Oculus Connect, the company’s annual developer conference, is here once again. Now in its fifth year, Oculus is expected to update the world on what’s next from in VR content and hardware. Here’s a look at what we expect to see this year.
Taking place this week on the 26th & 27th, Oculus Connect 5 will be hosted in San Jose, CA. The opening keynote on the 26th is where most of the major announcements will happen, while smaller developer-focused sessions across both days will likely give deeper glimpses into what Oculus and partners have been up to. You can find the full OC5 schedule here, and if you aren’t attending yourself you’ll be able to watch the keynotes and some of the VR esports action via livestream (details here).
Here’s a look at what we’re expecting to see from the company this week.
Santa Cruz, Oculus’ High-end Standalone Headset
Image courtesy Oculus
Santa Cruz is the code name of Oculus’ high-end standalone headset. While the company launched Oculus Go just earlier this year, at $200 Go is built as an entry-level VR device for casual users. Go lacks positional tracking on the head and hands, limiting its capabilities to the point of being in a different class of VR device compared to high-end VR headsets like the Rift.
While Go targets the casual user, Santa Cruz is being built with the same positional tracking features as high-end headsets, meaning it’s expected to be able to play the same class of high-end games. As a ‘standalone’ headset however, all the compute hardware is built in, with no reliance on an expensive gaming PC to power Santa Cruz. While that brings ‘take-it-anywhere’ accessibility, it also means users should expect mobile-class graphics.
While we don’t expect Oculus to outright launch Santa Cruz at Oculus Connect 5, we do expect them to formally announce the consumer version, which means branding the headset with a proper name and detailing some features that will be included at launch. The actual launch of Santa Cruz is presently rumored for Q1 2019.
It seems Oculus could take a similar approach to Santa Cruz’ announcement and launch as they did with the Go headset. Go was announced at Oculus Connect 4 (right around this time last year), and then launched in the first half of 2018. At Oculus Connect 5 this week, we could see the company formerly announce the consumer version of Santa Cruz with a launch date set for early 2019, which aligns with the headset’s current release date rumors.
If you want to dig deeper into what’s known (and still unknown) about Santa Cruz, check out this article.
Half Dome, The Next Step for Rift
Image courtesy Facebook
Oculus’ first PC VR headset, the Rift, is still going strong now 2.5 years after its 2016 launch. Even so, earlier this year Oculus offered a glimpse at a what could be coming to the next Rift.
While an expanded field of view and eye-tracking would be big improvements alone, the varifocal display could prove to be Half Dome’s most unique feature. A varifocal display is one that can focus at multiple focal lengths, compared to today’s VR headsets which are locked at a single focal length. In Half Dome, the headset identifies what part of the scene the user is looking at (thanks to eye-tracking), and then physically moves the display inside the headset to achieve the correct focal length. Doing so could be a solution for what’s called the vergence-accommodation conflict in today’s VR headsets.
A Rift-like field of view compared to the Half Dome prototype. | Image courtesy Facebook
Worth noting: Oculus has stated that we shouldn’t “expect to see all [of Half Dome’s] technologies in a product anytime soon,” meaning that the next Rift might incorporate some but not all of what Half Dome can do.
That said, we don’t think that Oculus will announce a Half Dome-based ‘Rift 2’ at Connect this year. Instead, the company may do what they’ve done in years past with Santa Cruz: show Half Dome to a select group of press and developers in a ‘behind-closed-doors’ setting so that it doesn’t steal the spotlight from products that are nearer to launch (namely, Santa Cruz).
Beyond that, it still feels a little early for the company to give any indication of a release date for an eventual Rift 2, which we may not see until late 2019 or even into 2020.
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Alright folks, it’s finally (almost) time for Oculus Connect 5! Later this week on September 26th and 27th down in sunny San Jose, CA, the big wigs at Facebook and Oculus will descend on the convention center, along with hundreds of developers, VR enthusiasts, and members of the press to analyze and experience the future of virtual reality.
Oculus Connect is always one of the biggest events of the year for the VR community and this year is shaping up to be no different. With the recent release of the Oculus Go standalone headset, continued growth of the Rift platform, and now forthcoming news on an official Santa Cruz-powered consumer headset that’s reportedly slated for Q1 2019, there is a lot of news expected to come out of the show.
But the question at hand is: What do you expect from Oculus Connect 5 this week? Do you think it will be lots of new content, updates on stuff we know about, or a heavy focus on hardware? Or maybe something completely different?
Oculus has confirmed that a number of VR eSports tournament finals are officially headed to Oculus Connect 5, the company’s annual developer conference.
Competing for a total cash prize pool of $120,000, tournament hopefuls will descend upon San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center on September 26th – 27th.
Live coverage of the tournament finals will begin at 11:30 am PT (local time here) both days of OC5 on VR League’s Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube channels.
The best bit: could get a shot at the prize money too. For more information on how to compete in each game’s ‘Last Chance Qualifier’, head over to the Oculus blogpost for relevant sign-up links.
