Jun 22, 2018

June Monthly Tech Updates

Oculus VR

The latest updates from the Oculus software, integrations, and docs teams are now live! This month's major updates include updated assets for the Avatar SDK, new audio features, new developer bundles on the Oculus Store, as well as updates for both our Unity and Unreal Engine integrations.

Oculus Utilities for UNITY 1.27

In the Oculus Utilities for Unity 1.27 we've added support for Asymmetric FOV in OVRDisplay, added detection of invalid texture settings to OVROverlay, and provided bug fixes for the following:

Fixed a bug affecting monoscopic functionality.
Fixed a bug preventing audio device changes from being detected correctly with OVRManager's audio events and audio device ids.
Fixed a bug preventing OVROverlay from appearing correctly when disabling and re-enabling its parent GameObject.
Removed particle trail from Gaze Cursor script.

Unreal Engine 4 integration 1.27

New features for Unreal Engine support include Mask-Based Foveated Rendering (MBFR) for Unreal developers who are targeting the Oculus Rift. MBFR reduces GPU pixel shading cost by dropping a subset of the pixels in the world rendering passes and new enhancements to the developer center's UE4 Developer guide:

Mask-Based Foveated Rendering
UE4 Developers Guide - The updated documentation now provides more detailed best practice guides, Oculus quick start guides, new samples, updated blueprints, and more. The changes to this documentation are a direct result of feedback received from our developer community. If you have any additional feedback for the developer team, please share your thoughts on the Oculus Developer forums.

Audio SDK 1.27

In the latest Audio SDK, the Oculus Spatializer plug-ins for DAW Mac and DAW Win now use additional unique colors to serve as sound sources, and to highlight the currently selected source.

Bug Fixes

The Oculus Spatializers for FMOD, Wwise, Unity, Native had a bug that caused a crash on Android when reflections were enabled on a source with a non-zero volumetric radius. This bug has been fixed in the current release. This fix applies to Oculus Go and Samsung Gear VR.

Avatar SDK 1.27

Avatar SDK 1.27 now provides compressed assets to help improve Avatar load times for PC builds. This feature is currently only available for PC but will be coming soon for mobile.

Experimental VR 5k Player

Oculus CTO John Carmack has implemented a new technique for video encoding that can improve overall video quality and visual clarity. This tool takes us one step closer to full 360 degree, 60 fps stereo to immersive video. Head over to the Oculus Developer blog to learn more about the technology and download the sample to try it out yourself!

Developer bundles on Oculus Rift

This is another developer feature request that we're excited to launch! The Oculus Rift Store now offers developer bundles so you can further showcase your catalog of applications. Bundles are offered with a small discount set by the developer team and can be found live under each included title as a promotional item.

If you're interested in offering a bundle of your launched applications please reach out to store@oculus.com to set up your bundle.

Oculus On the Road

We always love meeting you in person. Here are some events we'll be attending. Hope to see you there!

The Oculus Developer team will be attending Develop: Brighton this year from July 10 - 12. Each year, Develop brings together the European game dev community to talk about new tools, new techniques, and connect with over 2,000 developers over the course of 2 days.
We will be onsite at Gamescom 2018 from August 22-25 in Cologne, Germany.
We'll be joining Indie Megabooth at PAX West in Seattle from Aug 31 - Sep 3. Mark your calendars and keep an eye out for more information closer to the show!

Oculus Connect 5

Our next Oculus Connect conference is scheduled for September 26 - 27. Make sure you sign up to be the first to know when registration opens and apply for your developer ticket!

Oculus Start

Oculus Start members have just started receiving their Oculus Start kits! The kits include an Oculus Go, Oculus Rift, and some Oculus Start branded swag. If you're already in the program, keep an eye on your email for shipping updates.

If you'd like to join Oculus Start, head over to /oculus-start/ to see if you qualify!

- The Oculus Team

Avatar SDK

Games

Oculus Start

Rift

Unity

Unreal

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