Oculus tends to update its virtual reality (VR) platform on a monthly basis, with October seeing Custom Developer Items, dynamic lighting and physically-based renderers among other additions. For November there’s a new pirates collection and Dash UI improvements.
Overall look and feel of Dash has now seen an upgrade, bringing enhanced accessibility to settings. Now you can hover over the right side of the belt for instant access to volume controls, Touch status, battery life, and to re-centre your view.
Custom 3D Objects have seen an update, ‘introducing the ability to add embedded panels into your custom objects. Now you can stream PC desktop windows from any item of your own design,’ notes the company.
And for those who love to sail the seven seas, rum in-hand, there’s a new pirate collection available to decorate your virtual home. This sees floor and ceiling materials, decorations, furniture, and outfits now on offer.
To unlock a starter set of decorations simply log into Oculus Home before 1st December. You’ll also be able to find rare artefacts like the Captain’s Throne, Skull and Crossbones, or Benjamin, a poor landlubber that’s been turned into a candle inside of reward packs as you spend time in Oculus Home throughout November. Avatar’s get new clothing and accessory options, like a tricorn hat and a leather vest.
Don’t forget that about the newly launched Oculus Referrals Programme either. This allows current owners to refer a friend to get them a 10 percent discount off of an Oculus Rift or Oculus Go headset. In turn, the referee gets Oculus Store credit towards their next purchase.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Oculus and its winter deals, reporting back with the latest updates.
Rift’s new system software, previously known as Rift Core 2.0, is now rolling out to everyone, bringing with it a number of performance improvements, UI updates, and a more customizable Oculus Home area with support for up to eight people.
First teased at Oculus Connect 5, the new update includes more performance improvements that now allow everything down to minimum spec computers to run Oculus Home and Dash smoothly.
Rift Core 2.0 beta branch users have been privy to a custom home area since last year, with plenty of random items to unlock for visiting Home each week, and more recently, the ability to import your own 3D creations. But now playing games and unlocking achievements will get you game-specific items too, such as animated objects, sculptures, trophies, and avatar clothing—all of it now available on the default stable branch.
A total of 32 unlockable objects are available across nine titles, including Loco Dojo, Moss, SUPERHOT VR, Echo Arena, Brass Tactics, Job Simulator, OrbusVR,Arizona Sunshine, and the Lone Echo II Trailer Experience. Oculus will soon allow developers to create Home items commemorating pre-orders, specific purchase incentives, and participation mementos.
All Rift users can now invite up to eight friends simultaneously for social hangouts and co-watching events that include any content you can cast from your desktop.
Here’s a quick guide on how to visit a friend’s Home:
To visit your friend’s Home:
Open the Oculus app on your computer.
Click your name from the bottom left menu to open your Friends List.
Select the friend whose Home you want to visit.
Click “Visit Home”, then put on your headset.
To visit your friend’s Home from within VR:
Open the Oculus app on your computer and put on your headset.
Press the menu button on your left Touch controller to access the Home menu.
Select Places from the left sidebar.
Point at the Home you want to visit, press the grip trigger on your Touch controller to grab the Home’s sphere, and then break the sphere to teleport to that Home.
To invite friends to your home, simply click on Social and click your friend’s name to send them an invite.
Oculus Connect 5 at the end of September brought with it a whole bunch of announcements, with the pick of the bunch obviously being the reveal of the Oculus Quest. The finalised vision of that which was begun with the Santa Cruz prototype head-mounted display (HMD).
However, it wasn’t just new hardware that was discussed at this year’s Oculus Connect, the evolution of the current software sets was also very much a topic of discussion – and, after being previewed at the event, Oculus has pressed the button to roll out the latest version of the Oculus Rift’s software package. (Previously known as Rift Core 2.0.)
The update brings with it both new features and optimisations for previous ones. Performance has been improved, the user interface upgraded and there are changes within Oculus Home which is now more customisable than ever before.
“This new software release marks the culmination of months of work and the start of an exciting new phase for Rift.” Confirmed Oculus VR in their latest company blog focusing on the update. “From here, we’ll continue to evolve features and functionality on a monthly basis.”
Such evolution will be achieved in part through the Rift’s new system interface called Dash, which will not only be bringing Rift users greater access and control of both their apps and PC but that will also include what Oculus is calling Experiments. As the name suggests, this toggleable addition showcases a number of potential upcoming features for users to test and feedback on.
