Greetings from Sunny and Beautiful San Jose, California!
What a great first day at Facebook’s Oculus Connect 6 (OC6)! Wow, is there a lot to talk about! Here are some highlights from my informative first day!
Hand Tracking On The Quest Is Here!!
What a relief and one of the more important takeaways from day 1! After converting most of our VR experience at CADmech to the Oculus Quest, there was just one thing that missing; hand tracking! Hand tracking allows a user to feel presence of their hands in VR and adds a different dimension to your VR experiences that brings it just that much closer to full body immersion. Thankfully, during the keynote on day 1, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced the release of hand tracking capabilities to the Quest that is due to launch sometime in early 2020. That’s not all! For everyone at OC6, there was a demo from Farmer’s Insurance that featured this new hand tracking capability on the Quest.
After a long lineup (2 hours ☹), I finally got to try it! To my surprise, it actually worked really well. Even after being demoed over and over again for hours, I thought the processing power for hand tracking would’ve caused the device to overheat or lose tracking capabilities but that wasn’t the case. Overall, the hand tracking capabilities were on par with Leap Motions, but obviously with the added benefit of it being completely wireless and processed all on the Quest. Now it still lacks the haptic feedback of hand presence in VR, so it’s still hard to say if this is the optimal solution to have hands in VR especially with the recent merge between Leap Motion and Ultrahaptics.
Oculus Link
Oculus Link allows users the ability to play all their favorite Oculus Rift games right on their Quest but would require a gaming PC and to be tethered using a USB-C cable (launching in Nov).
Facebook AR Glasses
Facebook announced that they are in fact working on AR glasses. Not much about this technology was released but it seems like Facebook Reality Labs is working hard on accomplishing this. Something to keep an eye out for.
Facebook Horizon
Lastly, Facebook Horizon is Facebook’s new social VR platform. It allows users the ability to have custom avatars in the VR realm and for you to connect with friends in a virtual space to play games, explore, and many more.
Overall, OC6 day 1 was amazing and I can’t wait to write about the cool things I come across on day 2.
Follow along on our Instagram to see day 1 of the conference as well as day 2 live on our story!
