With Facebook’s 💰, Oculus Is Fending off Old Enemies, Former Friends, and New Foes

Blink and you might have missed it—a lot has happened in the VR landscape in the last few months. At Oculus Connect, the company’s annual developer conference, we got fresh insight into where Oculus is heading, and a new look at how Facebook’s money is funding battles on all fronts of the industry’s increasingly competitive landscape.

Old Enemies – HTC

A Tale of Two Headsets

While both Oculus’ Rift and HTC’s Vive hit the market right around the same time in 2016, the Vive was the first system with motion controllers and room-scale. With that, Vive also offered the most immersive VR experience. It wouldn’t be until December of 2016 that Oculus got their Touch controllers out the door, adding much more immersive input to the system. Still it took another six month or so, well into 2017, for Oculus to solidify support for three and four Sensor configurations, offering 360-degree and room-scale tracking to early adopters.

With the slow draw on motion controllers, and HTC’s smart early focus on more than just consumers (also enterprise and out-of-home markets) the Vive appeared by many estimates to take a strong lead against the Rift in the first 12 months on the market.

Newfound Momentum

Oculus Rift + Touch Price Cuts in 2017

Launch – $800
March 1st: $600
July 10th: $400 (sale)
September 4th: $500
October 11th: $400

Speaking on stage at Connect, Oculus CTO John Carmack noted that the ‘demand curve is not linear with relation to a product’s price’. Oculus seems to have learned this lesson quickly, having ended its $400 sale on September 4th, only to permanently slash the MSRP back to $400 a month later.

Around the one year anniversary of the Rift’s initial launch, Oculus’ long-term investments in VR content began to show some traction. And as the Rift achieved the flexibility to add additional sensors for a room-scale tracking capability similar to the Vive, both headsets became a relatively close match in features and experience.

Combined with aggressive price cutting through 2017, which saw the Rift & Touch fall from $800 to $400 in just over seven months, and an increasingly best-in-class library of games, Oculus seems to have significantly swung momentum back in favor of the Rift in the consumer space, and also prompted Vive to cut its price down to $600.

Playing Catchup

Meanwhile, Oculus is still playing catchup in the enterprise and out-of-home markets. This month Oculus introduced its first efforts to serve these areas, with a new ‘Oculus for Business’ bundle ($1,000)—similar to the ‘Vive Business Edition’ ($1,200) which HTC introduced more than a year ago—which for the first time offers a proper commercial-use license for the Rift.

While the Oculus for Business bundle is offered in 17 countries, crucially, China is not among them—a major VR market which Oculus isn’t serving, and where Taiwan-based HTC has committed significant resources.

Former Friends – Samsung

Image courtesy Oculus

The Beginning

Samsung was perhaps Oculus’ first major ally. The companies co-developed the mobile Gear VR headset, which would be manufactured and sold by Samsung but run the Oculus platform for VR software distribution.

With the earliest version of Gear VR (the ‘Innovator Edition) launching all the way back at the end of 2014—and regular refreshes of the headset supporting newer Samsung phones over the years—the relationship between the two companies seemed very strong, but the last 12 months have may have changed all of that.

Awkward…

With Samsung’s latest flagship phones supporting Daydream, Gear VR gets thrown into an awkward position. Being baked into Android, Daydream can support any compatible phone, regardless of vendor, while Gear VR is stuck supporting only a subset of Samsung phones. This means large growth potential for the Daydream platform, while Gear VR is necessarily limited.

While Gear VR has a significant lead in install base today, in the long term, this growth potential poses a major threat; Daydream has a larger target audience due to cross-vendor compatibility, and could very well draw top mobile VR developers away from Gear VR and toward a larger customer marketplace.

The Middle

Starting with the launch of Google’s Daydream VR platform for Android in late 2016, the writing was on the wall for Samsung—Google’s largest Android hardware partner by far—to eventually support Google’s VR offering. I’m uncertain if this was Samsung’s choice, or if the company was pressured by Google, but as of July 2017, Samsung’s latest flagship phones support Daydream, and it’s expected that this trend will continue.

With the introduction of the standalone Oculus Go headset—essentially a Gear VR clone which doesn’t rely on a snap-in smartphone—I see Oculus insulating itself against the cold, uncertain waters of the Samsung + Daydream conundrum. This means that if Samsung was to announce the discontinuation of Gear VR tomorrow, throwing itself fully behind Daydream, Oculus would still have an affordable mobile VR headset to support the developer ecosystem that it invested a considerable amount of effort in building. In fact, Oculus Go will be fully compatible with the Gear VR library.

