Oculus have announced this month’s roll out of updates to its platform, which will affect both the Oculus Rift and Oculus Go. The new updates will affect video encoding to introduce 5K video to the platform as well as an update to Rift Core 2.0.
The new update will introduce a number of new features, many of which will affect Oculus Home, with the latest Rift software, version 1.26 getting ready to roll out to users from today.
The first announcement is regarding the availability of the new technique for video encoding which was implemented by Oculus CTO John Carmack. The technique is said to allow for a greater level of clarity for 360-degree videos. A developer blog provides an in-depth look at the technology, which was used for the 5K re-release of VR short Henry on Oculus Go and Samsung Gear VR.
Changes to the Oculus Home software includes an ability to embed Dash panels in the Retro Monitor items which can be used in the Oculus Home environment. Oculus say that based on positive user feedback, they are introducing more items which include screens. Users will be able to find a new ‘Special Items; category in the Home inventory, which will include computer monitors, TVs and arcade cabinets.
In the new update, anything which was previously available to watch using Oculus Desktop can now be watched in Home. Users will be able to play non-VR videogames or watch streaming video from within the Oculus Home environment.
Special rare items with screens can be unlocked in certain reward packs, such as a retro Vortex arcade cabinet.
More support for user-created content is being added into Oculus Home. Users will be able to drop .glb files, which is the binary version of the gITF 2.0 file format, into the imports folder in the Oculus Home Documents directory.
Further information can be found on the Oculus blog. Future updates on Oculus software and hardware will be covered here on VRFocus.