Last month Oculus confirmed that its regular fall event Oculus Connect would be returning for 2019 in September, saying on the website that: “we hope you’ll join us to begin a new chapter of virtual and augmented reality.” Today, registrations have now opened for Oculus Connect 6 (OC6) alongside some brief information regarding what sessions to expect.
With the launch of Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift S and a couple of months ago, expectations are high regarding lots of new content. The first teasing information doesn’t disappoint, Respawn Entertainment will be unveiling its first-person shooter (FPS) created in partnership with Oculus Studios, with attendees being able to go hands-on with the first playable demo.
Having previously created titles such as Titanfall, Call of Duty, Apex Legends and currently developing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, details regarding Respawn Entertainment’s step into virtual reality (VR) first surfaced last summer. Nothing has been mentioned since then, so the announcement is going to be big.
Plenty of other videogames are expected but another piece of information revealed today is that John Carmack’s App Reviews (a fan favourite) will be returning, offering his own unique brand of commentary.
There are going to be a wide range of talks and Oculus has released some details on the first few via its blog:
Long Live 360 (and 180)!
Eric Cheng, Immersive Media Lead, Facebook; Asad Sheth, Product Manager, Facebook; Abesh Thakur, Product Manager, Facebook – You spoke, we listened. Workflows, ingestion, and distribution for immersive-media creators have been riddled with friction over the past several years. Join the Facebook AR/VR Media Team to learn about new opportunities and approaches for creation, ingestion, and distribution of your content with the latest products made especially to reduce friction and support VR-first media. We’ll also share ways that you, as a creator, can build a presence and grow your audience.
Oculus for Business: Scalable, Professional, Secure
Matt Terrell, Product Manager, Facebook; Isabel Tewes, Product Manager, Facebook – Enterprise VR continues to make waves and prove results as innovate companies leverage the technology for training, collaboration, design, and much more. The logistics of scaling this powerful tech, however, can be daunting. Join the Enterprise product team as they give you a first look at Oculus for Business solution, which will help companies deploy VR in a new professional, secure, and scalable way.
Safety By Design: How to Bake Safety and People into Product Development
Sarah Ryan, Policy Associate, Facebook; Lindsay Young, Product Manager, Facebook – Online abuse—like bullying and harassment— isn’t new, but VR brings a whole new set of immersive and visceral abuse vectors that require bespoke responses from platforms and developers. Protecting people from abuse is especially important for vulnerable groups, including women and people of colour. This session will explore how various VR developers are thinking about and tackling user safety—both proactively and reactively—to help build safer experiences. You’ll hear from product and community managers on how they bake safety by design into their products and work with their communities to create safe and welcoming cultures.
Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Success on the Oculus Store
Panelists TBA – Oculus has three flagship VR headsets: Oculus Go, Rift S, and Quest. Each platform differs not only in terms of technical capability, but also the type of content players engage with as well as player expectations for quality. This session aims to shine more light on store curation decisions made by Oculus, where your title may fit best, and what to do if your app doesn’t make the cut on the first try.
Technological Tethers: How AR + VR Connect Us to the World
Lisa Brown Jaloza, Technology Communications Manager, Facebook (Moderator) – From dystopian futures to escapist fantasies, the possibilities of virtual and augmented reality are often misrepresented or misunderstood. In this session, we’ll explore how these technologies actually deepen our connection to the world around us.
OC6 sounds like it’s shaping up to be an exciting event, with Oculus expected to be sharing more information between now and September. The conference will be held at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center from 25th – 26th September 2019. As further details are released, VRFocus will keep you updated.
We’ve been waiting for this one. Back at the fourth Oculus Connect developer conference in 2017 (!) we learned Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment was making an Oculus Studios game. At the time, Oculus gave a vague 2019 window for the game, but we’ve seen nothing from it since. Oculus and Respawn will finally break their silence at the just-announced Oculus Connect 6, though.
In a blog post announcing OC6, which we covered earlier today, Oculus said it will “share more info” about the game at the event. Oculus Connect takes place on September 25 and 26. We’d put money on information coming our way during the inevitable opening keynote on the first morning of the show. The post also reconfirms that the game will be an ‘AAA’ first-person shooter (FPS).
Other than that we really don’t know much about it. The 2017 teaser video didn’t feature any gameplay footage or even a name. Instead, it’s Respawn’s pedigree that’s kept fans longing for more. The studio was formed from developers that worked on some of the staple Call of Duty games like Modern Warfare. More recently, the team’s found critical success with the Titanfall games and achieved a battle royale hit with Apex Legends. This November it’s also releasing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. We do at least know this game isn’t Titanfall VR.
