Facebook for the first time will offer a special VR livestream of the keynote presentation at the company’s upcoming F8 2019 developer conference. Users with Oculus Go or Gear VR headsets will be able to watch in VR, but it’s unclear if there will be a VR livestream that’s accessible by Rifters.
Facebook will offer a VR livestream for the keynote of its upcoming F8 developer conference which will be held in San Jose, CA on April 30th and May 1st. The company is expected to launch (or announce the launch of) its upcoming VR headsets (Quest and Rift S) during the conference.
The opening keynote (which is said to include Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and others) will take place on April 30th at 10AM PT. The VR livestream will happen in the Oculus Venues app which is available on Oculus Go and Gear VR, but not on Rift; users can ‘Subscribe’ to the event via their Oculus account to mark their interest. A non-VR livestream will be available as well.
At the company’s AR/VR focused Oculus Connect conference last year, Facebook also offered a VR livestream of the event’s keynote via Venues which showed a wide-angle VR perspective from the front row of the presentation while allowing virtual users to watch together at the same time. At the time there was no way for Rift users to watch that version of the livestream because the Venues app is only available on the company’s mobile headsets.
As for the upcoming F8 keynote, isn’t clear if Facebook will offer some version of the VR livestream that can be seen on the Rift beyond simply calling up the non-VR livestream in a virtual desktop app.