Oculus Connect 5 OT (26-27.September)

Oh yeah, Abrash, here we go!

Yes we're getting an update from what he said 2 years ago!

Edit: he just said his predictions (in 2016, Oculus Connect 3) was off by a year, thus 4 more years from now, not 3, for the future Oculus Rift? so 2022 instead of 2021.

I'll watch me some Abrash when this gets rehosted onto Youtube.

No! The broadcast died!

Second use of facebook in a year, second time I'll leave thinking "this is such a trash platform". Why doesn't your stream work, guys?

Stream dead?

Yeah stream RIP

WTF. I thought they want to establish a platform like youtube. There are only 6.5k viewers and this dies? Really now?

Maybe 4 years from now Facebook will know how to do streaming content. What say you, Abrash?

Wollan said:

Abrash predicts that Foveated rendering will happen within 4 years (according to his OC3 predictions it would happen within 3 years from 2018).
10x rendering improvement could be possible.

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With things like DLSS already becoming available, I do think we have a bright future thanks to Deep Learning.

What utter garbage their FB player is. I tuned in for the best part(Michael Abrash) and it's dead. :/

Well I guess I will wait for the youtube version. Livestream is dead.

Its back on facebook too now

Aww missed some photogrammetry stuff.

Trash stream quality. I will continue watching when YT version becomes available.

How is reconstructed people gonna work when everybody is (ostensibly) wearing a big-ass VR visor blocking their faces?

jett said:

How is reconstructed people gonna work when everybody is (ostensibly) wearing a big-ass VR visor blocking their faces?

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They showed this off at F8 this year. They were demoing their lip sync technology.



There were other companies trying to use sensors in the facial inserts to track facial movement as well.

jett said:

How is reconstructed people gonna work when everybody is (ostensibly) wearing a big-ass VR visor blocking their faces?

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Just take a pair of photos before to feed the AI in the avatar setup?

Facebook stream is trash, it crashed. I'll wait for Youtube.

Well, the Quest doesn't make me regret picking up a Rift a few days ago. Wouldn't want something that's not connected to my PC.

I hope that "Mario 64 for VR" means the end of "everything is a shooting gallery".

Wollan said:

It must have been Astro Bot Rescue Mission as nothing was announced for next week at OC5.

Unless Valve has a surprise...

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I always misread that as Astro Boy.

Lone Echo II is exciting. Yeah, we knew about it already, but to see it, and think that we might get to play it next year is exciting. That was easily the best VR game I've played, and would have been a system seller if new IP were capable of selling something like VR (it's not).

Quest looks like a very good product. I am skeptical to what extent it will offer a "Rift-like experience" in terms of performance, but I be the optics and screen resolution make up for it a bit. I like the way they're framing it as the last piece of their first gen lineup. Seems like Rift 2 is still a long ways off though. Was hoping we'd get a Half Dome successor.

StereoVSN said:

As long as they get away from the current camera solution and then go with that new standard for single USB-C cable, it would probably be ok. The main issue is less Oculus itself and more the cameras. Mounting Lighthouse is so much easier.

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Oculus cameras are no more fuss than Vive's lighthouses, but if people are happy with the hand tracking in Quest I think it's entirely possible they could go that route for Rift 2, or maybe even support both.

Wollan said:

It must have been Astro Bot Rescue Mission as nothing was announced for next week at OC5.

Unless Valve has a surprise...

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I doubt it's anything we know about right now. But what is happening next week?

https://twitter.com/horwitz/status/1044920671791456256?s=21

I'm guessing we didn't get any further teases of Rift 2 in order to not steal the limelight from Quest. Next year then, hopefully.

Wollan said:

It must have been Astro Bot Rescue Mission as nothing was announced for next week at OC5.

Unless Valve has a surprise...

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I didn't even look at the date of that tweet. I just assumed it was someone digging up an old tweet from last week (because of the conference beginning today). In hindsight, that tweet obviously has nothing to do with Oculus or else they would have just shown it during this conference.

If he's to be believed, and he's not prone to hyperbole, it certainly sounds like he's talking about something that's unknown at the moment.

I'm skeptical it's about Valve. Didn't Valve unveil Knuckles right before a previous OC? I feel like if they had anything to unveil at the moment, they would have peed in Oculus' cereal by doing it before the conference.

He says he covers Apple, 5G, and VR. With such hyperbole, you could almost think it was something Apple related. But Apple is more interested in AR that's also VR capable. So I don't think Apple has anything to do with it.

I'm completely stumped. I genuinely saw that tweet and assumed the Santa Clara prototype was going to have eye tracking built in and they were going to blow people away with a game/app that really melted people's brains. A Mario 64 moment really means something to anyone old enough to realize how mind blowing that unveiling was (and the effects it had on the industry).

EDIT: Rereading the entire sequence of tweets, maybe it is Valve. Not sure how anything other than a Valve game being demo'd on Knuckles can possibly compare. He specifically mentions Shiggy demonstrating it to the world and how Mario taught the world 3D controls. What other combo can live up to that buildup?

GeoGonzo said:

I'm guessing we didn't get any further teases of Rift 2 in order to not steal the limelight from Quest. Next year then, hopefully.

