resist the temptation to make games with a barrage of scary moments. “If you create jump-scares every minute, they become less interesting,” he said. “All great games, great movies and even great books require pacing to heighten the emotions that the authors, filmmakers or developers want you to feel.”

Oculus will be prominent at the E3 games industry show in Los Angeles this coming week, with Sony expected to announce more news and games for its rival Morpheus headset, which is expected to go on sale this year.

Beyond gaming

Facebook has its sights set beyond gaming, however. “Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face – just by putting on goggles in your home,” wrote the Facebook chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, in March 2014, as he announced the acquisition of Oculus.

For now, it’s games developers that are stretching VR technology with the help of companies such as Oculus. Despite past attempts at virtual reality having fallen flat, the developers present at the Oculus event were not afraid to trumpet their creative ambitions.

“This is just the beginning. Since we are all discovering more about what VR can bring, I think we’re going to see a lot of unexpected surprises over the next several years,” said Price.

“Our goal is really to transport the player into these fantasy worlds,” said Adams. “I love Star Trek, so that whole idea of the holodeck? Man, this is basically the holodeck!”

YouTube launches live gaming site to take on Amazon's Twitch

YouTube is launching YouTube Gaming, a new spin-off app and website for gamers that will make its debut in the summer, initially in the US and UK.

It will seek to capitalise on the popularity of gaming videos on YouTube, with profile pages for more than 25,000 games “from Asteroids to Zelda” collecting videos related to each title. Games publishers and YouTube gamers will also be prominently featured.\

Live streaming will be a key focus as Google’s online video service tries to win back the initiative from Twitch – bought by Amazon for $970m in 2014.

“Live streams bring the gaming community closer together, so we’ve put them front-and-centre on the YouTube Gaming homepage,” wrote Alan Joyce, YouTube’s product manager for gaming, in a blogpost announcing the upcoming launch. “And in the coming weeks, we’ll launch an improved live experience that makes it simpler to broadcast your gameplay to YouTube.

“On top of existing features like high frame rate streaming at 60fps, DVR, and automatically converting your stream into a YouTube video, we’re redesigning our system so that you no longer need to schedule a live event ahead of time. We’re also creating a single link you can share for all your streams.”

Twitch ended 2014 with a monthly audience of more than 100 million for its live and archived game streams. YouTube was stronger in pre-recorded “let’s play” videos and other gaming content.

Gaming videos are hugely popular on YouTube. The 100 most-viewed games channels in May 2015 accumulated just under 6bn views that month alone, according to online video industry site Tubefilter and analytics firm OpenSlate.

They were led by PewDiePie, the Swedish gamer who has become one of YouTube’s most recognisable faces. His channel has more than 37 million subscribers and generated 352m views in April alone. Other popular YouTube gaming channels include The Diamond Minecart (290m views in April), Popular MMOs (285m), Markiplier (222m) and Jack Septic Eye (219m).

Adblock Plus cries foul over Apple plan to stop ads

The developer of Adblock Plus has cried foul over new features in Apple’s next update for its mobile operating system that could come equipped with ad-blocking built-in.

The update for iOS 9 used on the iPhone and iPad and the Safari web browser was announced at Apple’s developer conference on Monday.

It will bring with it a collection of new features aimed at speeding up the iPhone and Mac’s operating systems and extend battery life. One of those features appears to be the ability to natively block web content, including ads.

The features built into Safari and iOS 9 were discovered as part of the developer preview builds of OS X El Capitan and iOS 9 released this week. But according to Adblock Plus, the new feature could render the extension redundant.

“So far very little is known about content blocking extensions, available in Safari 9 and iOS 9,” said Adblock Plus head of operations Ben Williams from developer Eyeo. “We look nervously at how powerful their block lists will be.”

A built-in ability to block unwanted content, including ads, seems like a good thing for users. It is less appealling for Adblock Plus - a business built on blocking some ads but allowing others through from sites that pay for the privilege of being on its “whitelist”.

