Oculus Connect 3: The biggest news from Facebook’s big VR event – The Verge

Seven VR predictions from Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe

2016-10-11T14:32:16-04:00

Oculus announced a surprising amount of VR news at last week's Connect conference. Its research division teased a new all-in-one headset, parent company Facebook demonstrated some new social features, and most pertinently for many VR enthusiasts, Oculus cut the minimum requirements for its Rift headset, reducing the cost of entry by hundreds of dollars. (Even if it's still quite an investment.) Then, Oculus chief scientist Michael Abrash came out and gave an extremely detailed talk about what features VR headsets will include by 2021.

But this still left us with a lot of questions about Oculus' vision. How does the Rift's two-camera motion …

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Facebook’s Michael Booth answers our questions about VR social networks

2016-10-07T15:20:35-04:00

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At Oculus Connect conference yesterday, we got a glimpse of what Facebook was after when it got into virtual reality: a VR environment where you can feel like you're hanging out in the same physical space as your friends, complete with realistic body language and emotional responses. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared in virtual reality with some of his colleagues to play cards, travel to a simulation of Mars, and hold a video call with his wife.

One of those colleagues was Michael Booth, Facebook's product manager for social VR. Booth comes from the world of game development, but what he's helping to build now isn't just a Facebook-owne …

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Why it’s cool that there’s no gender option in Oculus Avatars

2016-10-07T12:01:00-04:00

When I put on a headset to try out Oculus' new virtual reality avatar system earlier today, the first thing I did was look for the gender toggle. From Second Life to Pokémon Go, this is so ingrained in my understanding of character-creation menus that I barely noticed what I was doing, until I realized that the option wasn't there.

Instead of "male" or "female," Oculus Avatars starts you straight off with picking your face and hair from a single side-scrolling list. Clothes are organized vaguely by theme and type, like "jacket," "unique," and "sci-fi." You can pick something as masculine or feminine as you want, but you have to actively por …

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The 8 biggest stories from Oculus Connect 3

2016-10-06T17:03:03-04:00

Today's Oculus Connect 3 keynote covered a lot of ground. Over two hours of speechmaking Facebook and Oculus executives covered everything from release dates, prices, content, social, and diversity, to mobile SDKs and foveated rendering. If you want to relive it the way it happened, you can check out our liveblog, or watch the whole keynote on Facebook.

Here are some of the highlights:

Mark Zuckerberg took a VR selfie

Facebook's CEO is an obvious fan of VR, and not just in a I-spent-$2-billion-on-this-so-it-better-be-good sort of way. He explained how he's been sharing VR with world leaders, and then went on to do an extensive live demo of …

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I built a beautiful VR avatar in the Oculus Rift

2016-10-06T16:43:58-04:00

Earlier today, at its Connect keynote, Oculus announced a new avatar system for its Rift - and eventually Gear VR - headsets. Yes, the avatar is not exactly a new piece of technology, even in VR. You can already build an avatar in AltspaceVR or vTime, and Facebook has its own animated avatar setup that Mark Zuckerberg showed off on stage. But these avatars are classy, and I made one.

Instead of being either cartoonish or photorealistic, Oculus decided to go for severe monochrome busts with floating hands. Put on the Rift, and you can see something like a virtual mirror, where you can pick a face shape, a hairstyle, a pair of glasses, and an …

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The five best VR experiences we saw at Oculus Connect’s demo day

2016-10-06T14:30:03-04:00

Only at a VR show would a day of playing video games feel like a workout. Oculus started its third Connect conference with an eight-hour block of demos, mostly for the upcoming Touch motion controllers. (And even all those hours weren't enough time for us to catch everything.) A few we'd seen before, most we hadn't - and here are our five favorite ones.

Superhot

I first played Superhot on the Oculus Rift back in 2014, when the new development kit with positional tracking had just come out and I was so excited to be able to move my head a whole 12 inches in virtual reality. How times have changed. As in its non-VR iteration, Superhot is a sty …

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Here’s what you’ll be playing with the new Oculus Touch controllers

2016-10-06T14:14:29-04:00

We finally know exactly what you'll be playing when Oculus' Touch controllers launch in December. Today at its Oculus Connect keynote, the company unveiled a number of new titles that will support its fledgling controllers, including apocalyptic sci-fi shooter Arktika.1 from the creators of the grim Metro series, and Lone Echo from Ready at Dawn, a narrative-driven game about being trapped on a space station. Epic Games, meanwhile, will release its own sci-fi first-person shooter called Robo Recall set in an iRobot-esque universe. Robo Recall will be available for free early next year.

In addition to games, Oculus announced that a number of …

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Mark Zuckerberg’s new VR pitch sounds like Steve Jobs introducing the iPad

2016-10-06T14:12:23-04:00

Moments ago at Oculus Connect 3, Mark Zuckerberg gave a very brief look at a prototype standalone VR headset that Oculus and Facebook are collaborating on. But the way Zuckerberg presented it was very familiar; it was basically a direct callback to Steve Jobs' introduction of the original iPad in 2010. The pitch is identical: something magnificent that fits between lightweight mobile devices and powerful PC environments.

Behind Zuckerberg on stage was a slide showing Samsung's mobile Gear VR on one side, and the more powerful, PC-tethered Oculus Rift on the other. The thing that VR needs to reach mass adoption, Zuck said, is something in th …

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Oculus will soon be able to work with a much cheaper gaming PC

2016-10-06T14:05:57-04:00

Brendan Iribe, the CEO of Oculus, announced today the the company's VR system will now be compatible with much cheaper, less powerful PCs. In the past Oculus had certified a number of machines as compatible, but all cost around $1,000 at a minimum. Today it showed off some new engineering advances that allow Oculus to provide a smooth VR experience with a PC that costs just $499.

To make VR feel truly immersive, and to avoid nausea, it helps to have your software running at 90 frames per second. That is very demanding on your hardware, and even the best machines sometimes drop a frame. To fix that Oculus has developed two systems: Timewarp …

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Oculus announces new $49 in-ear headphones for the Rift

2016-10-06T14:04:57-04:00

Oculus has announced a new way to listen to audio while immersed in the Rift virtual reality headset: a set of in-ear headphones that can be used in place of the on-ear headphones that currently come with the device. The new earbuds cost $49 and will ship in December.

Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe boasts that the earbuds sound as good as headsets that costs much more, but we'll reserve judgement on them until we're able to test that independently.

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