The big update for Home includes Custom Developer Items – unlockable pieces of art, in-game objects and all manner of other things related to your favourite virtual reality (VR) videogame. From a statue of Quill from Moss to the latest addition to the ranks, an animate statue of the Grand Sensei from Loco Dojo. This makes 32 unlockables in Home across nine very different titles. The other seven being Lone Echo II, OrbusVR, Arizona Sunshine, Job Simulator, Echo Arena, Brass Tactics and SUPERHOT VR.
Oculus have also been getting in the holiday spirit – as have a lot of developers since October began – by debuting a new spooky décor for Home (seen above). You can find a list of key features in the update, as revealed by Oculus below.
With dynamic lighting and physically-based renderers, Home looks better than ever and turns off in the background to reduce overhead
Bring the power of your PC into VR with Dash’s virtual desktop, which lets you easily access and interact with your desktop windows and apps
While the weeks after the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2018 tend to be a little slower when it comes to videogame news, Oculus has been fairly busy this week with several updates to its core platform, sculpting software Oculus Medium and Oculus for Business. To round the week of Oculus has unveiled its July roster of updates rolling out today, adding more social features, customisation options and more.
The updates are being pushed out through Oculus’ Public Test Channel (PTC) which means they’re not official just yet, and only available to those who’ve signed up to the channel.
First up Rift Core 2.0 – which launched in December 2017 – is getting social so users can hang out with friends inside Oculus Home. Explaining on the Oculus Blog the company states: “This initial release has basic functionality and will help us test the multiplayer infrastructure. Over the next several months, we’ll add more features and depth to make Home a great place to spend time with friends regardless of physical distance—and the perfect jumping off point to explore social VR content together.”
Other features being rolled out today that you can start testing include Group Hang-Outs where up to eight people can chill in the same Home, Broadcasting Oculus Desktop which adds experimental support for broadcasting embedded Dash panels and upgraded Oculus Avatars.
The avatar customisation has been improved with new hair, skin shading, clothing, and eyewear design options. Oculus Avatars don’t just appear in Oculus Home but in several videogames as well, including Brass Tactics, Epic Rollercoasters, REFLEX UNIT, SportsBar VR, and Drop Dead. Additionally, Oculus has added an ‘Avatar Editor’ mirror in the Special Items section of the inventory that can be placed anywhere in the Home space.
Fine tuning the platform even further beta language support has been added for Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish (Latin America), Spanish (Spain), and Swedish. Plus, for those who don’t like teleporting new movement options like Walk Mode and Smooth Turning are now available. As Oculus continues to improve its platform, VRFocus will keep you informed.
Virtual reality (VR) headset aren’t just great for playing videogames on they’re also good for getting creative. When Oculus Touch launched towards the end of 2016 two design apps were given away free of charge Oculus Quill; designed more towards illustration and Oculus Medium; a sculpting app, Today, Oculus Medium has received a major update, bringing a bunch of new features with it.
The Oculus Medium 2.0 update has tried to address many of the community’s feedback for the app including increased layer limit, grid snapping, and multiple lights.
“I’m super excited for this release because we’ve added a lot of features our community have been asking for—more flexible scene management, better memory and performance, and more sculpting precision, just to name a few of the larger themes of this release,” says Technical Art Director Lydia Choy in a statement. “Lots of our underlying systems have been rearchitected, which sets us up to build some powerful features in future releases as well.”
Having introduced support for importing user-generated content to decorate Oculus Home in Rift Core 2.0 only last week, today’s update goes one further by allowing sculptors to export their VR designs directly into their Home inventory.
The 2.0 update has been designed to help both advanced and beginner users alike. For those well versed in Oculus Medium there’s a new file management system, scene graph, and a major UI facelift that sholud make for faster and more intuitive navigation of Medium’s tools, settings, and options. And for novices there are new tutorials to help them adopt the new tools like Layer Resolution Visualization and the Elastic Move tool.
The performance of Oculus Medium has been increased to improve rendering: “I’m especially excited about the new rendering engine under the hood of Medium,” notes Graphics Engineer David Farrell. “We rewrote the renderer to use Vulkan, which lets us more directly control the GPU, leading to smoother frame rates and better memory management for higher resolution sculpts. Plus, you can now have up to 100 layers!”
It seems as though this week has seen a push towards those designing in VR as Google Tilt Brushsaw a sizable update rollout. For any further announcements regarding Oculus Medium, keep reading VRFocus.