‘End of adblocking on Safari’

Adblock Plus recently released a browser for Android dedicated to blocking ads, and intends to release an iPhone version, which would be rendered useless should Apple provide an ad-blocking system baked into iOS 9 and mobile Safari.

“The best case is that the new application programming interface will help us to improve the performance and adblocking experience on Safari, and paves the way for an iOS adblocker. If [Apple’s] block list format turns out to be useless, however, that could mean the end of adblocking on Safari,” said Williams.

adverts within browsers. The company runs an advertising service called iAds within applications that run on iPhones and iPads and is unlikely to adopt a system that could damage its own revenue stream.

For publishers the ability to block adverts on mobile devices threatens a captive market for supporting their content through advertising. While the blocking of ads is common on the desktop, it is not on mobile browsers meaning that users viewing websites, including the Guardian, are guaranteed to be served any adverts that are planned by the publisher.

Ad blocking threatens the chosen revenue model for the majority of web publishers. German broadcasters RTL and ProSiebenSat1 recently lost court action against Eyeo over Adblock Plus.

The court ruled that Adblock Plus’s estimated 50m users did not put it in a dominant position of the market and therefore it was in breach of anti-competitive laws.

BlackBerry planning to launch Android smartphone with sliding keyboard

The next BlackBerry smartphone could run Android and have a sliding physical keyboard, according to reports.

BlackBerry briefly showed off a slider device on stage at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March, but has provided little detail on it since.

The move would make BlackBerry the latest Android device manufacturer, having brought Android apps through the Amazon app store to its BlackBerry 10 smartphones in an attempt to help tempt users with more apps.

Four sources talking to Reuters said the move to use Android is part of BlackBerry’s strategy to focus on software and device management, rather than handset sales after its market share declined to less than 1%.

Whether a move to Android, an about-face for the Waterloo, Ontario-based company, would spell the end of BlackBerry 10 devices is unclear. Launched in 2013, BlackBerry 10 devices have struggled to compete with Android smartphones from Samsung, Motorola or LG, or Apple’s iPhones, mainly due to a lack of big name apps.

“We don’t comment on rumours and speculation, but we remain committed to the BlackBerry 10 operating system, which provides security and productivity benefits that are unmatched,” said BlackBerry in a statement.

Software and services, not phones

BlackBerry chief executive John Chen has pinned the company’s hopes on a new device management system called BES12, which allows corporate and government clients to manage BlackBerry devices as well as devices powered by Android, iOS and Windows operating system.

One of the hurdles it faces in that transformation is convincing big customers that its device management software works across many different platforms.

By launching an Android-based device of its own, BlackBerry would be sending a signal to sceptics that it is confident that the BES12 system can not only manage, but also secure smartphones and tablets powered by rival operating systems.

In March, BlackBerry announced that it planned to deliver its patented security, productivity and communication tools to any mobile device running iOS, Android or Windows.

After launching its then popular BlackBerry Messaging app on Android and iPhone, BlackBerry said it plans to offer more in-house features on rival devices, including BlackBerry Hub and the predictive text capabilities of its virtual keyboard.

Tech firms need to use data ethically around the internet of things

As more connected products come to market, from smart thermostats on our walls to connected wearables on our wrists, how will we pay for it?

Will we sign contracts as we do with mobile phones, getting hardware for “free” and paying for services? Or will we get discounts or free devices by handing over our personal data, as we do with Google and Facebook?

Smart home services are likely to be paid for the same way as mobile phones, predicted Stephen Pattison, vice president of public affairs at British chip designer ARM, speaking at the HyperCat internet of things Summit in London on 8 June.

“What we’ll be looking at in the future is a big company ... coming to your door saying they could give you all your white goods – your television, your phone, your tablet, they can do security around your house – and they will charge you rent for that,” he said.

Trading our data for services

An alternative, especially for apps based on hardware we already have, is trading our data for free services – think of how Google or Facebook get their revenue without charging people to use their platforms. “It’s a fantastic free service, but they monetise [your] data,” noted Brian Robertson, networking firm Broadcam’s business development director for EMEA. “The freemium model has created a monster that we’re all quite happy to use.”