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Oculus has in the past held up Samsung and Gear VR as an example of the company’s commitment to creating an ecosystem that works with third-party hardware. Surely they could have sought out either Samsung (again) or another hardware partner to build the Go headset, but instead they decided to go it alone, suggesting they were either unwilling or unable to attract another partner that wanted to join their mobile VR ecosystem (likely made more difficult with Daydream looming).

The End?

And that’s just the start of it. Let’s not overlook the fact that this month Samsung introduced the Odyssey VR headset, which not only directly competes with the Rift for hardware sales, but also enters the market as the flagship headset for Microsoft’s VR platform, with no support for Oculus. And that’s quite strange—Samsung, the most natural partner to be the first non-Oculus headset to become part of the Oculus PC platform (given the company’s history with Oculus on mobile) ends up betting on a competitor’s VR platform.

And what’s more, Samsung has an additional point of leverage against Oculus up its sleeve—Samsung makes the displays which are used in the Rift, and is working on next-gen VR displays which it could easily keep to itself.

For what it’s worth, Oculus’ Head of Rift, Nate Mitchell, told me recently that the company’s relationship with Samsung is “stronger than ever,” but taken with the above, that doesn’t seem particularly apparent.

New Foes – Microsoft & Co.

image courtesy Microsoft

A New Platform for New Foes

And then there’s the old schoolers who are now the new kids on the VR block. The behemoth that is Microsoft has rounded up top PC hardware makers, all of which are household names—Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, and Samsung—and convinced them that the ‘Windows Mixed Reality’ platform is the future. Microsoft rolled out a major Windows 10 update this month which bakes VR directly into the operating system, while five of the aforementioned partners have launched VR headsets to support it (with Samsung’s Odyssey headset due to launch in November). In one fell swoop, Microsoft has brought major brand power into the VR arena and set a strong foundation for scaling VR to a larger audience.

SEE ALSO
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More Affordable and Easier to Use

While Microsoft had positioned the slew of Windows VR headsets as being the ‘affordable and easy to use’ option, Oculus’ price cut to $400—which matches the cheapest of the Windows VR headsets, the Acer AH101—has certainly taken wind out of one of those two sails.

Even so, the ease of use advantage—with native Windows support, and inside-out tracking which requires no external sensors—is no laughing matter. But in the near-term, Oculus’ content library outclasses what’s available for Windows VR headsets by a nearly unbelievable extent. Come December, Microsoft will be leaning heavily on Steam when the company offers a SteamVR integration to allow Windows VR headsets to tap into Valve’s content platform. Even then, Oculus retains a clear content advantage with a number of exclusive titles which are among the best available in VR today. And while it’s likely that workarounds will enable Windows VR headsets to play Oculus content, Microsoft and partners won’t be able to openly market that option to customers.

VR as a Computing Platform Warms Up

Another place Microsoft hoped to have an advantage is in the (slowly emerging) VR productivity space, in which they’ve promised that “20,000 Windows apps” (UWP, I presume) work seamlessly inside of the Windows VR computing environment. Microsoft, forever proud of their operating system as a place of productivity, hopes that one day we’ll all be working inside of virtual reality.

Even though Microsoft has built VR into the core of Windows 10, that hasn’t stopped Oculus from attempting to compete there as well. At Connect, Oculus announced ‘Dash’—as part of a major update to the Rift PC software—which will fully support running flat Windows applications inside of VR. Oculus claims they’ve spent significant time engineering the tech to support high-quality virtual displays, and says that even though modern VR headsets aren’t ready for serious computing, the foundation they’ve built will scale easily as better headsets to make productivity work in VR more practical. Specifically, Oculus says they are beginning a long-term focus on ‘VR as a computing platform’, much like Microsoft.

Battling the Gatekeeper

Even so, anything Oculus does on the PC fundamentally must be built on top of Windows, which Microsoft of course controls. On that front, Oculus is part of a larger effort to prevent Microsoft from seizing complete control over how VR headsets interface with Windows hardware. Oculus is part of the consortium behind the OpenXR standard—presently in development under the Khronos Group—which seeks to standardize the way VR hardware and software communicates.

