Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker is making the rounds in Silicon Valley this week, according to Politico's Morning Tech.

According to Time's Techland, flight attendants are suing to reinstitute a ban on using electronics during flights. The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, the largest union representing flight attendants in the United States, filed a lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday, saying that the federal agency should have upheld a ban on the use of smartphones and tablets during takeoff and landing.

The PC was marked down as dead as tablets began to outsell desktops a year ago. But new research from Gartner - as reported by GIGA OM - suggest that PC shipments are actually doing well again in developed markets. While tablet sales are still expected to be better than PCs in 2015, according to the research from Gartner, they are starting to show improvement in markets where they saw the most decline.

Ubisoft is backpedaling a bit after saying that it locked in the resolution of the PS4 version of Assassin's Creed Unity at 900p to match the Xbox One version. As reported on by GameSpot, Vincent Pontbriand, a senior producer at Ubisoft Montreal, said that the Unity development team "decided to lock them [the game] at the same specs to avoid all the debates and stuff."

Dave Anthony, who has writing and director credits on Call of Duty: Black Ops, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, and Call of the Dead, will be taking part in the Atlantic Council's "Art of Future War" event at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security in Washington D.C. October 1. Anthony recently joined the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security as a Nonresident Fellow. Here's more on his presentation from the Atlantic Council:

TechRadar reports that a consumer grade version of the Facebook-owned Oculus Rift will launch in the summer of 2015 in limited beta. Citing "multiple sources with knowledge of the matter," TechRadar claims that the virtual reality headset and software maker will roll out the retail-ready version of the headset in waves, with the first batch shipping in April 2015.

Today Apple announced the iPhone 6 in two flavors (iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus), and the Apple Watch. The iPhone 6 features a 4.7-inch display and a resolution of 1334x750 with 326 pixels per inch, while the iPhone 6 Plus has a 5.5-inch display with a resolution of 1920x1080 with 401 pixels per inch.

Nvidia has filed patent suits against Samsung and Qualcomm with the International Trade Commission and the US District Court of Delaware, alleging that the companies violate seven of its patents. Nvidia says that it filed these lawsuits after negotiations on a licensing deal with Samsung went nowhere. This is the first patent lawsuit filed by the company, which is surprising given that it reportedly holds over 7,000 patents. The company explains why it took legal action in more detail here.

Engadget has an extensive report on Samsung's freshly announced Gear VR, a virtual reality headset device that combines software created by Oculus VR with Samsung's new Galaxy Note 4 phone. Yes, this is a real thing.

Cloud-based gaming service OnLive and TP Vision have announced a new strategic partnership that will bring the OnLive Game Service on new models of Philips TVs powered by Android that will be released in Europe during 2014 and beyond.

Virtual reality won't become "mainstream" for another five years or more, according to what Oculus VR founder and Oculus Rift VR headset creator Palmer Luckey tells GamesIndustry International. Luckey says that that rather large window of time is fine with him because the Facebook acquisition gives him the space he and his company need to do what is best for VR technology in the long term.

During a recent Hack Day - as chronicled in this blog post - engineers at Netflix mange to design a prototype Oculus Rift user interface for its popular streaming service. The specially designed UI that makes this possible is being called "Oculix" and lets users control the Netflix menu using hand and head gesture controls.

Raptr has introduced a major update to its service that adds the ability to record or stream gameplay video with virtually "no degradation of system performance thanks to hardware encoding support across both AMD- and Nvidia-based graphics processors (GPUs)."

The latest version of Oculus Rift for developers (DK2) has begun shipping to buyers, but there's some question as to whether those who purchased a DK2 will get one in this first batch of shipments. In early June Oculus VR community manager Andres Hernandez indicated that the company was unlikely to be able to fulfill all deliveries on schedule in July after receiving over 45,000 DK2 pre-orders.

US Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has always been opposed to the FCC regulating anything, but she has been particularly outspoken about the FCC's Open Internet Order since it was introduced in 2010. To that point, Rep. Blackburn recently said that she wants to make sure the FCC never interferes with "states' rights" to protect private Internet service providers from having to compete against municipal broadband networks.

Oculus VR, the creators of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, announced today that its very first game development conference will take place in September. The event, Oculus Connect, will run from September 19-20 at the Los Angeles' Loews Hotel. Oculus says that the event will "bring together engineers, designers, and creatives from around the world to share and collaborate in the interest of creating the best virtual reality experiences possible."

New documents from the Global Certification Forum and the Federal Communications Commission found by Notebook Italia indicate that a second Nvidia Shield device exists.

