ICYMI: Day 1 at GDC 2018

Day 1 at GDC is a wrap, and what a day! Our favorite part was catching up with you, our developer community and hearing what you're all working on. It was great to meet so many of you in person.

In case we missed you, below is a brief recap of yesterday's announcements and sessions during GDC 2018. We hope to see you tomorrow at the event or online, stay tuned on our Facebook page for livestreams⁠.

First, we shared more details about Oculus Go so that you can make the most of the platform. As our first standalone headset, we're taking advantage of full end-to-end stack ownership to introduce new efficiencies to you, including new technologies like Fixed Foveated Rendering and Dynamic Throttling. You can check these out first-hand by demoing Oculus Go at the Oculus Booth, right at the front of South Hall (Booth #401) OR by requesting to join the Oculus Start program for your dev kits. We're demoing three new launch titles in the booth: Settlers of Catan, Anshar Online, and They Suspect Nothing.

We also shared some exciting updates for Project Santa Cruz, namely that we're continuing to explore controller prototypes — including controllers that would be closer to Touch.

Santa Cruz is a fully tracked, standalone, 6DOF headset with tracked hand controllers. The tracking and tracked controllers are implemented with inside-out tracking, with four cameras mounted on the headset itself. The hardware can push significantly more power without overheating than any other device we've seen. It's a completely different kind of VR headset from our other standalone headset, Oculus Go, and is is a lot more like Rift in the experiences and content it can drive. It's a first for the industry and we're proud to be leading the way.

If you caught our featured session, Director of Engineering Ross O'Dwyer touched on some recent runtime advancements we've introduced to ensure smooth performance even as we stretch the boundaries of PC spec. Dash, one of the key features of Core 2.0, has added a lot of utility and helped increase time spent in VR.

Dash support requires depth information for your apps. By providing access to the scene information when you submit frames, you can help your users take full advantage of Dash. With Core 2.0 exiting beta later this year, you'll want to make sure your apps will perform their best...and today we revealed one more runtime feature helping you achieve this.

Like ASW and ATW, Positional Timewarp (PTW) is part of our runtime's secret sauce. PTW is a technique that reduces judder when moving laterally through an environment. Today, PTW is used internally to helps us ensure smooth performance with Dash, but we're exploring unblocking it for future developer benefit, too. We'll talk more about work on PTW in a future post. For more on integrating Dash, be sure to check out our docs.

Our first round of in booth sessions focused on taking your VR app to the next level by diving into best practices, tools, and recommendations for the Oculus Platform. From concept through to launch, the Oculus team shared some of the best ways to build memorable human impact into your game to maximize retention, reviewed Virtual Reality Checks and Release Channels to get you ready for the Oculus technical review process, and shared some of the best-kept secrets to successful VR applications and launches.

Two development teams joined us in the booth today - Hidden Path Entertainment and OZWE Games⁠. Hidden Path Entertainment is the team behind Brass Tactics⁠, one of our most recent launches on Rift. They talked through some of the most challenging aspects of bringing familiar RTS gameplay to VR using the Oculus Touch controllers ultimately making it easier for new players to pick up the game.

In case you missed any of today's sessions, check out our archived live streams below!

We have another full line up of in-booth sessions to help you along your VR journey. Some highlights include: How to Make the Most of the Rift SDK, the Future of Rendering with Unity, Optimizing with Unreal's Profiler, and a Live AMA with the Oculus Head of Development Relations Engineering - Chris Pruett. We'll also hear from the Experiment 7⁠, Coatsink⁠, and Baobab⁠.

Check out the full schedule here!