Oculus Connect 5: Tech talks roundup

October 12, 2018

Oculus Connect is Oculus’s annual virtual reality developer conference, where augmented reality and VR developers and creators from around the world come together to collaborate and share ideas to push the VR industry forward. At this year’s conference, in addition to introducing Oculus Quest, the first all-in-one gaming system built for VR, developers and engineers shared deep dives into the technical challenges they’ve been working on and how their solutions will affect the future of VR.

Recommended Reading

Below are summaries and videos of some of the technical talks from this year’s Oculus Connect. To see all the sessions from OC5, visit the Oculus Connect website.

The best way to get the real feeling of presence in VR is to share an experience with someone else. In this session, John debunks the myth about how challenging it is to build a multiplayer VR experience. He walks through a Unity sample project step by step to help you build with invites and matchmaking, coordinated app launch and avatars, and VoIP and P2P networking.

Unity’s SRP allows developers a greater degree of control and customizability. Tony and Brad introduce the new High Definition Render Pipeline and discuss the challenges of rendering objects in VR, including the demand for a high, consistent frame rate and resolution, and the need to keep the experience consistent across two screens. The level of customization available with SRPs lets developers keep their render pipeline lean, maximizing for the assets they want and stripping out resource-intensive parts that aren’t necessary.

RenderDoc is a debugging tool run on PC and used by developers to show exactly what their application is doing. In this talk, Remi explains how it can be used to fix issues and optimize performance for apps running on Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest. He discusses how Ocean Rift, an experience about exploring the ocean, and Epic Roller Coasters, a multiplayer roller coaster racing game, maximize their performance by creatively limiting the textures and geometry they have to render.