The opening keynote at the fourth annual Oculus Connect developer conference delivered several new product announcements from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, VP of Virtual Reality Hugo Barra, and others. This included new standalone VR hardware, a new price for the Rift, and many software and game reveals.
Today at Oculus Connect 4, the company’s annual developer conference, Oculus revealed the Project Santa Cruz ‘Prototype 2’ standalone VR headset, including 6DOF motion controllers. Though it might not look obviously different at a distance than the original prototype showed off last year, up close it’s clear that it’s actually a big step forward, including new lenses and a new display.
Ubisoft today announced that Space Junkies, the multiplayer arcade VR shooter, is going into closed beta in early 2018. We got a chance to go hands-on with a more developed prototype of the game at this year’s Oculus Connect, and while many of the basics haven’t changed much from our time with it at E3, it’s certainly shaping up to be a fuller experience with more crazy guns and at least 4 giant arena-sized maps for the closed beta.
Today at Oculus Connect 4, the company’s Head of Content, Jason Rubin, announced that Oculus Studios will be publishing a Rift exclusive title made by Respawn Entertainment, the studio founded by ex-Call of Duty, and the creators of Titanfall.
Ready at Dawn’s single player sci-fi adventure Lone Echo (2017) already has its multiplayer mode, the much beloved sports game Echo Arena, but the studio says it’s bringing out a new first-person shooter multiplayer mode called Echo Combat, and also an expansion to the Lone Echo game.
Following their highly successful Summer of Rift Sale, Oculus have announced a permanent price cut of the Rift headset and Touch controller package to $399. The new price was revealed by Hugo Barra, Oculus’ Vice President of Virtual Reality at the opening keynote to Oculus Connect 4.
Today at Oculus Connect, Oculus’ Head of Rift, Nate Mitchell, announced the ‘Core 2.0’ update coming to Rift on PC which brings Oculus Dash, a total overhaul to the store and library experience on Rift, which also allows you to use desktop PC apps inside of VR on virtual monitors.
Oculus Home is getting a full overhaul in the new Rift Core 2.0 update coming this December, which promises to add a level of user customization that will let you create a unique, persistent space that you can invite friends to.
Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg took the stage today at Oculus Connect 4, the company’s VR developer conference, to tell the crowd that the high-end standalone Project Santa Cruz VR headset will be heading to devs next year and it will be coming with 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF) controllers.
On stage at Oculus Connect 4 today, Oculus revealed the Oculus Go headset, the company’s affordability-focused standalone VR headset.
Oculus Connect, the company’s annual developer conference, goes down this week in San Jose, California on the 11th and 12th at the McEnery Convention Center. If you aren’t attending in person you can catch the keynote livestream on several platforms, including in VR, officially on Rift and Gear VR for the first time.
Cloudborn is an indie first-person VR exploration game, currently available on Steam Early Access, where the player is tasked with ‘cleansing the corruption’ by traversing the world to reach ‘cores’ using an intuitive climbing mechanic. Unfortunately, the “melancholic journey of discovery and serenity” is sometimes rudely interrupted by the temperamental movement system.
At today’s GTC Europe conference in Munich, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced an Early Access program for Holodeck, their photorealistic, collaborative VR viewer. Described as the “design lab of the future”, Nvidia Holodeck aims to provide a highly immersive platform for industrial design and development.
HTC may have more than one new headset in sight than we initially thought when it registered the name ‘Vive Focus’ in the EU and US. It came to light via the Dutch publication Lets Go Digital that HTC has also applied for a trademark for the name ‘Vive Eclipse’ in New Zealand.
The team behind Bigscreen, the app that lets you view and share your desktop in social VR, today announced they’ve raised $11 million in Series A financing. The funding round, which comes only a year after their initial $3 million seed round, was led by True Ventures with participation from Andreessen Horowitz.
