Facebook will no longer replenish the Oculus Rift S supplies

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Facebook has confirmed that “generally speaking, as channels sell out of stock, they won’t be replenished moving forward.” The PC-tethered headset is unavailable through Oculus’ store, and it’s out of stock on retail platforms like Amazon and Walmart in the US, except from third-party sellers. Facebook announced last year that it would discontinue the Oculus Rift S in 2021. While the headset was a successor to the landmark Oculus Rift, it compromised on features like screen resolution and refresh rate, particularly compared to high-end PC-based competitors like the Valve Index. Meanwhile, Facebook shifted its focus to the self-contained Oculus Quest, a mobile headset that can also be plugged into a desktop PC – making it functionally a replacement for the Rift S. According to some reports, the strategy was a marked departure from Oculus’ earlier plans. Moving to standalone designs, though, has apparently worked well for Facebook so far. Facebook says last year’s Oculus Quest 2 has outsold all previous Oculus headsets combined. The device has established Facebook as the dominant VR headset company at the price of ceding high-end PC-based VR to competitors including Valve, HTC, and HP.


TikTok adds the ‘Automatic Captions’ feature for creators

TikTok creators will soon be able to add automatically generated captions to their videos as the app attempts to make it more accessible. The option to add auto captions will appear in the editing page after a video has been uploaded or recorded. TikTok says the feature will be available in American English and Japanese at first, but it plans to add support for more languages “in the coming months.” The platform is adding the feature to make TikTok videos easier to watch for deaf and hard of hearing viewers. Creators can edit their captions after they’ve been automatically generated to fix any mistakes, and viewers can turn captions off via the captions button on the share panel. As automatic transcription has gotten better over the years, services have increasingly been adding it to their software to make content more accessible. Last month, Google built the feature into Chrome, allowing it to generate captions for audio played through the browser. Video chat services like Zoom and Google Meet can auto-generate captions during calls, and Instagram also seems to be testing a similar feature for its videos. TikTok also warns creators about videos that might trigger photosensitive epilepsy and provides filters for viewers to avoid these videos.

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