Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Gunters, to your headsets! ‘Ready Player One’ to get unique VR experiences

Add as a preferred source on Google

It’s time to don your headset and gloves and brush up on your Joust skills, as Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is edging every closer to release. To celebrate the upcoming year’s lead-in to its debut, Warner Bros and HTC have partnered to create a number of unique virtual reality companion experiences for the hotly anticipated film.

Ready Player One is a story that takes place almost exclusively within the bounds of virtual reality game Oasis. When it was finally announced that Warner Bros and famed director Steven Spielberg would be making a movie based on the original novel, many expected that some form of virtual reality experience would be released alongside it.

Recommended Videos

They weren’t wrong, but according to the latest release from Warner and HTC, we can expect several pre- and post-release VR experiences based around Wade Watts and his fellow egg hunters, or Gunters as they’re known in the book.

Although we don’t know exactly what these experiences will involve, we do know that they will be delivered through HTC’s Viveport platform. We’re also told that the games and experiences will be distributed “globally across all VR in-home platforms, from high-end PC-based VR systems to mobile solutions.”

That means Rift and Vive compatibility, but it could also hint at HTC’s future plans for a mobile VR solution of its own.

The Ready Player One movie is slated for release on March 30, 2018, so we still have some time to wait before the movie itself becomes available. It seems from the wording of both Warner Bros. and HTC staffers, though, that we’ll get to experience part of Ready Player One in virtual reality before it arrives.

How hyped are you guys to do some egg hunting of your own? We’re just hoping we get to play out some key movie scenes from Ferris Bueller as Wade Watts.

Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale covers how to guides, best-of lists, and explainers to help everyone understand the hottest new hardware and…
ChatGPT is recommending scam websites that will steal your credit card info
The chatbot is surfacing fraudulent clones of defunct retail brands, and scammers are deliberately engineering sites to game its recommendations.
ChatGPT running on a laptop.

Scammers have found a new way to reach shoppers: getting ChatGPT to do their marketing for them. According to The Guardian, scam-checking service Ask Silver found that OpenAI's chatbot is recommending fraudulent retail websites built to harvest payment details from unsuspecting buyers. The sites mimic real storefronts and use official-looking URLs, making them difficult to spot without scrutiny.

Defunct brands are a prime target

Read more
McDonald’s new AI drive-thru has to prove it can handle hungry people
After its earlier ordering bot became a punchline, McDonald’s is testing a new system that promises fewer human handoffs.
Architecture, Building, Hotel

McDonald’s is bringing AI back to the drive-thru with a new Google-backed system called ArchIQ, also known as Archy. It’s starting in five locations under the company’s broader “> NEXT” technology push, with a franchisee claiming the system has already handled more than 1 million orders.

The bigger number is the one McDonald’s needs people to trust. About 90% of those orders reportedly needed no human intervention. That sounds promising, but this is not a clean reset. Its earlier IBM-backed AI drive-thru experiment ended after viral mistakes turned automated ordering into a public punchline.

Read more
Logitech’s Mobi Fold is a pocketable folding mouse for folks who despise trackpads
Logitech’s Mobi Fold looks like a tiny productivity taco
Logitech Mobi Fold

Laptop trackpads are fine until you get really busy. Editing a spreadsheet in an airport lounge, juggling tabs in a café, or trying to do proper work on a tiny hotel desk can make you miss the convenience of a mouse. Logitech has the answer to this with the new Mobi Fold, its first ultra-portable foldable mouse.

While a small portable mouse is something people carry, many choose to skip the added bulk, simply choosing to bite the bullet with the trackpad. But the Logitech Mobi Fold can simply fold flat, and can later be unfolded when you need to work. This makes it pretty convenient to carry. Logitech even made the mouse to automatically power on when opened and turn off when folded.

Read more