Back at E3 last week, we asked Oculus if the Respawn game would be coming to its new standalone headset, Quest. The company declined to comment, although we’re at least fairly sure it will appear on Rift and Rift S. As for if it will make that 2019 timeframe? That seems unlikely at this point, but fingers crossed all the same.
Auch in diesem Jahr wird Oculus wieder ein eigenes Event veranstalten. Das Unternehmen lädt am 25. und 26. September wieder nach San Jose in das McEnery Convention Center ein und in diesem Jahr soll es nicht nur um Virtual Reality gehen.
Oculus Connect 6: VR und AR im Fokus
Die aktuelle Webseite zur Oculus Connect 6 gibt noch keine Details bekannt, jedoch ist dort zu lesen:
“In diesem Jahr hoffen wir, dass Sie mit uns ein neues Kapitel der virtuellen und erweiterten Realität beginnen werden.”
Auch wenn Oculus und Facebook vermutlich bereits an einer eigenen AR- bzw. MR-Brille arbeiten, so ist es dennoch unwahrscheinlich, dass uns die Unternehmen mit einer smarten AR-Brille überraschen werden. Viel wahrscheinlicher ist, dass Oculus die Passthrough-Ansicht der Oculus Quest und der Oculus Rift S dazu nutzen könnte, virtuelle Objekte in der realen Welt zu platzieren. Aktuell ist dies jedoch reine Spekulation und wir werden erst mehr Erfahren, wenn sich Oculus zum Programm und den Inhalten äußern wird.
The annual Oculus Connect event has always been a chance for the company to showcase its latest tech and a slew of new and upcoming videogames. Last year, for example, saw the official reveal of Oculus Quest, while titles such as Lone Echo II made an appearance. Now Oculus Connect 6 (OC6) has been dated for September with an interesting nod to augmented reality (AR).
It has already been a big year for Oculus with the launch of Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift S last month. Both of those took centre stage as part of the Facebook Developers Conference (F8) in April, which could well mean OC6 is a little light on hardware for this year.
On the OC6 website, details are fairly sparse at this stage, with the event returning to the San Jose McEnery Convention Center on 25th – 26th September 2019. A short passage notes: “The future we’ve all been working towards starts here. It’s our moment to think bigger, build smarter, and realize the true potential of what we’ve created together. This year, we hope you’ll join us to begin a new chapter of virtual and augmented reality.”
It’s that latter part which is most intriguing. While parent company Facebook has been involved with AR for a while now, Oculus has tended to stay towards its routes in VR. So could this be the year we start to see Oculus officially step into the AR field with some new kit? A more consumer-focused rival to HoloLens or Magic Leap maybe? Who knows, what is fairly certain are plenty of videogames will be there – VRFocus expects Lone Echo II to make another appearance.
With only three months to go there’s not long to wait to see what Oculus has in store. Keynote favourites such as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) John Carmack’s unscripted talks and Chief Scientist Michael Abrash’s technical deep dives into R&D development are sure to make an appearance as they’ve become highlights of previous events. And expect some new faces after the leadership shakeup in May with Eric Tseng taking Hugo Barra’s place at Oculus’ helm.
As further details regarding OC6 are made available including registration, VRFocus will let you know as soon as possible.
Mark your calendars; the dates for Oculus Connect 6 just came in.
The website for Oculus’ sixth annual developer conference just went live. This year’s show will take place on September 25 and 26 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. It’s just a basic landing page right now but it does tease that the show will ” begin a new chapter of virtual and augmented reality.”
Well, that leaves plenty of room for speculation, doesn’t it? Oculus itself hasn’t drawn attention to the page yet, so it’s possible we find out more soon via an Oculus Blog post or the like.
This will be the first Connect since the launch of the Oculus Quest and Rift S. At last year’s show we saw Quest being used as a ‘mixed reality’ headset, with camera passthrough letting users see the real world augmented by virtual images. Given the site’s tease about both VR and AR, is it possible that we get an update on that work this year?
Mostly we’ll be eager to see a possible update on Oculus’ Half-Dome prototype. This advanced PC VR headset was first revealed at F8 last year. It’s since gone back into hiding as Oculus released the accessibility-focused Rift S. Will we get another peak this year?
Whatever the case, we’re sure to find out in the inevitable opening keynote. Oculus Connects traditionally kick off with big announcements from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg before leading into a slew of update. Following that, Michael Abrash usually checks in with a technical keynote, as does John Carmack. That’s all still to be confirmed for this year though.
