July Monthly Release Notes

In an effort to make developing for Oculus easier, last month we coordinated all tech updates to launch on one release date. Thanks so much for your feedback. The coordinated release date was well received by everyone. As such, we'll continue the process for July.

July's releases include new features and improvements within the updates that will help you continue to push the bounds of VR.

We started working on mixed reality capture support over the past few months in front of a lot of green screens. Using our new stack, developers can create videos and other content that merges live footage of people using Rift and Touch in the real world with in-game footage from VR apps. Check out our documentation for more details on creating mixed reality content as well as our guides for integrating with Unity, Unreal, and the Rift native SDK.

New this month from the Unity Integrations Team: All Oculus Unity plugins are shipping in a single package called "Oculus Integration" through the Asset Store! Now, you'll be able to easily pull all the latest Oculus features into your applications with the updated 1.15.0 integration.

Last month we announced full support for a new, merged Oculus plugin in our branch of Unreal 4. This month, we extend that work by overhauling our Blueprints to provide the functionality you're already familiar with. Be sure to check out our Blueprints documentation for details.

The Oculus 1.16 branch of Unreal adds graphics debugging support for Gear VR development, including experimental RenderDoc support (requires a nightly RenderDoc build) and Mali Graphics Debugger support if you're developing with a Mali phone such as the Android GALAXY S6).

To help developers and sound designers download the specific plugins needed for their projects, we've split the audio SDK into separate packages for the latest 1.16 release.

The Audio Manager extends the Unity sound system to provide some useful high level features and is integrated with the Oculus Audio Spatializer. Some features include: instance management, randomization, and fading sound. Instance management makes it easier for audio and level designers to maintain audio events separately from scene files. It includes easy to use scripts which allow for the playback of sound instances.

The Unity Ambisonics now supports playing Ambisonics with the Oculus Audio Spatializer Unity integration. Note that this integration requires Unity 2017.

Lipsync for our OVRLipSync plugin for Unity now allows your audio to be processed offline—greatly reducing runtime CPU usage for prerecorded dialog. This makes it a great solution for generating animations for characters, particularly for use on Gear VR.