Oculus Connect 2: all the news from VR’s biggest conference

My favorite moment at last month’s Oculus Connect conference actually happened before the show started. It was during the Proto Awards — virtual reality’s (significantly younger and smaller) version of the Oscars, with categories for things like the year’s “best graphical user interface” and “best social experience” alongside the more traditional awards for music and art direction.

There have definitely been some standout VR experiences this year; spy mini-thriller I Expect You To Die ended up winning best overall experience, and the whole slate can be found here. But a surprise award also went out to Ivan Sutherland, creator of the “Sword of Damocles” headset in the 1960s. Sutherland is often cited as one of the inventors of what is now called virtual reality, along with cinematographer Mort Heilig. His nine-minute speech at the Proto Awards is a thoughtful, moving, and extremely modest recollection of the very first virtual object, as well as the inspiration behind it: a remote viewing system from Bell Helicopter.

Social experiences are at the core of this year’s Oculus Connect. This isn’t surprising — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg bought Oculus largely because of VR’s social potential. But Oculus has only recently started focusing on shared experiences. Earlier this year, it showed off a very, very subtle two-viewer mode for its short VR film Lost. At E3, its Toybox demo let two people see each other as stylized heads and hands. At Connect, it expanded on this with the Medium sculpting app for the Rift. On the Gear VR, it had something more dramatic: streaming video apps that let people watch Twitch, Netflix, and more while sitting with their friends in virtual chairs.

Oculus is following in the footsteps of many other Rift developers. Platforms like AltSpaceVR and Convrge, for example, hold group live-streaming parties for events like the Oculus Connect keynotes. On a smaller scale, there are conferencing systems like VTime, which is essentially a less infuriating, VR-based version of GoToMeeting. It’s an idea that many VR enthusiasts find compelling. But it’s hard to judge Oculus’ efforts against any of those, because the Gear VR’s social tools feel built for a specific kind of interaction I never have.

The newly announced Gear VR is a milestone for Samsung and Oculus. It’s the first virtual reality headset either has released without the safety net of an “Innovator Edition” or “Development Kit” label. It’s coming out at the beginning of the holiday season — Samsung is openly hoping it becomes one of the year’s hot gift items. It opens the platform up to anyone who owns one of Samsung’s four new flagship phones: the Galaxy Note 5, the Galaxy S6, the Galaxy S6 Edge, and the Galaxy 6S Edge+. And at $99, it’s selling at half the price of the Innovator Edition.

So it’s a little surprising that the new model’s pre-production mockup looks almost identical to the old Gear VRs scattered all around it at Oculus Connect. Samsung’s design language seems totally set at this point: a chunky white container with a small trackpad on the temple. But there are a couple of significant ergonomic changes. The first is that the side trackpad now has a shallow, cross-shaped depression with a small bump in the very center.

Before we go any further, I implore you to ignore the utter aesthetic bankruptcy of my creation above. But do look at it, because it’s the product of 10 minutes in Oculus’ new tool Medium — a remarkably natural sculpting system that uses the company’s Touch motion controllers. Medium was announced yesterday at Oculus Connect, and it’s not just one of the first official Rift demos to use motion control, it’s the very first to offer some kind of creative experience.

On stage, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe said that “every platform has to have a paint app, and this is our paint app,” which positions Medium a little bit like MS Paint. Valve’s competing SteamVR platform already includes a third-party app called Tiltbrush, a three-dimensional painting system whose brushes can create things like stars and fire alongside more traditional materials. Tiltbrush and Medium’s control schemes both use the metaphor of a virtual palette and a virtual brush, but everything in Medium is made of a material that looks and behaves more like clay.

Before the Oculus Rift, game studio Owlchemy Labs was possibly best known as the creator of Smuggle Truck (the rejected iOS physics game about undocumented immigrants) and Snuggle Truck (the accepted iOS physics game about stuffed animals.) But in 2013, the studio released Aaaaaculus!, a virtual reality adaptation of a skydiving game it created with Dejobaan Games in 2011. Coming at a point when virtual reality experiences tended towards small tech demos and ports of first-person shooters, Aaaaaculus! made Owlchemy one of the first serious developers for the Oculus Rift.

Now, the studio is preparing for the release of Job Simulator, an offbeat virtual reality toybox about (usually badly) performing jobs like cooking and convenience store management. Job Simulator has been touring with Valve and HTC’s Vive headset, but at Oculus Connect, Owlchemy has announced that it’s also going to support the Oculus Touch motion controllers. That officially puts the game on both PC virtual reality headsets, set for release whenever the Vive and Rift end up going on sale. They’ve also got a new job to announce — office worker — and a Connect session about making standing, room-scale games. Before the announcement, I got to ask Owlchemy “chief scientist” Alex Schwartz a few questions about the state of virtual reality.

Walking through the darkened hallways of Epic Games, I know three things about the secret project I’m about to see.

The first is that it bears the promisingly straightforward title Bullet Train. The second is that it’s an experience built for Oculus Touch, arguably the most advanced motion control system that ordinary people stand a chance of using. The third is that it’s the biggest step Epic has taken into the emerging medium of virtual reality.

The Windows 10 version of Minecraft will be compatible with the Oculus Rift headset, according to a Microsoft representative that took the stage at today’s Oculus Connect 2. Further details are sparse, but we’ll learn more closer to the update’s release in spring 2016.

The event, centered around Oculus’ virtual reality headset, has hosted a handful of video game-related announcements, but the inclusion of Minecraft is fascinating because of the role the game currently serves in Microsoft’s own mixed-reality device. At this year’s E3, Microsoft showed a special demonstration of Minecraft for its augmented reality headset, HoloLens. It was without question HoloLens’ standout, the closest we’ve seen to a killer app. Bringing Minecraft to Oculus shows Microsoft’s commitment to bringing the blockbuster world-creation title to practically every platform powerful enough to play a video game — not just its own hardware.

Samsung and Oculus have announced a new Gear VR mobile virtual reality headset, and it’s coming before Black Friday. At today’s Oculus Connect show, Samsung executive Peter Koo said that the latest Gear VR will work with Samsung’s whole 2015 line of smartphones — previous editions worked with either the Galaxy S6 or the Note 4.

Read next: The Samsung Gear S2 review.