Introducing Oculus Developer Hub

Hello. My name is Thomas McGlynn, and I'm an engineer on the VR Developer Engagement team at Facebook Reality Labs. Our goal is to help developers successfully create and publish VR experiences.

In our Facebook Connect session today, we announced the launch of the Oculus Developer Hub (ODH), a central hub that improves the VR development experience and the way developers interface with Oculus headsets from their PC or Mac.

Since VR development requires you to develop 3D experiences from a 2D screen, we introduced the ODH to streamline the transition between these two modes.

Within the ODH, the Device Manager provides several toggles to aid your development workflow. For example, Guardian is essential to safely interact with the virtual world, showing a boundary when activated. As a developer, it’s often useful to briefly disable Guardian and quickly enable it at will. ODH allows you to quickly do this with a single click. Another example is a proximity sensor. By disabling it, you can ensure that the headset display will remain on, even when you’re not wearing it. This is useful if you need to work on your development machine without the headset display going to sleep.

ODH also helps you easily discover tools to aid in your development process, like OVR Metrics, which gives you a VR overlay of performance information about a running app. Performance metrics include frame rate, heat, GPU and CPU throttling values, tears, and stale frames per second. ODH makes it easy to install and enable OVR Metrics within your headset, with a simple interface. This tool is invaluable in understanding performance degradation within your VR project.

Another useful feature of ODH is casting, which lets you mirror your headset display inside of ODH. This gives you the ability to view the virtual environment without wearing the headset. Screenshot Capture saves still images of your headset display directly on the computer running ODH. You can also begin recording live video with the click of a button. These tools offer simple ways to capture content from your headset and aid your workflow.

All of these device capabilities can also be used wirelessly by enabling ADB over Wifi. This means you can toggle Guardian, toggle Proximity Sensor, cast, capture screenshots and video—all without your headset being tethered to a computer.

Oculus Developer Hub is the central access point for development tools, many of which can be installed on your computer alongside ODH. The best way to discover, install, launch, and stay updated on these tools is within the Package Manager. ODH organizes companion tools into tabs: Installed, Available, and Updates. The Installed tab is where you launch tools and access documentation. The Available tab is where you discover and install new tools. The Updates tab will inform you when there are new versions of an installed tool and allow you to easily update.

Notifications are fundamental to real-time information within Oculus Developer Hub and keep you connected to the information you need without the added step of going to the dev site. Tool update notifications will tell you when a new tool or update is available and ready to install. App submission notifications will tell you when your app submission has completed or been rejected. Build notifications will tell you when new builds are submitted for a specific application. Team notifications will tell you when a new member is added to your organization. There are many notification types, which you can learn more about in the Developer Hub Documentation.

Home is where you can see your most commonly used actions and resources come together in one place. You can browse details for apps within your organization, view real-time performance metrics for your device, and get access to commonly used actions within the Oculus Developer website, including popular documentation pages and all of the latest news and information from Oculus Developer Blog.

Virtual reality is a new frontier of technology and society. You can fully immerse yourself in any experience imaginable. As a developer, you have access to a canvas unlike any that has ever existed before. The Oculus Developer Hub was created to ease and streamline the process of creating VR. Download today for Windows or macOS and start using these features to level up your development workflow—and stay tuned for monthly updates.