The OpenXR consortium consists of essentially every major player in the VR space—except for Microsoft (despite Microsoft being a member of the larger Khronos Group). OpenXR appears to me to be (among other things) a direct result of major players hoping to prevent Microsoft from seizing control of the way VR headsets interface with Windows PCs. The stakes are high: if the OpenXR consortium fails, the result could be a situation similar to the controversial Universal Windows Platform—the modern app foundation for Windows 10—where Microsoft exerts unilateral control over what apps can do on its platform, as well as decide who’s in and who’s out.

– – — – –

Fighting battles on substantially different fronts, against many different adversaries, it should be clear by now that Oculus would likely have crumpled against these odds if not for the (at the time controversial) 2014 acquisition by Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg’s realistic, long-term approach to VR (not to mention a lot of money) has kept Oculus in the game where other, shorter-sighted companies (without as much spare cash) might be tempted to scale back and fight fewer battles at once.

Though Oculus is facing challengers across the board, this level of competition (and bankrolling by all the players involved) is incredibly healthy for the industry, and exactly what’s needed for the long-term success of VR.

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Hands-on: ‘Windlands 2’ Gets a Change in Tone with the Addition of Co-op Combat

Windlands (2016), the high-flying exploration game from Psytec Games, is getting a sequel next year that’s looking to alter its predecessor’s formula with the addition of co-op adventuring as well as combat. We got a hands-on with the newly revealed game at this year’s Oculus Connect, which puts a bow and arrow in your hands on top of your trusty grappling hooks.

There are a few elements new to the series, the first of which reveals itself almost immediately as I start the demo: enemies. Riding on a speeding land-boat traveling at high speed through a dusty desert, a giant sandworm appears out of nowhere, looming over my live companion and me. I’m told I have to shoot the beast with my bow, and although I’m not certain why, we both comply, conjuring it up with the Touch’s grip button and firing a hail of arrows at the sandworm until he disappears into the sandy desert below.

It’s all very cinematic, if not a little telling about the journey to come. Gone are the zen-like, pressure-free heights requiring quiet tenacity to surmount, which are now replaced with level bosses and the active chatter of real-world companions by your side.

Satisfied with our performance, a bearded NPC named Tohir beckons us to move forward through the level set before us, a tree-filled canyon that functions as a straight obstacle course clearly built for our grappling hooks to take hold. Studio co-founder Jon Hibbins raced ahead of me, chatting along the way about the game’s art style and some of the new additions to the series’ second game.

Passing by Tohir again, I remarked that the art style looked awfully familiar. To my surprise, Hibbins told me Psytec had hired one of my favorite developers from the early days of VR, Nick Pittom (aka “Red of Paw”), an indie dev known for lovingly recreating several scenes in VR from various Studio Ghibli films such as Spirited AwayMy Neighbor Toroto and Howl’s Moving Castle.

Predictably, the locomotion system functions nearly the same as Windlands, providing you with green trees for hook-holds and incremental save points that you can pass through along the way. Full of myself and overconfident of my own swinging abilities, I fell a few times, reappearing back at these save points on my forward journey through the level.

At the end of the tree-filled canyon, Hibbins and I faced off with the level boss, a strange legged robot with a number of shields on its legs. Finally using my bow to good effect, Hibbins and I took turns firing on the robot, trying to break the shields. Success was quick, and out of the strange enemy came a recognizable glowing golden prism. Demo over.

From what little I’ve experienced of Windlands 2, the game feels pretty different in scope from the first. Although the quiet vertical parkour puzzles seem to be gone with the second game in the series, the game is still in development, so there’s no telling if the lofty heights will return or if the game will be more linear like we saw in the demo. Either way, the added benefit of being able to explore the world with a friend and have that shared experience adds something I only wish were a part of the first game.

Windlands 2 is coming to Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Playstation VR sometime in 2018.

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Hands-on: ‘Red Matter’ is an Adventure Puzzle Set in a Wonderfully Weird Pseudo-Soviet Dystopia

Red Matter is an upcoming story-driven VR adventure puzzle game, first revealed at Oculus Connect, that puts you in a retro-futurist world that borrows elements from the Cold War-era and teases them out to an interesting logical conclusion.

Created by Madrid-based studio Vertical Robot, Red Matter places you in the role of an astronaut from the Atlantic Union who’s tasked with investigating one of a Volgravian top secret research project located on a distant planet.

