Oculus VR booth at CES 2015.
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Oculus unveils Mobile VR Jam with $1M in prizes

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 1 min

Facebook’s Oculus VR division announced it will hold its Mobile VR Jam on April 13 with $1 million in prizes.

That kind of prize money should further stoke developer interest in making virtual reality applications for the Oculus Rift VR goggles and the Samsung Gear VR, which runs off Oculus tech. It also makes sense because Oculus will face rivals this year with the announcement of the Valve VR and Open Source Virtual Reality projects.

Oculus held its previous VR Jam in 2013, drawing hundreds of developers. That resulted in VR experiences dubbed DarkNet, Dumpy, SightLine, and DreadHalls. But this year is a step up with the big prize and the availability of the Samsung Gear VR Innovator Edition.

Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.