As a developer moving from the web and app world into 3D and XR, I’ve had to constantly re-evaluate my platform and tool choices as the industry evolves at tweetstorm velocity. Today’s XR development pipeline is clogged by a glut of proprietary hardware and software APIs and SDKs by competing firms like Oculus, HTC Vive, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Sony and SteamVR — to say nothing of emerging third-party peripherals like Logitech’s VR-tracked keyboard, the new AR-enabling Zed Mini dual-eye camera for the Rift or Vive, or any other industry-disrupting Kickstarters that might’ve sprung up since I started typing this paragraph.
Left to right: a bunch of cool stuff I want.
Each platform’s fine — even technologically stunning, one might argue — with respective strengths, weaknesses and use cases. But the distinctions force XR developers to ask hard questions: Where is the market going? How do I invest my skill-building time? What devices should my app support? What platform can I get a job working on? Developers must be business analysts as much as creative technologists to stay relevant. It’s easy to suffer choice paralysis with such a wide array of options, and easier still to bet on the wrong technology and lose.
Personally, I also face certain technical, logistic and financial realities as an independent XR developer in the Midwest (US), where the industry hasn’t proliferated as it has in major coastal cities. Thankfully, game engines like Unity and Unreal are rapidly democratizing this space. Both engines seek to bridge the gaps between the various XR SDKs, employing thousands of engineers to ensure their software plays nicely with just about any significant third-party API. For example, as I wrote about in August, the Oculus SDK integrates beautifully with Unity and comes equipped with many of the scripts and prefabs needed to quickly prototype, develop and deploy a custom Rift app.
I miss bossing around my hand-modeled #MadeWithBlocks BB-8. Check out my deep dive on this project, The Future of VR Creation Tools.
That’s fantastic, but it’s still non-standard. To port the same Unity app to the HTC Vive or a Windows HMD is non-trivial — not impossible or even terribly difficult, but non-trivial. Maintaining your app for multiple SDKs over the long haul is similarly non-trivial. Non-trivial costs money and time and we’re all short on both.
Instead imagine if XR practitioners had to worry less about betting on the right platform or device and could instead focus on creating unique and compelling experiences, content and UX. The first step down that path was VRTK — but sadly, one of the best tools to combat the VR SDK surplus will soon be hobbled by the loss of its founder.
VRTK: The Open Source Approach
This free, open source Unity toolkit aims to knit together a single workflow for a variety of VR APIs. It comes with the same stock prefabs and scripted mechanics you might find included in any single proprietary SDK, but makes each piece of functionality identical whether deployed to Oculus, SteamVR (read: Vive and, with v3.3.0, Windows HMDs) or Daydream — covering all major VR HMD manufacturers today.
It’s a boon to anyone wanting to dip their toes in the waters of VR development. Think of it: Want to implement teleportation locomotion over a Unity NavMesh? Just drop the component onto your player prefab. Want to test out grab mechanics, or a quick bezier pointer? VRTK’s demo scenes have you covered, and they’ll work easily on a variety of devices. Since it’s open source, you’re also free to dive in and customize the code. Struggling to get a feature working in your own project? Check out this implementation on a varieties of SDKs — not a bad way to grok new XR coding concepts.
Sadly, VRTK’s creator is sunsetting the woefully underfunded project. The UK-based developer TheStoneFox — who until recently was actively seeking contributors, partnerships and support — announced recently that he would will be stepping back from the project post-version 3.3.0. Though VRTK boasts an active Slack community, a growing list of “made with” titles and a recent Kickstarter, TheStoneFox was unable to attract the support necessary to sustain it for the long term.
Now, as the opportunity to contribute to and utilize a premier open-source VR development pipeline expediter will fade going forward, what if anything will replace it?
OpenXR: One API to Rule Them All
The VRTK approach —using Unity scripting to knit together similar mechanics across a spectrum of VR SDKs — is necessary in the current fragmented development landscape, but there are downsides. Some community still has to monitor the various proprietary SDK updates and your end-user VRTK app still has to be mindful of VRTK’s changes over time. In this way, VRTK treated the symptoms of the VR SDK overload, but was not equipped to address the root cause. Enter OpenXR, The Khronos Group’s upcoming industry standard:
The standard, announced December 2016, is being written now and is quickly gaining traction among industry players (with the notable exception of Magic Leap). Instead of forcing developers to grapple with variable propriety SDKs and all the accompanying business consequences, companies will instead tailor their hardware and software to comply with OpenXR’s spec. Khronos, the non-profit responsible for shepherding the Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenGL ES and WebGL standards, is leading the charge. Cue the infographics!