Starting out the demo in an a rocky clearing, I find what appears to be a Volgravian sign bearing some faux-Slavic language using the Cyrillic script. With a data tool in my left hand and a gripper claw in the right, I point to the sign to activate the data tool’s translator function, revealing that a research facility is just up ahead.

image courtesy Vertical Robot

The low-gravity environment of the planet means that instead of bounding your way around by foot, it’s more efficient to use your boosters to get from place to place. In real-world terms, this functions as an on-rails teleport; you pick your landing point and are transported there in a lofty arc at a variable speed controlled by the player. The default speed is nice and slow with no abrupt changes in acceleration, although you can speed up the boost from place to place to make it a quicker experience.

Moving towards a brutalist-style concrete building featuring a giant Soviet-style red star above its sign, I point my translator tool again at the illegible Volgravian script sitting below it. Yup. That’s the place I need to get into.

Pushing a button with my claw, the door retracts, revealing an industrial facility of some sort. The research subject is still unclear as I make my way further, replacing some fuses to another door that I scrounge from nearby panels. The door is heavy, and moves satisfyingly slow, giving it a weighty feel.

image courtesy Vertical Robot

With one door puzzle down, I enter a small round room with a strange device in the middle. On the wall is a diagram with written instructions on how to operate it. Reading carefully, I pop open the device to reveal a strange two-handed crank that rotates the interior shell of the room to face an unseen metal blast door, that upon opening leads to an employee area.

I head into the employee area leading to several engineering departments. A schedule on the wall tells me which sector I need (of course with all the Soviet iconography of gold-trimmed red stars), as I’m told by my commander I need to find a specific secure room with who knows what in it.

image courtesy Vertical Robot

Rustling through the employee lockers, I find a keycard. Instead of putting the card into my inventory, I was told I could scan it with my translator tool and record the data so I could then spit it back out later so I could leave the physical card behind. Traveling to the door and opening it up with my copied keycard data, I find a cell-sized room with a single lever covered with a few strange plants. Touching the alien flowers turns them an iridescent color – a sign that something even more strange was next if I pulled that lever.

I knew I had to, so I pulled the lever, and that’s when a strange substance leaked out of the panel, slowly spreading out over my whole field of view to obscure the world around me. Fade to back, demo over.

Design Director Tatiana Delgado calls the game’s Volgravian setting a “cross between the encroaching surveillance of George Orwell’s dystopian societies and Kafka’s absurd bureaucracy.” Delgado told me that while it’s still in development, that Red Matter is aiming for a 2.5-3 hour gameplay length, but it was too early to talk about launch dates at this time. The game is currently being advertised as an Oculus-only experience.

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Developers Can Now Request Oculus Go Dev Kits, Could Have Headsets As Soon as Next Month

The new Oculus Go standalone headset was revealed yesterday at Oculus Connect, the company’s annual developer conference. According to Oculus CTO and legendary programmer John Carmack, developers could have their hands on the $200 standalone mobile headset as soon as next month. As an added piece of the puzzle, developers can also request Oculus Go dev kits via the company’s dev portal starting today.

In Carmack’s famous stream-of-thought keynote speech today, where he touches on almost anything on his mind when it comes to the future of Oculus, he revealed that devs should expect to get their hands on Go starting next month. Since Go wasn’t present at Oculus Connect, it lends credence to the idea that he means Go developer kits, and not Oculus Go demos as such.

Image courtesy Oculus

Using it as a dedicated media device for the past few months, Carmack says he’s been using the headset to watch Netflix in short intervals, watching 15 minutes of a show at a time and returning back to work. Although the friction of entering VR is much lower when it comes to a dedicated standalone like Oculus Go, he says developers shouldn’t make Go-specific applications, instead targeting both platforms as one in the same.

Image courtesy Oculus

Both Go and Gear VR feature a single 3DOF controller and will share the same mobile software, says Carmack, although the $200 price-point makes the dedicated standalone headset more ‘giftable’ than a Gear VR of Oculus Rift.

Oculus maintains Go is headed to consumers in “early 2018.”

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Oculus Connect 4 Day 1 Roundup: Oculus Go, Rift Price Drop, New ‘Santa Cruz’ Prototype, and More

The opening keynote at the fourth annual Oculus Connect developer conference delivered several new product announcements from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, VP of Virtual Reality Hugo Barra, and others. This included new standalone VR hardware, a new price for the Rift, and many software and game reveals.

