OC5 Day 2 Highlights: Carmack’s keynote, the Innovation Zone, and more

From Santa Cruz to Oculus Quest
This year’s Oculus Connect was all about celebrating how far the VR industry has come in the past five years — and looking ahead to an even brighter future — so it’s no surprise that we’d revisit Project Santa Cruz. Originally unveiled at OC3 in 2016, Santa Cruz was the very first prototype of VR’s standalone form factor. No HDMI cables connecting you to a PC, no external sensors, no need to drop in a phone — just put on a completely untethered headset and be instantly transported to any number of virtual worlds.

Fast forward to 2017, when we introduced two positionally-tracked controllers at OC4 for a glimpse of the magic of hand presence delivered by Touch delivered with an all-in-one headset. Although we started off building an entirely new input device for Santa Cruz, we got some great feedback from the developer community, encouraging us to use the same input as Rift. It’s important that we make it easy for devs to build for both platforms to ensure the long-term health of the VR industry, and we’ll do more to unify our content ecosystems in the months and years ahead.

Check out our Day 1 recap to learn more, and read on for highlights from Day 2.

Oculus CTO John Carmack delivered his trademark unscripted keynote, where he highlighted the technical challenges and milestones facing VR developers today. Carmack discussed what the team learned from the successful Oculus Go launch, as well as what’s needed to create great experiences on Oculus Quest.

The other 16 talks on Day 2 covered topics ranging from using deep learning to create VR characters to ways to get more eyes on your apps.

Funomena designer and CEO Robin Hunicke joined Oculus Studios Producer Ruth Bram for a fireside chat to discuss creative development and emergent tech.

Oculus Audio Design Manager Tom Smurdon and Software Engineer Pete Stirling gave a talk on “Spatial Audio for Oculus Quest and Beyond.”

And Oculus Developer Strategist Phil Greenspan talked about best practices to prepare your app for launch.

VR League Grand Finals
The popularity of esports continues to expand, and VR is redefining the billion-dollar industry. This week, VR athletes joined game developers, enthusiasts, and creators at OC5, where the VR League hosted its Season 2 Grand Finals for The Unspoken, Onward, Sprint Victor, and Echo Arena.

Visit fb.gg/vrleague to catch more highlights and learn more about the riveting second season.

Prototype playtime
In the Innovation Zone, attendees got hands-on with new technologies in development at Oculus, including arena-scale tracking, mixed reality, and co-location with Dead and Buried.

Check out The Verge’s coverage to learn more.

So long, San Jose
Thank you to all the entire VR community who helped make OC5 a huge success. Head over to our YouTube channel to relive some of the hype.

— The Oculus Team

Oculus Quest has not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission. Oculus Quest is not, and may not be, offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained.

This post originally appeared on the Code engineering blog.