The Virtual Reality League is an ESL Gaming organization partnered with Oculus that oversees eSports tournaments for online VR multiplayer games including Echo Arena, The Unspoken, and Sprint Vector. While ESL cancelled the competition a few days ago, something that was done after competitors engaged in seven weeks of bracketed 1v1 battles, the company now says it’s reverting back to the original plan to send the top four players to compete at Oculus Connect 5 after all.
Update (July 7th, 2018): An ESL spokesperson took to Reddit, and announced the company has worked with Oculus to reinstate its plans to run ‘The Unspoken’ tournament finals at Oculus Connect 5. Here’s the relevant bits:
“While The Unspoken has seen a decline in signups, we were wrong to believe this warranted a lack of interest in the Grand Final. We’re thrilled to see the passionate community surrounding The Unspoken so eager to prove themselves in front of an audience at Oculus Connect 5—both Oculus and ESL are happy to oblige. After discussing with Oculus, we will keep the original plan: the top four players from The Unspoken will be invited to Oculus Connect 5, provided travel, and will compete for a share of the overall VR League prize pool.
We are still fine tuning the plans for Oculus Connect 5 and more information will be released in the coming weeks—stay tuned.”
The original article detailing the cancellation follows below:
Original article (July 5th, 2018): Starting back in May, VR League hopefuls began competing in The Unspoken tournaments with the promise of getting a chance to shine at OC5. For many, this represented not only the opportunity to win the bulk of a $220,000 prize pool for claiming victory at the tourney, but also get a chance to travel to San Jose, California for Oculus’ biggest event of the year, the Connect 5 developer conference.
The finals however have been cancelled mid-tournament, and won’t be appearing alongside Echo Arena’s league finals at the dev conference (see update above).
Image courtesy Insomniac Games
The official reasoning behind it, Community Manager Hung Lai (‘Gravity’) says in a the company’s Discord channel, is due to shrinking player numbers. The decision, he said yesterday, was decided “less than 48 hours ago,” and that The Unspoken is being entirely dropped from the VR League as a competitive eSport.
Image captured by Road to VR
Players invited to Oculus Connect are offered comped travel, hotel, and no entry fee to the conference—a valuable prize in and of itself for many competitors looking to rub elbows with VR devs and enthusiasts from all over the world. With two months of battles behind them, participants are rightly dismayed to find out they’ve been wasting their time, and investing their hopes in something that just doesn’t exist anymore.
Only a day after the competition started, Insomniac Games Senior Community Developer Tim Salvitti had this to say on the game’s Discord channel:
“We are excited for VR League Season Two and can’t wait to check out the action online. However, at this point in time we have no new updates planned for the game. We have been listening since the last update and certainly know some of the wish lists everyone has. We would love to see as many of you as possible playing in VR League and hope we can push to make The Unspoken one of the games Oculus brings to OC5! As always, we will continue to watch and listen, and we thank each and every one of you for playing and helping make the game what it is.”
The company also previously stated on the competition’s website that from the onset, Unspoken league competitors could “earn points to qualify for the Wold Qualifier bracket for OC5.” That statement has since been removed from the league website.
Where a list of upcoming cups once was now stands a blank sheet.
Last year’s Unspoken finals winner ‘Charizard’ told us a little more about how he feels after having the rug pulled out from under him:
“I think that it’s important to understand that players who are passionate about this game are going to be upset about it being cancelled. That’s not the core of the issue though. ESL has held a 7 week tournament on the assumption that this prize was going to be paid out. Players have spent time and money preparing for this, and ESL has gained attention and marketing by holding this on the assumption of those prizes being followed through. So yes, none of the passionate players of this game want to see it go, but beyond that, they have been lied to in what they can expect by investing in this game on a competitive level. It’s beyond just disappointing, it’s downright criminal.”
While The Unspoken playerbase is dwarfed in comparison to other traditional eSports, at the end of the day what matters most is the players, many of whom invested countless hours in learning how to play the game at a professional level. With real prize money on the line, it’s clear ESL hasn’t done right by its community (see update above).
We’ve reached out to ESL for a statement, but haven’t received any word yet regarding a more detailed reason behind this. We’ll make sure to update as new information comes out.
A special thanks goes out to Shaun Lane for pointing us in the right direction.
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.
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.
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.
Oculus Connect 4 is already disappearing into the distance behind us as we rocket through the remains of 2017, indeed there is little in the way of big virtual reality (VR) events left on the horizon now. With one-day events like Develop: VR joined by the big lingering presence of PlayStation Experience 2017. But other than that it’s a smooth ride into the new year and the next big stop, that of CES 2018. Which is taking place at a slightly later date than the previous couple of years. One far friendlier for press and industry members alike.
This does not mean we are done talking about the event though with Oculus themselves continuing to put up footage of the event sessions as well as discussions from the floor and behind the scenes. One such series of videos is the Developer Perspectives series, which previously featured quick snapshots of creators for the Oculus platform giving their philosophies on VR and content creation. The series returned at Oculus Connect 4 with some quick interview snippets of various VR developers as Oculus asked them for their development tips, what they are finding exciting them about VR and what they think is to come.
There’s a whole host of them, and you can find them all below. You may even spot some familiar faces from the VR scene. VRFocus will be back soon with a number of interviews from Oculus Connect 4 as well as all the news from around the VR and AR industries.
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 Away, My 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