Affordable standalone headset ‘Oculus Go’ revealed:

Image courtesy Oculus

At $199, Oculus Go is a low-cost, all-in-one standalone headset launching in early 2018. On stage, Hugo Barra claimed that the headset was designed to deliver the “best visual clarity of any product we’ve ever built”, using a “fast-switch LCD” at 2560×1440 and an “all-new, custom optical design”. The lenses are an evolution of the ‘hybrid’ optics found in the current Rift. Sharing the same controller input set as Gear VR – a single controller and rotational-only tracking – apps will be “binary compatible”, working on both systems. Essentially, Oculus Go is an enhanced, standalone version of Gear VR.

Project Santa Cruz developer kits coming in 2018, we go hands-on:

Image courtesy Oculus

Described as the “first, complete, standalone VR system with full inside-out tracking and hand presence”, Santa Cruz developer kits will be available next year. The company revealed various improvements to the latest prototype, including brand new 6-degrees-of-freedom controllers, similar to Touch. Unlike Oculus Go, Santa Cruz is designed as a high-end, standalone system, with full positional tracking on both headset and controllers, but will be limited by the performance of its on-board mobile PC. Check out our hands-on impressions here.

‘Oculus Dash’ is a total interface overhaul, supports desktop apps:

Nate Mitchell, Head of Rift, described how Oculus has been rebuilding the core software from the ground up over the past year, introducing various improvements to ‘Rift Core 2.0’. Most significantly, Oculus Dash is a total overhaul of the Rift user interface, designed specifically for motion input. It combines the existing functionality of Home and the Universal Menu, while allowing access to traditional desktop apps. Mitchell claims Dash will offer “best in class performance and visual quality,” for PC apps in VR, setting the platform “on a path to replacing real monitors entirely.”

Oculus Home also completely rebuilt:

The Rift Core 2.0 update also brings a brand new Oculus Home space, with a more realistic visual design, with “state of the art lighting” and “dynamic soft shadows”, powered by Unreal Engine 4. This is customisable with toys, furniture, artwork and achievements, and is designed to be a persistent, social space, with the potential to create shared spaces in the future.

Rift receives permanent price cut:

Photo by Road to VR

Hugo Barra, Vice President of Virtual Reality at Oculus announced a permanent price cut of the Rift and Touch bundle to $399. The package still includes the same hardware bundle of headset, two sensors, two Touch controllers, and “six free apps” – although there are actually several more free apps available on the Store.

Echo Arena FPS Expansion, more Lone Echo coming:

image courtesy Ready at Dawn

Following the success of Ready at Dawn’s sci-fi adventure Lone Echo (2017) and standalone multiplayer mode Echo Arena, the studio has confirmed a new multiplayer, first-person shooter experience coming in 2018 called Echo Combat. In addition, more single player content for Lone Echo is on the way, continuing the adventure of Captain Olivia and Jack.

Respawn Entertainment developing Rift-exclusive VR title:

Oculus’ Head of Content Jason Rubin’s closing announcement was that Respawn Entertainment, ex-Call of Duty developers and creators of Titanfall, are building a major new VR title for Oculus Rift. The game is due to launch in 2019, and Respawn director Peter Hirschmann offered a few details on their blog.

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Ubisoft’s Multiplayer Arcade Shooter ‘Space Junkies’ Is Heading into Closed Beta in Early 2018

Ubisoft today announced that Space Junkies, the multiplayer arcade VR shooter, is going into closed beta in early 2018. We got a chance to go hands-on with a more developed prototype of the game at this year’s Oculus Connect, and while many of the basics haven’t changed much from our time with it at E3, it’s certainly shaping up to be a fuller experience with more crazy guns and at least 4 giant arena-sized maps for the closed beta.

In a 2v2 team deathmatch, I got a chance to see what a real battle feels like in Space Junkies, as the last time we played it was in a more demure setting with only the developers to shoot down. True to its main selling point, the match was fast-paced and featured a mad grab for the most powerful guns which float in predetermined spots in the zero-G map.

image courtesy Ubisoft

I also got a chance to play a free-for-all deathmatch, which took place in the same sprawling, meteor-encrusted mining facility as the earlier prototype, but according to Ubisoft, the map had been expanded further to give the players more hiding spots and cover from incoming fire.

Guns are greatly varied, some of them requiring two hands to pump or fire. You start out with a whimpy pistol on your hip, but you can wait for the random gun generator to give you something better before you spawn on the map. Guns like rocket launchers, OP lasers, and Gatling guns predictably take a long time to reload and charge up, but pretty much do major damage.

image courtesy Ubisoft

There’s also a light sword and shield that you can carry, but unlike the earlier version of the game, the sword was no longer able to deflect gun blasts. I would have loved to have played a swords-only match to see just how reliable the weapon is when faced with another sword-wielding player, but alas, I’ll have to wait until the closed beta takes effect in a few months to see if anyone will agree to a momentary cease fire.

