Developers get a broader VR market with Oculus Go

Oculus on Wednesday announced Oculus Go, its first standalone VR headset that it says "makes VR more accessible than ever."

Shipping early next year starting at $199, the all-in-one device "represents a huge leap forward in comfort, visual clarity, and ease-of-use."

While expanding the market for VR content, Oculus Go is also already accessible to developers building for the Samsung Gear VR. Gear VR and Oculus Go apps are binary compatible, meaning developers working with the latest Oculus Mobile SDK, or building with Unity or Unreal, can run applications on it without modification. Gear VR and Oculus Go also share the same controller input set.

"Targeting both devices will be important in the near immediate term to reach the widest audience," Oculus notes on its developer blog.

Meanwhile, Oculus also expanded the reach of the Oculus Rift in a few different ways. First, it's permanently lowering the price of Rift to $399.

"This new permanent price opens up PC VR to the widest audience yet," the company said in a blog post. "Rift is here to stay with years of amazing content on the horizon."

Oculus also launched Oculus for Business, a professional Rift bundle designed for the workplace. Each bundle includes Rift, Oculus Touch controllers, three sensors, and three facial interfaces. They also come with dedicated customer support and special extended licenses and warranties.

"This is a great opportunity--not only for businesses, but for the long-term viability of VR," Oculus said in a blog post. "To become an indispensable part of our daily lives, VR must continue to impact the ways we collaborate, discover, and learn, at scale."

The company announced its first partners from a variety of industries, including Audi, DHL, and Cisco. Audi is using Oculus Rift at dealerships, enabling people to "build their dream car," Oculus said. DHL is using it for personnel training, while Cisco is bringing the functionality of their Spark collaboration app into a virtual environment.

At its Oculus Connect event on Wednesday, Oculus also announced a series of new and updated tools to help developers build for Rift, Gear VR and Oculus Go. These include new Oculus avatars, platform-level safety tools such as reporting and blocking and multiview.

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