Today during the Day 2 Keynote at the 2019 F8 Developer Conference in San Jose, CA, Facebook discussed plans for upcoming social safety features in VR and teased Oculus Connect 6.
During the first part of the VR segment of today’s keynote, Lade Obamehinti from the AR/VR team at Facebook talked about building AI with inclusivity in mind, which dovetailed with the recent announcement of a voice assistant in Oculus devices. You can read more about those insights in a detailed blog post on the Facebook tech site.
After that is when Ronald Mallet came on stage from Facebook Reality Labs to discuss detailed avatars, full-body tracking, and more. We’ve got a breakdown of that over here if you want to see the impressive body tracking technology in action.
Then at the very end of today’s keynote is when Lindsay Young from the AR/VR team got on stage. She described her job as working, “on safety and integrity products to make virtual reality experiences an inclusive and meaningful place for everyone.” That includes both preventive systems and reactive systems.
One of the most tangible examples she gave applies to how Oculus runs their Venues app. Venues is a live performance VR experience that lets users view things like concerts and sporting events live with other people. It’s social and a lot of fun and is the next best thing to sitting in the audience in real life. Before you join though, there’s a detailed conduct video everyone watches.
“We envision a world where meaningful connections and communities can form in VR,” Young says. “It’s the next frontier of human interaction.” I know plenty of people that meet up with friends in apps like Bigscreen, Rec Room, and VRChat as if they were real locations.
One of the biggest differences between VR and real life right now is that real life has plenty of socially accepted norms and etiqeutte rules that people mostly follow. You don’t often see people run up to strangers on the street, get in their face, or slap their hands around to be annoying. People don’t often yell obscenities in public or loudly harass someone for no reason, but it can happen online in video games and VR very easily, which is why social safety tools are important.
For starters there are things like “safety bubbles” in which other users will disappear if they get too close to you, preventing them from invading your personal space too immediately. As Facebook rolls out additional features and encourages third party developers to include these things in their apps too, it’ll include more social features like pausing an experience or muting someone so they can’t bother you. Reporting users will send quick video recordings to moderators as well.
“Behavioral expectations are the foundation of the type of culture we want to have in these communities,” Young says. “So if people violate these expectations, they can be blocked or removed from future events. Repeated abuse could also result in a suspension from our entire platform.”
Finally, before wrapping up, Young highlighted the work Harmonix is doing with Dance Central to make it a safe online space. If someone is bothering you all you need to do is give them a double thumbs-down signal using the Touch controllers and that will mute them, freeze them, and send their character into the background or a corner like an NPC so you don’t even need to interact with them anymore. You can give a double thumbs up to reverse it and let them rejoin the experience.
Then at the very end, Young alludes that all of the things she discussed are actively being developed as real features and that they are, “excited to share more at Oculus Connect,” but didn’t elaborate on when that would be. My money is on sometime around October like usual in San Jose, CA.
Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
The featured image was provided by Oculus and all other images were screencapped during the F8 Day 2 keynote livestream.
As always, one of the highlights of this year’s Oculus Connect developer conference was the staggeringly detailed keynote talk from Michael Abrash, Chief Scientist at the newly-renamed Facebook Reality Labs. Abrash’s team is paving the future of VR and AR for Oculus, developing breakthrough technologies that could someday make headsets even more immersive than they are right now. For this year’s talk, he provided an update on just how far the team has come in the past two years.
Specifically, Abrash revisited predictions he made for VR in 2021 back at Oculus Connect 3 in 2016. His talk then included a look at the future of aspects like display, audio and haptics alongside estimations of when we’d get our hands on improved versions of each. Last week, he went over each of those estimations and assessed how they were holding up. It was a lot to process, so we’ve run down five main takeaways from his insightful talk.
Displays, Foveated Rendering And Virtual Humans Are Developing Quicker Than Expected
Abrash summed up his talk by suggesting that his predictions were pretty much “on track”, though some areas have made much more progress than others. Reassuringly, he stuck by most of them.
For example, one of the most intriguing segments of Abrash’s OC3 predictions concerned displays. He estimated that, five years from 2016, we would see a VR headset with a 140-degree field of view (FOV), variable depth of focus, and a 4k x 4k panel resolution with 30 pixels per degree density. Well, things are looking good in this area.
At F8 earlier this year, Facebook introduced its Half Dome headset prototype. Though still very much a work-in-progress, the kit featured varifocal displays and a 140-degree FOV. “Half Dome achieved two of my three display predictions three years early,” Abrash admitted, further adding that implementing 4K displays with 30 pixels per degree would be “straightforward”.