On the left, the problem — on the right, the solution:
“Each VR device can only run the apps that have been ported to its SDK. The result is high development costs and confused customers — limiting market growth,” reads some fairly accurate marketing copy on their website. “The cross-platform VR standard eliminates industry fragmentation by enabling applications to be written once to run on any VR system, and to access VR devices integrated into those VR systems to be used by applications.”
A working group of industry heavyweights have agreed the standards be extensible to allow for future innovation and should support a range of experiences — anything from a 3-DoF controller all the way to a high-end, room-scale devices.
The only thing missing is a realistic timetable before this standard has an impact on the development community and its day-to-day workflow. Until the market-movers get their act together, we’ll be left scrambling (and patching up VRTK projects, in many cases).
OpenXR supporters: everyone except Magic Leap.
The Cinema of Attractions: Slow Your Reel
But should we so quickly welcome industry standardization while the technology is still so new and full of possibilities? That’s the question asked in a recent Voices of VR podcast by Kent Bye and Rebecca Rouse. The two discussed the early days of cinema — when exploration and experimentation were the status quo — and Rouse drew striking parallels between that era and the current period in XR production and development.
Pure spectacle then and now. Left: a Cinema of Attractions-era still. Right: Chocolate VR.
“[Scholars of early film] came up with this term ‘cinema of attractions’ because they saw an incredible wealth of diversity and kind of range of exuberant experimentation in those early pieces, so they were very hard to sort of clump them together — there was such diversity — but this ‘attraction’ idea was a large enough umbrella, because all of those early pieces are in some way showing off the technology’s capabilities and generate this experience of wonder or amazement for the viewer. And the context in which they were shown is that of attractions, so they were shown at world’s fairs and as a part of vaudeville shows with other kinds of performances and displays.”
— Rebecca Rouse, assistant professor of communication & media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Sounds eerily familiar, huh? The whole podcast is well worth a listen, but tldr: while there are obvious consumer and market advantages to XR standards, Rouse argues that perhaps we shouldn’t jump the gun here— not during this era of frenetic, often avant garde XRexperimentation across art, science, cinema and gaming. Looking around the industry, it’s hard to disagree.
EditorXR
One man-eating-the-camera-brilliant new application of XR technology is Unity Labs’ EditorXR. Created by Unity’s far-future R&D team (whose roles often find them working on projects and products five-to-ten years away from consumer adoption), EditorXR offers you an interface to create custom XR Unity scenes entirely within virtual reality.
Oh! And there’s flying, among other superpowers — soar through your scene like Superman or scale the whole thing down to a pinhole. They’ve literally ported the Unity inspector, hierarchy and project windows (again among others) to an increasingly user-friendly VR UI pane on your wrist. With the latest update, you’re able to:
hook into Google’s Poly asset database web API in real-time inside VR
create multiplayer EditorXR sessions for editing Unity scenes with friends and collaborators
run EditorXR with Unity’s primary version 2017.x editor
It’s still new and I’ve encountered bugs, but it’s a foregone conclusion that this tech will become a standard feature of Unity’s scene creation process as XR technology matures and proliferates. Even their alpha and beta efforts evoke the same sense of wonder and possibility that early Cinema of Attractions-era moviegoers must have felt.
Another experimental Unity project, ML-Agents, explores one of the most promising avenues for the future of XR development, design and UX: machine learning. Using so-called “reinforcement learning” techniques which expressly don’t feed the AI model any sample data or rules for analysis, ML-Agents instead applies simple rewards and punishments (in the form of tiny float values) based on the outcomes to their [usually very narrowly defined set of] behaviors.
Stretched out over hundreds of thousands if not millions of trial-and-error training sessions, the computer experiments with its abilities and forms a model for how to best achieve the desired goal. In this way, your Agents become their own teacher s— you just write the rubric.
The original GitHub commit contained some basic demo scenes and the development community quickly took up the torch from there. Unity’s Alessia Nigretti followed up the original blog with one describing how to integrate ML-Agents into a 2D game. On Twitter, @PunchesBears has been demonstrating similar concepts — and showing that often enough, Agents respond to developers’ carefully calculated reward system in ways they don’t anticipate. Similar to actual gamers, no?