However, research suggests we’re no longer happy to pay for services with our private data, so the IoT industry may be smart to find a different way. Symantec’s CTO, Darren Thomson, said company research suggested a “marked change” in consumer behaviour towards privacy of late, with a recent report revealing personal privacy was viewed as more important than quality of service. “That’s the first time that’s ever happened,” he said.

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Perhaps because of that, people are starting to lie to such services, giving false information to access them while keeping their personal information safe, Thomson said – and that’s a problem for companies that rely on our data to power their business.

“I would suggest that that fundamental idea starts to fall to pieces if we find that a high percentage of people that are contributing that data are actually lying in order to get access to that service,” he said.

Tackling the growing aversion to handing over personal data, IBM fellow Andy Stanford-Clark suggested, would need companies to act more ethically and stop trying to “catch us out” with complicated terms and conditions.

Instead, firms should help users actively and intelligently opt in to data collection where they are happy with it.

Lord Erroll, chairman of IoT standards group HyperCat, suggested that there should be a “basic minimum level which you can’t sign away” to protect users from unknowingly handing over too much data, while helping to rebuild trust in such companies.

Another solution is to hand all our data to one company, and let it act as a broker – similar to how PayPal holds your payment card data and only passes it on to retailers at your request.

John Davies, chief researcher at BT, pointed to startups that will do just that for data, helping give control of data back to consumers. “Their whole business model is predicated on the notion that they will own your data for you, [and] will sell it,” Davies said.

IoT services – and websites and apps, for that matter – could also offer discounts to users who share their data. “This can be a way in which individuals can realise the benefit of their data,” Pattison said.

“But one of the problems with that is it has to be a real choice. You can’t have a world where you’ve got companies saying ... if you don’t hand over all your data you don’t get this service at all. It has to be a world where there’s this phased, staged approach.”

Users prefer to pay upfront?

Rather than hand over data, perhaps we should start paying upfront for such hardware and services – a point made by Apple CEO Tim Cook last week, who argued his firm believes it’s better to base the bottom line on cash than to sell customers’ personal data to advertisers.

Robertson said he’d happily pay for otherwise free applications or services if it meant he could keep his data safe. “As a consumer, I would definitely consider it, especially for my kids,” he said, explaining that adults are better equipped to make careful privacy decisions than children, who may agree to any data handover to keep playing their game.

That could be done with micropayments, with consumers doling out a small payment to get access to an application or service when they use it, which could help reduce our dependency on selling our data, Robertson added.

Regardless of which business model dominates the IoT, ARM’s Pattison said protecting privacy and handing data ownership back to people is the key.

“If we don’t get this right, this data protection right, we will not liberate data to drive the smart world that we’re all trying to create,” Pattison said, adding later: “The main principle is we must all accept that consumers own their own data. I think this whole experiment will fail if we don’t get that right.”

Twitter rolls out shared block lists to help combat trolls

Twitter has rolled out lists of trolls that can be shared among users and enables a one-click block from harassment on the social network.

The new feature forms part of Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo’s pledge to help users protect themselves and deal with being attacked and harassed by trolls – a common problem for certain users on the social network.

“This feature is yet another step towards making Twitter safer for everyone and will be available to some of our users starting today and all users in the coming week,” said Twitter user safety engineer Xiaoyun Zhang in a blog post.

Blocking an account stops trolls from viewing a user’s profile, sending them mentions or interacting with them in their feed. Until now each account had to be blocked individually.

The system worked fine for most users who were only occasionally forced to block singular users from time to time. However, those who are subject to coordinated or sustained attacks by trolls can be quickly overwhelmed by hundreds of users, making blocking them all difficult. Shareable lists are aimed at solving that problem.

Twitter also allows users to mute accounts, which does not block them from viewing their feed, but does stop mentions from troll accounts showing up on their timeline.