Despite being on the same horizontal plane as the rest of the combatants, having the full 3 dimensions at your disposal creates an interesting dynamic, as you can never tell where the shots will come from next. As long as you’re not boosting around and going normal speed, you’ll be undetectable to the opposite team, meaning combat may evolve into a less intense hide-and-seek match of popping out behind cover and quickly retreating to safety instead of going to the center with guns a’blazing.

You can register for the closed beta here. Ubisoft says they’re aiming for a spring 2018 release on Oculus Rift+Touch, HTC Vive, and Windows VR headsets.

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‘Echo Arena’ FPS Expansion Announced and More ‘Lone Echo’ Teased

Ready at Dawn’s single player sci-fi adventure Lone Echo (2017) already has its multiplayer mode, the much beloved sports game Echo Arena, but the studio says it’s bringing out a new first-person shooter multiplayer mode called Echo Combat, and also an expansion to the Lone Echo game.

Announced today on stage at Oculus Connect 4, the company’s annual developer conference, Echo Combat was quickly teased in a video.

The details are still thin on the ground, but Ready at Dawn says Echo Combat is (predictably) using the same zero-G locomotion method, and is said to arrive in 2018. It’s unsure if it will be a free expansion to all users like Echo Arena was for a limited time.

Oculus further said there will also be an expansion headed to Lone Echo that reopens the world of Captain Olivia and her best robot buddy Jack (aka ‘you’) in their mission through zero-G.

The game’s high-flying locomotion method is famously comfortable, allowing for fast-paced action without the problems of feeling artificial motion-induced nausea.

Oculus says more news is yet to come during the conference, so check back for more soon.


This story is breaking. We’ll be filling in the gaps as info comes in.

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Oculus Rift + Touch Bundle Gets Permanent Price Cut to $400

Following their highly successful Summer of Rift Sale, Oculus have announced a permanent price cut of the Rift headset and Touch controller package to $399. The new price was revealed by Hugo Barra, Oculus’ Vice President of Virtual Reality at the opening keynote to Oculus Connect 4.

Detailed on the official Oculus Blog, the $399 package still includes the same hardware bundle of headset, two sensors, two Touch controllers, and “six free apps” – although there are actually several more free apps available on the Store.

This aggressive pricing strategy means that the Rift and Touch remains considerably cheaper than the HTC Vive – the main competing high-end PC VR solution – which also received a permanent price cut to $599. Oculus is keen to bring the costs of VR entry down, also announcing Oculus Go – their first standalone VR headset launching early next year for $199.

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Oculus to Talk “Breakthroughs in Spatial Audio Technologies” at Connect Conference

Oculus Connect 4, the company’s fourth annual developer conference, is set for October 11th and 12th in San Jose, California. There, Oculus will share with developers some of its latest research and developments, including what’s coming to the company’s VR Audio SDK.

See Also: NVIDIA Shows How Physically-based Audio Can Greatly Enhance VR Immersion

Spatial audio is hugely important for creating convincing virtual reality worlds. Traditional stereo audio often sounds like it emanates from within your head. In VR, most sounds need to have distinct sources that sound as if they’re coming from somewhere within the virtual world, just like they would in real life. But simulating realistic sounds in complex 3D environments isn’t as easy as it may seem, especially if you need to do so accurately and efficiently. Many companies have been working on the challenge of spatial audio in VR, with varying degrees of complexity and success.

At Connect 2017 in October, Oculus Audio Design Mananger Tom Smurdon and
Software Engineering Manager Pete Stirling will take to the stage in a session titled ‘2017 Breakthroughs in Spatial Audio Technologies’, to overview the latest spatial audio tech devised by the company.

Get up to speed on key terminology and concepts you need to know, then dive directly into the newest audio tech developed by Oculus. We’ll cover how new techniques and tools like Near Field HRTF and Volumetric Sound Sources help create dramatically increased immersion for people experiencing your game or app. Attendees will also get a first look at what’s coming in the Audio SDK roadmap.

The session description also promises to give attendees a first look at what’s coming to the Oculus Audio SDK, implying that whatever new spatial audio tech the company has cooked up will soon be rolled into the SDK.

The session is among more than 30 expected at the developer conference, 14 of which are now revealed on the Oculus Connect schedule.

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