Going into more detail, he explained that Reality Labs had made “significant progress” in varifocal displays (which provide accurate blur based on the proximity of virutal objects to your eyes) using an AI-driven renderer called Deep Focus.
Work in foveated rendering, which uses eye-tracking to fully render only the area of the display the user is looking at and thus save on computational power, is also on track thanks to the help of a deep learning tool that fills in missing pixels.
Virtually real humans have also come some way using an early system known as codec avatars, a “novel machine-based learning approach” that could one day “revolutionize how we communicate and collaborate.”
There are other technologies pushing past Half Dome, too. Abrash spoke of Pancake Lenses, which will allow much sharper images at resolutions that go beyond 4K, and could even support a FOV of around 200 degrees and more compact headsets (though he did note the latter two couldn’t be achieved in the same device). Even these are likely to be surpassed by waveguide displays currently in development for AR devices, however (more on that in a bit).
But Eye-Tracking, Realistic Audio And Other Features Might Take Just A Bit Longer
While many of Abrash’s predictions had positive outlooks, he did also have to adjust his timeline slightly on some aspects. He now expects competent eye-tracking and high-quality mixed reality (which includes photorealistic replication of real world environments) to be here around 2022 rather than 2021, for example.
He also acknowledged that, despite recently experiencing an incredibly compelling demo of personalized head-related transfer function (HRTF) audio, it may take longer to get here than he thought. Personalized HRTF (the Oculus SDK already uses a generalized version) is able to replicate the distance and position of audio within a VR environment with incredible accuracy, though Abrash’s most recent demonstration required him to have his ears scanned for 30 minutes. Not ideal.
“Overall my two-year predictions are looking pretty good, but I was perhaps a little more specific than I should have been, not about the technologies themselves but about their timing. I think most of what I talked about will be in consumer’s hands a year later than I thought; four years from now rather than three,” Abrash noted. “But, apart from that, not only are the predictions on track, it’s actually starting to look like I underestimated in some areas.”
There Were New Predictions Too
One of the best bits of Abrash’s talk was a video showcasing Reality Labs’ very early work with haptic gloves that can provide realistic resistance when grabbing objects. A VR user played a game of Jenga with startling accuracy, including full hand-tracking to allow her to grab individual blocks and even place a virtual rubber duck atop the tower. It looked incredibly promising, though Abrash stressed that this was very early work, predicting that a form of haptic control similar to it would reach consumer hands within 10 years. As he said himself, this is the farthest out VR prediction he’s yet made, but it’s an important one.
To recap: Abrash believes that by 2028 our sense of touch could be simulated realistically by a glove-like VR attachment.
“I predict the first time you get to use your hands with haptics in VR it will be as much as a revelation as the first time that you put on a VR headset,” he said.
Facebook’s Work In AR Has ‘Ramped Up’ And It’s Helping VR Too
Oculus may have started out as a VR company first and foremost, but continued progress in augmented reality over the past few years has made it increasingly harder to ignore. Indeed, Facebook’s hiring spree over the past few years has made it obvious that Oculus is now working in AR, and Abrash confirmed that Facebook Reality Labs’ work in the field “has ramped up a great deal and over the last two years.”
Does this mean we’ll see an AR headset from Oculus one day? It’s very possible, but Abrash also noted that this progress in AR is helping its work in VR as the two share a “great deal of overlap.”
“VR can advance further and faster by leveraging AR technology,” Abrash noted. He explained that Reality Lab had to invent an entirely new display system for its work in AR, which could in turn “take VR to a different level.” The company’s work with AR waveguide displays, which utilize light injected into a thin lens no bigger than a few millimeters, is helping push work in VR to the point where Abrash even showcased concept art (seen above) of a strictly hypothetical Oculus headset that utilizes them.
Ergonomics is another big area of overlap, as the demands for a socially acceptable AR headset are far more than that of VR. By applying those same demands to VR, we could one day have much sleeker headsets. “Applying AR technology to VR, especially display, silicon, audio and computer vision, will make it genuinely possible to build something like the visor I showed you earlier,” Abrash claimed.
In Fact, VR May Be The Best Place For AR In The Next Few Years
Ergonomics aside, though, Arbash claimed that VR headsets may even be able to offer better ‘mixed reality’ experiences than AR devices in the coming years. Whereas devices like Magic Leap One and HoloLens use AR displays with see-through optics upon which digital elements are overlaid, Abrash argued VR’s more controlled environment with opaque display — using camera and sensor-based reconstructions of the real world — might offer a more compelling package for mixing two realities in real time.
