Gadgetory

move over power glove oculus has a new way to play games with your hands I'm Bridget Carey this is your scene that update oculus is leveling up the virtual reality experience with a new type of game controller that lets you use your hands to interact with the game now when you look at people using virtual reality headsets you see a whole bunch of this people reaching out their hands while they look into a 3d environment now that motivated the team at oculus to create a new type of motion sensing controller called the oculus touch this set of controllers has the usual analog stick buttons and trigger but it also detects finger poses with how you hold it so you can give a thumbs up or point or wave as part of the game it takes motion a bit further than our old friend the wiimote but it's still a prototype the actual first oculus rift headsets are going to be coming out sometime in the first quarter of next year and they will come with an Xbox one wireless controller and a little sensor on your stand to detect how you move in the room but the company still isn't saying what all this is going to cost oculus which is owned by Facebook also showed off the final design of its headset at this press event it's going to be wrapped in fabric for a smooth feel and the headphones are removable if you want to use your own oculus also teased some upcoming games that were made specifically for virtual reality taking advantage of the illusion that you're inside of the game we're going to hear more about that next week during the big III video game expo in Los Angeles while Facebook's oculus wants to change the virtual world Google is going after another project to change the real world google announced the launch of something called sidewalk labs it's an independent company that's dedicated to improving life in big cities that means looking into how to improve things like energy use cost of living and transportation which goes with that whole self driving cars thing it's the idea of the perfect Tomorrowland world minus the jetpacks search and advertising are still Google's main revenue stream bringing in 50 billion dollars annually so why does google stretch itself into this far-out project like self-driving cars google glass internet via balloons or like it announced in 2013 to go on a mission to extend the human lifespan it all comes down to making more money from data if a city is smart enough to know how we are moving through the streets if you can report a pothole right when it happens if parking lots told you when they were full so you can get an alert to your phone if the mailbox told you when the postman came by or not yeah there's plenty more data for Google to turn into a business that's it for this tech news roundup and there's more at cnet com from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey