As part of Microsoft’s ongoing partnership with Oculus, Rift owners are in for a treat come December. The VR headset will support streaming games from your Xbox One or Windows 10 via a free app that will hit the Windows and Xbox Stores on December 12. Get ready to experience your favorite games in virtual reality — sort of.
It’s exciting news for Rift owners, but don’t get your hopes up — it doesn’t mean you’ll be playing your games in VR. Well, you will, just not the way you might think. The Rift app essentially creates a VR environment in which you can play your games, the app reportedly includes three different environments you can immerse yourself in while you immerse yourself in your games.
The Rift app effectively mimics a gigantic screen in one of three VR environments: Citadel, Retreat, or Dome. From that screen, you can stream any of your Windows 10 or Xbox One streamable titles like Gears of War 4 and Forza Horizon 3.
The partnership between Microsoft and Oculus has been ongoing ever since the launch of the Oculus Rift, which shipped with an Xbox One controller in the place of the then-forthcoming Oculus Touch controllers. The Rift app will be the next step in that relationship, and it comes at an interesting time just after the release of the PSVR and PS4 Pro.
According to the Xbox news release you can give it a try at a few different retail locations this holiday season, in case you’re not quite sold on the Xbox One and Oculus Rift partnership. It’s a step in the right direction, and the closest you’re likely to get to a fully VR version of Halo 5: Guardians for the time being.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?