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Yeah. Makes sense that they would just keep it behind close doors and only show it to close developer partners. Still some chance they'll be tweets about their impressions. But spotlight is definitely on their 2019 product.

HyGogg said:

Oculus cameras are no more fuss than Vive's lighthouses, but if people are happy with the hand tracking in Quest I think it's entirely possible they could go that route for Rift 2, or maybe even support both.

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Oculus requires you to run a USB cable from a PC. Lighthouse just needs a power source. That's a huge difference.

StereoVSN said:

Oculus requires you to run a USB cable from a PC. Lighthouse just needs a power source. That's a huge difference.

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Depends on your set up. In my room the USB thing is more convenient. In others it might not be. I don't think one or the other is inherently more convenient.

Oculus's USB bandwidth usage, on the other hand, is kind of a problem, especially for people on older motherboards.

So according to Zuckerberg, VR ecosystems need 10 million (active) users to be self sustaining. He emphasized that this doesn't mean 10 million accross all VR platforms (because as a dev, you have to support each individually), but 10 million for each.

This is why Go and Quest are so important to turn VR into a healthy market. Quest is basically VR's Switch, a home console class mobile system, which you can take to and show off at parties. Imagine what Super Hot can do for VR word of mouth once you can take it anywhere and show it off like you could a DS game, or nowadays a Switch game.

The announcement of casting for Oculus Go is also very important because it supplements the much needed social screen lacking from mobile VR currently. When you are showing off a VR device to more than one person, a social screen is crucial to keep the other people not currently wearing the headset involved. They will want to take turns at the HMD and get a first hand experience of the difference between immersive and tiny displays.

Like when I watched the keynote in Oculus Venues. Sure, the stream was 2d. But it covered my whole view and the audience and seats were rendered in realtime 3d. When my battery went low and I switched to watching on my Ipad, the sense of being there was lost completely.

On one hand if this drives up VR adoption en masse, that's great. Selfishly, as a sim racer who only uses VR, there's nothing here so I have to either get an Oddessy or see when the Pimax is available.

Man I just saw the new information updated in Oculus' website and some of that stuff looks so good! Defector in particular stood out to me as a game that looks really fast paced and fun to play, alongside Stormland and Lone Echo 2 of course.

The new home improvements look great and seem to be implementing big screen mode natively into the Oculus. And the new software experiments look really cool too. Overall I'm excited for the future of VR. Glad Oculus is pioneering the industry.

Wollan said:

The keynote has been removed from Oculus YouTube account?

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Yeah, I was just going to watch it :/

GuitarGuruu said:

Defector in particular stood out to me as a game that looks really fast paced and fun to play

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I am pretty skeptical of this game.

It is made by Twisted Pixel (Wilson's Heart) and while the story was interesting it was using some really cheesy/gimmicky implementations of VR. Many of the fights in Wilson's Heart were very basic and repetitive. (Ex: Dodge bosses extremely basic attack cycle then attack...repeat x 3) and it based on a video Tested.com put out it seems like some of the interactions will be very similar to that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88vgWIBYZ_w&feature=youtu.be

SharpX68K said:

Yeah, I was just going to watch it :/

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Me too. It says ustv put in a copyright strike..?

Who the eff is ustv? Didn't Oculus upload it themselves? What grounds do they possibly have for claiming copyright infringement?

Carmack talking live now.

Posted this in the other thread: the Road To VR write-up is saying the panels are OLED. So definitely not the same screens as the Go.

I love how Carmack just talks without much script but it sucks that this causes the talk to be truncated like that.

The Switch anaology is a good one. This is gives you a "Rift-like" experience in the sense that Switch gives a console experience -- they're not really comparable in terms of power, but for many the advantages of the form factor are going to outweigh things like graphical fidelity. This is probably especially true when we talk about PSVR, which I think is really this things most direct competitor because of the price point.

People that have already invested in a high-end gaming PC are probably not the main market for this, so I don't see it really taking away from the Vive and Rift except in the sense that some people who might have considered building a system just for VR would go this route instead. But committed PC gamers are probably going to continue to use PC headsets.

HyGogg said:

The Switch anaology is a good one. This is gives you a "Rift-like" experience in the sense that Switch gives a console experience -- they're not really comparable in terms of power, but for many the advantages of the form factor are going to outweigh things like graphical fidelity. This is probably especially true when we talk about PSVR, which I think is really this things most direct competitor because of the price point.

People that have already invested in a high-end gaming PC are probably not the main market for this, so I don't see it really taking away from the Vive and Rift except in the sense that some people who might have considered building a system just for VR would go this route instead. But committed PC gamers are probably going to continue to use PC headsets.

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I'm really have trouble talking myself into spending 300 dollars on the Vive wireless adapter (although, it's not even working with Ryzen CPUs at the moment anyways). I feel like a good chunk of the games that I'd be buying the adapter for, can probably have a Quest version without much degradation. And I would absolutely prefer the Quest for media (Youtube seems like it's finally coming to Go. They really need to get the rest of the players like Amazon on board too).

So I can definitely see overlap for myself. The real answer will be in exactly what titles they have lined up, but I think I have a pretty good sense there. And if it lives up to my expectations there, I'm definitely in. It's probably the biggest reason I held off on the wireless adapter. I'd just as soon pocket that money and use if for this.