In one of my favorite applications of ML-Agents, the developer Blake Schreurs actually brings a 6-DoF robo-arm Agent trained to seek a moving point in space into virtual reality — with slightly terrifying results once he assigns that moving target to his face.
Imagine someone applying this training model to actual robotics and fat-fingering the wrong key. Or don’t, whatever.
He’s down for the count! I was immediately reminded of the audiences pouring out of theaters in 1895, afraid they’d be run down by the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of Train at La Ciotat. We’re still in the salad days of both machine learning and XR development compared to where we hope to be 10 or even 50 years from now. In that time, some combination of traditional or procedural AI with these new machine learning approaches will doubtless lead to great developments in gaming and XR at large — or even in the very design process and daily workflow of computing itself.
Rift OS Core 2.0
With Rift’s new Core 2.0 OS, your entire Windows PC is accessible from your right-hand menu button. Being able to view and use your desktop apps, as well as pin windows inside other VR apps, introduces new possibilities for XR workflows (and even for traditional computing workflows) in VR.
While working on my next project, entirely within VR, I can watch Danny Bittman’s great Unity rendering and lighting tutorial on YouTube in a pinned browser while messing with those same settings on my wrist in UnityXR. I can watch @_naam craft original assets in Google Blocks at the same time I do, or I could gather assets from the Poly database and deploy them to my Unity scene in real-time VR, pulling up Visual Studio to code some game logic as I please.
That sounds pretty goddamn metaversal to me — and before long, we likely won’t even need code.
The XR Developer of the Future Is Not a Developer
If XR technology is to go mainstream, the development process must be as efficient and accessible as possible — and likely even open to non-developers through content creation and machine learning applications. Spanning sciences and disciplines, there’s so much more to talk about and speculate over that this piece hasn’t even touched on (next time I’ll examine WebVR and A-Frame as viable XR development pathways). More and more pieces of this accessible, standardized XR development pipeline will fall into place as the immersive computing revolution rolls on, though I’m thankful the XR industry isn’t ready to ditch its Cinema of Attractions ethos quite yet.
Already in the wild for over a month now, Rift Core 2.0 Beta has seen its first substantial update since launch. The January update addresses performance and general ease-of-use of Home and Dash, but more importantly provides solutions to some rather niggling issues.
Considered a major overhaul to the platform’s underlying user experience, Rift Core 2.0 was only available through the Public Test Channel since launch last month. Now, Oculus says Rift users on the default branch will have automatic access to Core 2.0 beta without having to opt into the more incremental Public Test Channel updates. While classic Oculus Home is still the default for non-test-branchers, you can now toggle Rift Core 2.0 beta on an off in the Settings menu.
image courtesy Oculus
Oculus says a number of rendering, stability, and performance fixes have come to Home and Dash as a result of the update. Dash is the platform’s in-app menu system which also allows you to use desktop PC applications and switch apps while still interacting in VR apps. There’s also some updates to how Dash works when you’re running apps purchased through Steam or other app marketplaces—no doubt polishing Valve’s recent update to SteamVR that allows Rift users to use Dash in Steam-bought games.
Now, all of this is well and good, but what about the annoying bits?
One niggling issue that the update addresses is the ability to “lock” changes in your Home, so you can inhabit the space without accidentally moving that perfectly placed object. The Lock option can now be found in the Settings panel in the Home menu.
Image courtesy Oculus
Speaking of niggling issues, this is the granddaddy of them all. Ever since the launch of Rift in March 2016, users have been pleading for an official way to easily install and manage their Oculus apps outside the confines of the default C: drive location. With the January update, Oculus is now letting you install VR apps across more than one hard drive or Windows folder, meaning you’ll finally be able to shunt your apps to that extra SSD. Pure joy.
Smaller, less-niggling niggles: when you add games and experiences to you Wishlist, you’ll get notified when they go on sale, making it easier to wait on that game that may need a few months after launch to finally shape up, both content and price-wise. You’ll also be able to see playtime hours and achievements for any game in your Library.
If you’re got a great idea, or found a bug worth squashing, Oculus suggests joining UserVoice forum for all feature requests.
According to a recent entry on the official Oculus blog, the team has plans to allow sculptures from Oculus Medium (2016) to be placed into Home spaces. Customisation is already the central feature of the new Home, which makes up a key component of Rift Core 2.0, the underlying platform for Rift and Touch currently in beta.
