‘A new chapter of virtual and augmented reality’ arrives September 25th.
Facebook’s sixth annual Oculus Connect will take place September 25th & 26th at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, CA, introducing developers, content creators, and other VR fanatics to the latest advancements made by the Oculus team. Last year at OC5 we received our first official look at the Oculus Quest, went hands-on with several standalone 6DoF VR experiences, and learned more about Expressive Avatars technology.
This year it appears as though we’ll be treated to new updates regarding not only their VR lineup, but some potential AR projects as well.
According to the official Oculus Connect website, “The future we’ve all been working towards starts here. It’s our moment to think bigger, build smarter, and realize the true potential of what we’ve created together. This year, we hope you’ll join us to begin a new chapter of virtual and augmented reality.”
What this statement is alluding to is anyone’s guess at this point, although based on an interview conducted earlier this year between Ficus Kirkpatrick—Facebook’s Head of AR—and Techcrunch, this could be referencing Facebook’s long-talked-about AR glasses.
“Yeah! Well of course we’re working on it,” states Kirkpatrick in the 8-month-old interview. “We are building hardware products. We’re going forward on this . . . We want to see those glasses come into reality, and I think we want to play our part in helping to bring them there.”
Combine that with job listings posted by Facebook back in September in search of engineers experienced in custom AR chips, as well as several patent applications for AR glasses back in 2017, and the odds are good we’ll be seeing some type of AR headset in the near future.
In terms of VR, Oculus has confirmed that a AAA VR combat experience developed by Respawn Entertainment (Apex Legends, Titanfall, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order), teased originally during OC4 back in 2017, will be making an appearance during the two-day event.
While we’ve received no official word on its appearance, we’re keeping our hopes up for more information concerning the companies mysterious varifocal half-dome prototype headset teased during SID Display Week 2018. The headset supposedly features an impressive 140-degree field-of-view, native eye-tracking, and varifocal optics.
