Here are the announcements from the keynote at Oculus Connect 6, many of which revolved around the Oculus Quest (reviewed here)! Here are the highlights (the full keynote is below).
Oculus Quest sales (5:40 of the full keynote – see below): “selling as fast as we can make them”; high retention; people have bought more than $100M of content from the Quest store.
Oculus Link (8:00 of the keynote): You’ll be able to use Oculus Quest to play Rift desktop VR games. The Quest will need to be tethered with a USB Type C cable, and will be limited to 72 fps refresh rate. However, the games will otherwise have the same graphics as Rift S. You will still, however, require a VR-ready PC. Note: You can use any Type C cable, but the Oculus cable is designed for maximum throughput and will be long enough not to interfere with your movement. This feature is due for release in November.
Hugh Hou of CreatorUp got to try it out (see around 2:00 of this video):
Hand tracking for Oculus Quest (09:40 of the keynote): Oculus Quest will be able to track both of your hands without the use of any additional hardware or sensors. Oculus Quest will be able to track your hand movements as well as your finger movements. This is incredible, considering that Quest is running on a mobile chipset (Snapdragon 835). This will be released in beta “early next year.”
This is going to have a huge impact on the industry, and it just destroys the $999 Valve Index, whose key feature is supposed to be finger tracking.
Neural interface (13:24 of the keynote): a wristband that will provide a non-invasive neural interface.
Social experience in VR (14:58 of the keynote): socially connected VR. Post to Facebook within VR.
Oculus Horizon (15:48 of the keynote): Oculus is launching a new virtual social environment that will enable people to create their own space. It sounded similar to the Oasis in Ready Player One. Launching next year.
Oculus TV (26:00 of the keynote): watch TV in VR together with your family and friends. What’s new is that the enivronment will be more realistic.
Passthrough+: This is an improved feature for Oculus Quest. Passthrough enables you to see outside the VR headset. Passthrough+ will remove distortion and will make it possible to instantly see the passthrough view. This will be released next week!
Media Studio: You can upload your 360 and VR content to media studio and see the analytics. However, there is no monetization feature.
Mixed reality: more accurate and detailed depth mapping to create detailed 3D environments.
Social teleportation: photorealistic avatars that will be able to track facial expressions and body movements.
Here is the full keynote from Day 1 of Oculus Connect 6:
All very exciting news!