“We’ll be adding tons of new content throughout the year, including new items and decorations built by the community,” writes Nate Mitchell, Head of Rift at Oculus. “We’ll also make it easy to bring your own content, like Medium sculptures, into Home in 2018.”
This brief mention of Medium in the first ‘Dev Diary’ for Rift Core 2.0 is about all we have to go on; it’s a logical step to allow user-created content in personal Home spaces. The team will continue to add decorative and interactive objects into the beta, and some games already provide physical trophies for displaying your achievements, in much the same way as SteamVR Home. Bringing Medium support could open the floodgates to much deeper personalisation, particularly if the sculpts can be scaled to any size, but that remains to be seen.
Earlier this year at the Oculus Connect event, it was announced that Oculus would be bringing in a large overhaul to the Oculus Rift experience with Rift Core 2.0. Those plans now come to fruition as Rift Core 2.0 is launched on the one-year anniversary of the launch of Oculus Touch.
The new update is the biggest overhaul of the Oculus Rift experience so far, utilising the capabilities of the Oculus Touch controllers and modern PC virtual reality (VR) rigs to introduce native virtual computing, a new customisable home space and a redesigned user interface created to work perfectly within a VR environment.
The new and overhauled features in Rift Core 2.0 are:
Dash – A new system interface that lets users access the PC desktop and content library and communicate with friends both in and out of VR
Oculus Desktop – A virtual display that lets users select a portion to ‘tear off’ and carry with them elsewhere through the VR experience.
Multi-Tasking – Users can be sculpting in Medium and bring up Google Image art references, or developers can play an app and work in the Unity editor. Or gamers can watch a YouTube walkthrough and still play the videogame within VR.
New Oculus Home – The Oculus Home space is now fully customisable, allowing users to show off achievements to friends and display their own taste and style
Redesigned Oculus App – The new app makes it easier for users to play videogames, discover new titles and communicate with friends.
The Beta for Rift Core 2.0 is available for users to try now by opting into the Public Test Channel. The development team are seeking feedback from the Oculus Rift user community and have set up UserVoice, to allow users to provide feedback and vote on what new features and changes they wish the developers to focus on.
VRFocus will continue to bring you the latest news on Oculus Rift.
During Oculus Connect 4 (OC4) last month the company announced it would be overhauling the Oculus Rift experience with a major update called Rift Core 2.0. Now the virtual reality (VR) headset manufacturer has gone into greater detail about what to expect, discussing an update to the Oculus desktop app.
The purpose of the redesign is to make everything easier and more accessible, so the user interface (UI) will include Oculus Updates, highlighting the latest Oculus news, improvements, and features, while the Oculus Store will feature a Wishlists option so that users can mark interesting apps and videogames, they’ll then be notified if any of the saved apps go on sale.
With Oculus Rift now permanently bundled with Oculus Touch the update will be more heavily focused towards the motion controllers. In a blog posting about Rift Core 2.0 Oculus explained: “We redesigned the core Rift experience to be truly Touch-native, offering you all the benefits of hand presence in an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. That said most, but not all, previous functionality will continue to work with gamepad and some new functionality—such as customizing your Home— requires Touch. If you want to take full advantage of all the features in Rift Core 2.0, use Touch.”
The posting also details how to prep for the update, with users having to ensure they have Windows 10 installed to enable all features. Core functionality like the new system menu Dash (not including the app overlay option) and Oculus Home will work with Windows 7 and Windows 8, but Oculus Desktop will only work with Windows 10.
Rift Core 2.0 will begin its beta roll out next month, if you want to try it out you’ll need to opt-in for beta access via the Public Test Channel. Obviously, as with any beta you many encounter bugs and glitches whilst Oculus makes improvements.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Oculus and Rift Core 2.0, reporting back with any further updates.
However, it wasn’t just new hardware that was discussed at this year’s Oculus Connect, the evolution of the current software sets was also very much a topic of discussion – and, after being previewed at the event, Oculus has pressed the button to roll out the latest version of the Oculus Rift’s software package. (Previously known as 
The big update for Home includes Custom Developer Items – unlockable pieces of art, in-game objects and all manner of other things related to your favourite virtual reality (VR) videogame. From a statue of 
The standard, announced December 2016, is being written now and is quickly gaining traction among industry players (with the notable exception of 