While Sony works on Morpheus for PS4 and Oculus continues to developer Oculus Rift, Google is offering a more mundane approach to the virtual reality space called Google Cardboard. It sounds like an April Fool's Day prank, but Google Cardboard is a DIY VR headset offering developed by a two-man team (in Europe) at Google that uses a simple cardboard headset, and a few household items to offer VR using an Android phone and a Google app.

Almost 50 percent of all households in the United States have at least one television set connected to the Internet via a video game system, Blu-ray Disc player, smart TV set, and/or stand-alone device such as Roku, Apple TV, or Google Chromecast. This number is up from up from 38 percent of U.S. households in 2012 and 24 percent in 2010, according to new data released by research firm Leichtman Research Group. The data is based on a survey of 1,200 U.S. households conducted this year.

Graphics hardware maker Nvidia is responding to accusations by rival AMD that its new GameWorks toolset interferes with the ability of game developers to optimize their products for AMD graphics hardware. Last week Robert Hallock, AMD's head of technical communications, software and technologies made the allegations in regard to Watch Dogs.

A former Google employee and the lead engineer on Google Glass has left the company to join virtual reality headset maker Oculus VR. Adrian Wong was senior hardware engineer of the Explorer Edition of Google Glass prior to joining Oculus.

During his time at Google, Wong was responsible for a number of duties on the Explorer Edition, including working on hardware prototypes and display subsystem design and architecture.

Wong was also hardware engineering manager of the Consumer Edition of Google Glass.

ZeniMax asserted last week that it owns the rights to "key technology used by Oculus to develop and market the Oculus Rift" by way of "extensive VR research and development works done over a number of years by John Carmack while a ZeniMax employee, and others." The company said that it provided that technology to Oculus in 2012 and 2013 and that Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey "acknowledged in writing ZeniMax's legal ownership of this

Update #2: A person who is familiar with the situation (who spoke on background) said that the Wall Street Journal's use of the term "stole" is not a term that Zenimax would use in describing John Carmack's actions leading up to this current dispute. We have adjusted the title and body of the story to reflect the situation in its proper context.

Aquifi, a company comprised of some of the team that developed "key elements" of the Microsoft Xbox One Kinect Technology today introduce the world to its new "Fluid Experience Technology." Fluid Experience Technology is a software-only platform that "will yield new economics and usability in the perceptual computing and gesture-control markets, by allowing a new style of 'adaptive' interface to be created," according to Aquifi.

Virtuix has completed a $3 million round of seed investment that it says it will use to complete its Omni VR treadmill. You may remember the virtual reality treadmill from last year when its Kickstarter crowd funding campaign sought to raise $150,000 but ended up raising a whopping $1,109,351. The technology works with VR headsets to let players move around inside virtual environments. At present Virtuix has more than 3,000 preorders for the $500 Omni treadmills.

External game storage support for the Xbox One is "coming soon," according to Microsoft's resident Xbox spokesperson Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb. Hryb confirmed the news in an Xbox One subreddit.

Responding to a question from a Reddit user about the topic, Hryb said that external game storage support is "coming soon" but that he needed to check on the status of media storage support. Hryb also said that he would share details on if there will be external storage limits.

Amazon revealed the Fire TV set-top streaming entertainment and gaming device on Wednesday. The $99 Android-powered device features 2GB of memory, a quad-core processor, a dedicated GPU and built-in Wi-Fi support. It also supports most of the popular entertainment apps including Netflix, Crackle, WWE Network and more. Today the company has revealed all the games available now for the Fire TV.

The tower-defense shooter title Sev Zero is the system's only major exclusive game. It was developed by Amazon Game Studios.

A full list - from free to $7.99 can be found below:

The long rumored set-top box/gaming device from Amazon has finally been revealed. The device is called the "Amazon Fire TV" and it is available today for $99. The device offers consumers the ability to play games and stream video from Amazon's video streaming service, Amazon Prime.

While some developers like Mojang say that they will no longer pursue plans to support Oculus Rift after Facebook announced that it would acquire the virtual reality technology last night for $2 billion, others are saying that they will continue to support the device. One of those developers is Eve Online developer CCP Games. The company tells Eurogamer that it still plans to launch its space combat game Eve: Valkyrie for the consumer version of Oculus Rift, whenever that comes out.

Facebook announced this afternoon that it would purchase VR headset maker Oculus for $2 billion with a combination of cash and stock. The company will pay $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares worth about $1.6 billion. Oculus employees will also eligible for an additional $300 million if the company achieves certain targets.

"This is a long-term bet on the future of computing," said Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg Tuesday on a call with analysts. "I believe Oculus can be one of the platforms of the future."