Day 2 at OC6: Session and Show Floor Highlights

This week brought a massive number of Oculus news, insights, conversations and learnings. From new technology like the Half Dome 3 prototype and hand tracking for Quest, to the developer-focused features like Purchase Funnel Analytics and Mixed Reality Capture, we’re excited to see how you leverage these new products to build and deploy your VR games + applications. See below for the presentation highlights and show floor demos that shined on Day 2 of OC6, while even more in-depth content focused on developer learnings are coming in the very near future.

Hear from our data science + software engineering team as they provide VR consumer insights like genre preference, the importance of localization and discoverability trends. We’re also excited to share a number of updates to the store experience, and new developer features: Purchase Funnel Metrics and Developer Posts.

J.J. Hoesing, Senior XR Engineer at Unity and Neel Bedekar, Oculus Software Engineer discuss the new Unity XR architecture, providing background on how it works, the resulting benefits + improvements, and the ins and outs of leveraging Unity’s new Universal Render Pipeline with Oculus Quest.

Jules Blok from Epic games shares a number of learnings and insights on OpenXR and building XR applications with UE4. This overview includes topics like runtime selection, frame blocking and the history + future plans for the OpenXR plugin.

Lead by the Oculus UX and Product Design teams, this presentation provided many learnings and best practices for how to enable identity and social engagement in your VR games and applications.

On Wednesday we announced that the Oculus For Business Platform is launching in November. The team behind this upcoming launch provided a chance to check out the device management app, where enterprise users can remotely set up and configure multiple headsets from a single mobile device. The booth also included a walkthrough of the Device Manager which is deployed on the Desktop. In this view, you can monitor your devices battery level and wifi connectivity strength. You can also group devices together via the desktop web app, streamlining how enterprise users manage content on their Oculus devices. Lastly, our Oculus for Business services will also include a kiosk and controller-free modes, enabling even more scalable opportunities for enterprise applications.

This week’s Hand Tracking announcement included a show floor demo that was a priority for many at OC6. The demo, developed by Talespin in Unity, is a Farmers Insurance training module, a timed experience where the user practices locating and selecting certain water-damaged areas of a kitchen setting. As this was the first opportunity for most to try a controller-free, immersive experience, many began by testing the technology by looking at their hands from different angles and making different grab/pinch gestures. From there, the demo invites users to interact with items within the room. While the gestures were simply and clearly designed, it is interesting to note the elevated level of immersion when hand tracking is enabled.

Check out the OC6 session below featuring Mike Nichols from the Talespin team as he dives deep into the interaction design involved in his initial experience with hand tracking on the Quest.

It’s been an amazing OC6. Be sure to check out the Oculus Youtube page for more sessions on demand. Thanks to all of you who attended, demoed, collaborated and connected at this year’s event. For those that were unable to make it to San Jose this year, our team will be working to share a number of in-depth articles on the learnings/insights from OC6 here on the developer blog over the next few months. Stay tuned!