The battle for virtual reality supremacy has been rough, but it’s looking like the more expensive HTC Vive is beating out the Oculus Rift.
In Steam’s monthly hardware survey, where it analyzes what processors or GPUs gamers are using, it found that far more of its users are buying HTC Vives.
According to those surveyed, 66 percent of Steam users own an HTC Vive while 27.75 percent own an Oculus Rift. The survey also asked if users owned an Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 (DK2), and 6.25 percent said they did. Even when combining the consumer Oculus Rift with the DK2, that comes out to 34 percent, a little over half of the market share HTC has claimed.
What’s interesting is the fact that HTC’s Vive is a good $200 more expensive than the Oculus Rift. In achieving these results even in the face of a higher, $800 price tag, Vive can make a strong case that its headset is the superior one. Unlike Oculus, Vive uses motion controllers and motion detectors that are placed around your room to more accurately capture movements. This has translated to more positive reviews and consumer response when compared to Oculus. While both are still incredibly capable VR headsets, the hardcore early adopter audience went with the better option.
This does come as bit of a surprise, considering Oculus had far more publicity than Vive with its Kickstarter and subsequent purchase by Facebook. It turns out that consumers were paying very close attention to which headset would edge the other out.
Oculus has also been on a recent bidding war, courting developers to its side to make exclusive Oculus games. This has left gamers upset, as many feel that making certain games exclusive to Oculus would be the equivalent to making games exclusive to Samsung TVs.
Possibly in order to profit from this caustic environment, Valve has announced that it will pay developers to make games and has made it clear that it will not demand exclusivity. This more consumer-focused message by HTC and Valve may be what’s pushing consumers to their side.
The VR war is only beginning, as PlayStation is set to launch its PSVR this October and Razer is also entering the game with its Open Source VR headset. Stay tuned.
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?