Outside of the more visible publicity surrounding announcements at Oculus Connect 2 in September, the event is of course primarily a developer focused event, designed to bring creators up to speed with the latest in virtual reality techniques and technology. As such, this year all developer sessions and talks were filmed and Oculus has just released those videos online for those not lucky enough to attend the event.
Regardless of which virtual reality platform you choose to support as a developer (and it seems most developers are opting to support more than one), Oculus’ developer sessions at its annual Connect conference are essential consumption for all.
This years schedule was packed with incisive and essential talks on all aspects of both the Oculus hardware and development suite as well as more generalised virtual reality techniques.
The videos of those sessions are now online, and here’s how they break down:
Oculus Connect 2: Bringing ‘Adventure Time’ to Gear VR [25m]
Learn the tools, tricks and practices that Turbo Button uses to build their fun and engaging games for Gear VR. Get a sneak peek at scenes from an upcoming adventure game, and see the ways Turbo Button tackled the design challenges to meet Gear VR’s specific hardware needs. Hear how the collaboration and workflow among art, design, and engineering made it possible to hit 60 FPS and how to improve on those workflows via select third-party resources.
Speaker: Holden Link, Co-Founder, Turbo Button
Oculus Connect 2: Introduction to VR Filmmaking from Oculus Story Studio [1hr 06m]
The Oculus Story Studio team will share creative and technical lessons learned while making its first two VR experiences, ‘Lost’ and ‘Henry.’ We’ll discuss the creative solutions we’ve come up with while developing narratives for virtual worlds, the technical tricks used to fit content into 90 frames-per-second, and thoughts on how authoring technology today needs to change for VR.
Speakers:
Saschka Unseld, Oculus Story Studio
Max Planck, Oculus Story Studio
Chris Horne, Oculus Story Studio
Inigo Quilez, Oculus Story Studio
Oculus Connect 2: Virtual Reality is a Medium: Creating Art with Oculus Touch [1hr 07m]
VR is a powerful tool for creative work. Artists working in virtual worlds will no longer be bound by the limitations of physics, and will be free to create in new mediums. This is the beginning of an entirely new genre of artistic experiences. In this talk, Oculus team members will discuss actionable lessons around building rich interactions with Oculus Touch and share their thoughts on the future of professional VR applications aimed at creatives.
Speakers: Lydia Choy, Oculus and Brian Sharp, Oculus
Oculus Connect 2: Building ‘Toybox’ for Oculus Touch [1hr]
Toybox was the first demo for Oculus Touch and served as the internal prototyping test bed to experiment with new features and social interactions in VR. Toybox helped us understand how people interact in virtual reality, how to build expressive avatars, and how we can deliver social presence. In this talk, you’ll learn everything we learned about designing intuitive, enjoyable interactions for Oculus Touch.
Speakers: Matt Alderman, Oculus and Brandon Dillon, Oculus
Oculus Connect 2: Developing with the Oculus Mobile SDK [1hr 1m]
The Oculus Mobile SDK has everything you need to build great games, applications, and experiences for Gear VR. We’ll cover the fundamentals of building mobile VR applications, the capabilities of the SDK, best practices for avoiding common development pitfalls, and the upcoming API restructuring designed to make the SDK easier to use.
Speaker: Johannes van Waveren, Oculus
Oculus Connect 2: Shipping Hardware: The Evolution of the Rift [60m]
Step behind the scenes and learn about the gritty side of developing the Rift. We’ll talk about the hardest elements in designing hardware for VR and the challenges we faced turning a 3D computer model into reality. You’ll learn about the difficult design decisions we made to get the Rift ready for people everywhere.
Speakers: Caitlin Kalinowski, Oculus and Stephanie Lue, Oculus
Oculus Connect 2: Live Coding Session with John Carmack [1hr 5m]
John Carmack will demonstrate the process of developing a simple VR application using a new development environment for rapid development and open deployment on Gear VR. You’ll also learn more about media processing, remote development, deployment, and multi-user setup.
Speaker: John Carmack, CTO, Oculus
Oculus Connect 2: ‘Gunjack’: The Making of a Gear VR Game [24m]
Developers from CCP Shanghai will take you through the roller-coaster of building a fun and visually stunning game for Gear VR. Gunjack is a first-person arcade shooter, built from the ground up for VR using Epic’s Unreal Engine 4. This talk will offer an overview of the creative process, project set-up and how to achieve AAA visuals on Gear VR, among other topics.
Speakers:
Jean-Charles Gaudechon, Executive Producer & MD, CCP Shanghai
Kevin Liu, Senior Producer & Creative Lead, CCP Shanghai
Oculus Connect 2: Making the Tabletop Interface for ‘Lost Cities’ [24m]
Discover the process used to design the virtual interface for the card game Lost Cities on Gear VR. Examine the mistakes and assumptions made in designing the tabletop interface, and review a few “do’s and don’ts.” Review how scale, field of view, typography, art style, and the use of grids can affect tabletop design to improve readability and avoid neck strain. Finally, learn how a little arts and craft time can make all the difference.
Speaker: Lesley Klassen, Co-Founder, The Campfire Union
