Pepsi releases special bottle for Back to the Future month

USA Today reports that in honor of Back to the Future month, Pepsi will be releasing the famous bottle of Pepsi Marty McFly ordered in Back to the Future II.

"Fans have always been a little crazy about it," says Lou Arbetter, PepsiCo's senior director of marketing, about the scene in the film where a Pepsi Perfect is delivered to Michael J. Fox's character through a futuristic pneumatic tube, "and so we wanted to take advantage of the fact that Marty travelled to the future, to this month, and wanted to actually come out with the product."

This is not going to be a new product for the company but rather a special limited edition collectible. Pepsi is planning on only making a run of 6,500 bottles at $20.15 each.

Additionally Pepsi will also be distributing 1,500 Pepsi Perfect bottles at New York Comic Con this week to fans dressed as Marty McFly.

Watch the romantic comedy Man Up

From the director of The Inbetweeners Movie and the producer of Hot Fuzz and Paul, comes the feel-good British romantic comedy MAN UP starring Lake Bell and Simon Pegg. Available now at Amazon or Itunes digitally or on DVD and Blue Ray

When Nancy is mistaken for Jack’s blind date under the clock at Waterloo Station, she decides to take fate into her own hands and just go with it. What could possibly go wrong? MAN UP is an honest, heart-warming romantic comedy about taking chances and rolling with the consequences. One night, two people, on a first date like no other...

Amazon will ban sales of Apple TV and Google Chromecast

In a very odd move, this week Amazon announced that by the end of October they would be removing all Apple TV and Google Chromecast products from their site. Amazon says it’s “to avoid customer confusion.”

Amazon claims that the move is meant to benefit their customers and that Chromecast and Apple TV don’t support Amazon Prime Instant Video.

“Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime,” read the email from Amazon’s corporate representatives. “It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion.”

There is some speculation that Amazon is trying to eliminate competition for the latest version of its streaming device, the Fire TV. However, other devices capable of streaming like Roku, Xbox, and PlayStation products wouldn’t be affected by the ban.

The biggest announcements from Oculus Connect

This past week the VR company Facebook bought for $2 Billion dollars showed some of their future plans at Oculus Connect, the virtual reality professional development conference sponsored by Oculus. We have a wrap up of the biggest stories to come out of the conference:

Gear VR will get New Streaming options including Netflix, Hulu, and Twitch

Gear VR is the virtual realty project that created a portable virtual reality headset that uses Samsung phones to work. Well now Oculus has shown some of the non-gaming content coming to the portable headset. Streaming content like Hulu and Twitch will be coming later this year but Netflix was announced to be available right now.

We had a chance to test out the VR Netflix option and found it to be very smooth and comfortable. The Netflix TV app puts the user on a couch in a virtual room decorated in popular Netflix content (think posters of Daredevil on the walls). While on the couch user watches Netflix on a big screen TV. The interface is almost exactly like the one you'd use on your traditional PC, phone, or smart TV. 

100s of games listed to be ready for Oculus Launch in 2016

Oculus has had their developer kits out for over a year now allowing hundreds of game developers a chance to create game content for the device. The new games announced for the recently announced touch controllers include: Final Approach, Moon Strike, Pulsar Arena, Job Simulator, I Expect You To Die, Nimbus Nights, Dead & Buried,  and Surgeon Simulator.

However, the biggest game announcement had to be Minecraft. That's right Minecraft for Windows 10 was added to the list of games to be available for the consumer version of Oculus. Now you can build from a overhead 3rd person view or jump right into the world you create in 1st person virtual reality. 

Oculus Ready computers at $1,000

Oculus Ready is a partnership with manufacturers including Asus, Dell, and Alienware, which will guarantee a simple, plug-in-and-go VR experience on PCs carrying the logo. All the PCs in the program are built on Intel and Nvidia hardware, and pricing will begin at under $1000.

This means that you no longer have to worry about building a custom PC for your VR needs. Just look for the Oculus logo on a new PC and know it'll be able to handle the first consumer version of the Oculus Rift. 

New Gear VR headset that will work with all Galaxy 2015 phones for $99

The most exciting VR news that came out of Oculus Connect was likely the hefty price drop of the Gear VR from $250 to $99. The additional compatibility with any 2015 Samsung Galaxy phone is a great since it adds a much wider potential audience for the device. Previous versions of Gear VR only worked with one model of the Samsung phone.

The new price plus the added phone compatibility options for the Gear VR make the virtual reality headset much more appealing to the average consumer and may just kick off a new trend for affordable portable VR rigs.

Volkswagen caught cheating on SMOG checks

by Ramon Mejia

This week the EPA accused Volkswagen of illegally using software to cheat emissions standards, allowing the German automaker to sell half a million cars that produce nitrogen oxide, which creates smog, at up to 40 times the legal limit.

Volkswagen admitted to the software hack which could detect when the vehicle was undoing a Smog check and change the emissions profile to pass the test. The CEO of Volkswagen resigned due to this scandal and the company has voluntarily recalled 500,000 diesel vehicles to fix the hack. Volkswagen faces up to $18 billion dollars in fines from the EPA.

The International Council on Clean Transportation, a research group, discovered Volkswagen’s software hack.

The group was conducting unrelated research on diesel vehicles and noticed the discrepancy between Volkswagen’s emissions in testing laboratories and on the road. They brought the issue to the attention of the E.P.A., which conducted further tests on the cars, and ultimately discovered the use of the defeat device software.