“Mixed reality in VR is inherently more powerful than AR glasses because there’s full control of every pixel, rather than additive blending,” he said. “VR can also provide a richer experience than AR because the display doesn’t have to be see-through, the form factor is much less constrained, and it doesn’t have to run off of a battery for an entire day. So the truth is that VR will not only be the first place that mixed reality is genuinely useful, it will also be the best mixed reality for a long time.”
Eventually, though Abrash does say these experiences will converge, but that’s a long way off.
The VR/AR Takeover Is Inevitable
A personal favorite moment of Abrash’s talk came towards the start, when he spoke about Steve Jobs’ early visits to see the first-ever personal computer, the Xerox Alto, in 1979. He lifted a key quote from the Apple icon about how the technology was so powerful it would inevitably become a part of our lives.
The quote reads: “And within… ten minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day. It was obvious. You could argue about how many years it would take. You could argue about who the winners and losers might be. You couldn’t argue about the inevitability, it was so obvious.”
It’s a quote that seems very appropriate to the current state of the VR and AR industries, where early, expensive hardware is fueling doubt about their future as a market. Abrash then updated it a bit, saying: “Imagine a VR headset that’s a sleek, stylish, lightweight visor with a 200 degree field of view, retinal resolution, high dynamic range and proper depth of focus, with audio that’s so real you can’t believe it’s computer generated, that lets you mix real and virtual freely, that lets you meet, share and collaborate with people regardless of distance and that lets you use your hands to interact with the virtual world. If that existed, we’d be playing, working and connecting in it every day.”
“Imagine AR glasses that are socially acceptable and all-day wearable, that give you useful virtual objects like your phone, your TV and virtual work spaces, that give you perceptual super powers, a context-aware personal assistant, and above all the ability to connect, share and collaborate with others anywhere, any time. If those glasses existed today, we’d all be wearing them right now.”
Crucially, Abrash reaffirmed that “while it may be hard to believe, it’s all doable.”
Last week the VR event of the year came and went — Oculus Connect 5 — with Facebook’s Oculus Quest formally revealed as the company’s next attempt to tap a consumer market for VR hardware in 2019.
The fully standalone headset requires no phone or PC to operate and will start selling early next year for around $400. Facebook said Quest will ave 50+ games at launch and the company is helping to port over many of the top Rift titles including Superhot, Robo Recall, The Climb, and Moss. We expect games like Beat Saber, Marvel Powers United VR and other popular games to make appearances on Quest as well — alongside a timed exclusive for Vader Immortal — the official Star Wars experience which seems to include lightsaber combat.
Facebook is waiting until closer to release to reveal the full launch lineup for Quest, but the hour and 15 minute long keynote includes updates for Oculus Go and Oculus Rift as well. Go will soon be getting a casting feature and the keynote also included language making clear how Facebook is thinking about the PC VR market.
The full keynote is embedded below, but we cut down a 14-minute version focusing just on the key information above. Note that our super cut focuses on the product and game announcements and doesn’t include the Michael Abrash predictions portion which is the last half hour of the Oculus Connect 5 keynote.
What do you think about Oculus Connect 5’s announcements? Let us know down in the comments below!
Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate.
Death to the Project Santa Cruz, long live the Oculus Quest. Now that Oculus Connect 5 is officially in the books, we know the real, consumer-facing name of Facebook’s upcoming standalone VR headset and we actually had the chance to go hands-on with the device from the show floor in San Jose.
We got to play Superhot VR, Tennis Scramble, Dead and Buried Arena, and Face Your Fears 2 on the device and overall came away extremely impressed. The Oculus Quest will ship in Spring 2019 for $399 and includes two 6DOF Touch controllers as well as the headset itself, which is entirely standalone, 6DOF, and wireless. It represents a middle ground between the Go and Rift.
We still don’t know the full launch lineup, but we do know at least 50 games will be ready by the release date including Moss, Robo Recall, and more. All of technology is really, really impressive — but is it enough?
At the OC5 keynote Mark Zuckerberg said that in order for a VR ecosystem to be self-sustaining and successful, it needs about 10 million users. There are only 3 million PSVR headsets out there and we still don’t know a number for Rift, but it’s fair to assume less than 1 million since that hasn’t been announced yet. In our hands-on I stated that this could be the VR headset for everybody, but what do you think?
So, if the Quest is going to be the breakout success that Facebook hopes, it needs to do really, really well. Which brings us to the following question: Do you think the Quest will outsell the Rift? Will it do so well that the Oculus Quest becomes Facebook’s primary device going forward? Will this become the best-selling headset ever? Why or why not?
Let us know what you think down in the comments below and make sure to watch our live Q&A show from last week for more details.
