PlayStation 4 is Bringing Console Gaming Streaming To PC and Mac

Sony PlayStation is the bestselling gaming console of the current generation devices. The PlayStation 4 has maintained its superiority over competitors like Xbox and Nintendo by regularly offering big updates that improve the user’s gaming experience. Today marks another big step towards improving console gaming. Sony has revealed that the upcoming PS4 firmware update will make PS4 playable on PCs and Macs via streaming. Currently, the streaming feature called Remote Play can also stream games on the PS TV and PS Vita.

Those familiar with Sony products must be aware that Sony offers a Remote Play feature for its Sony Xperia devices. The feature allows those with Xperia products to stream PlayStation games to their phone or tablet over WiFI and play them via the standard PlayStation controller.

The upcoming version 3.50 software update for PS4 will add the ability to “Remote Play” PS4 games on a home computer, effectively turning a laptop or desktop with mediocre specs to a remote PlayStation powered gaming machine.

Not so long ago, Microsoft announced that Xbox One gamers will be able to stream games to PC thanks to the updated Xbox app. That feature was, for obvious reasons, limited to Microsoft Windows PCs and not Apple devices. This new announcement is just in time to nullify Microsoft’s superior feature.

This addition is not a reply to Microsoft’s screen sharing feature. President of Sony Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, had made the announcement a while back. In November last year, he tweeted “Some people asked if we plan to provide Remote Play function to PC, and yes, we are indeed working on an official application for PC/Mac”.

Sony says the feature will not be available in the beta release of the 3.50 update. So early adopters won’t be able to test the feature in advance. However, the company’s blog post says “you can look forward to it soon”.

There are several others inclusions in the major update. It brings online friends notifications, which will let the gamers know when their friends are online to play games. To complement the feature, users will now be able to appear offline (invisible) when they are gaming alone or busy with something else. The Play Together feature will allow friends to join game parties or start new games together in more simpler manner.

Sony’s also bringing scheduled updates to PS4 which will make the process of organising future game meetups much easier. Dailymotion is being added to the Share feature and users will be able to check their storage using PlayStation Plus. Sadly, there is still no support for external storage devices.

The beta version of the update has been released while the stable release should be coming soon after.

Oculus Pushes Back Touch Controller Launch To Second Half Of 2016

Sometimes timing creeps up on you and you have to move things back. It’s an ugly reality for hardware creators, but it happens.

Today, Oculus announced that its Touch controllers will be shipping in the second half of 2016 instead of immediately with the Rift, which is still coming in Q1 2016 with preorders coming “soon.”

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey tweeted a link to a blog post from the company, positioning things around the importance of “getting it right” rather than merely getting it out there:

As we wrote in June, the Touch controller, known as the “Half Moon” prototype, will let you pick up objects, fire a gun, or point at things while in a virtual reality experience with the Rift.

Here’s the full post:

On the path to perfecting Touch, we’ve decided that we need more time before release, and we’ll now be shipping Touch in the second half of 2016. Pre-orders will open a few months prior to launch.

Rift remains on schedule to ship in Q1 with pre-orders launching very soon.

On Touch hardware, we’ve made significant advances in ergonomics, and we’re implementing many changes that make Touch even more comfortable, reliable, and natural. We’re also implementing changes that improve hand pose recognition.

We’re also outputting larger numbers of pre-production runs, which means we can get a lot more Touch hardware in the hands of developers who need it.

There will be a huge amount of ground-breaking new content launching alongside Touch. We shared a handful of early previews at Oculus Connect 2 in September, but we can’t wait to show you what’s coming next.

The feedback on Touch has been incredibly positive, and we know this new timeline will produce an even better product, one that will set the bar for VR input. We appreciate your patience and promise Touch will be worth the wait.

Pre-orders will open a few months before the Touch controllers are slated to ship.