Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8, won’t be here until May, but with registration opening today, Facebook and Oculus is teasing some exciting AR and VR news to come.
Update (2/28/18): Algonside Oculus head Hugo Barra’s tease about AR/VR news to come at the F8 conference, the company’s VP of AR/VR also joined in the teasing, stating in a tweet that the company will share the “biggest AR/VR news from Facebook to date,” at the May conference.
Barra stoked the hype flames when suggesting that “4 out of 9” items were correct on a list of guesses tweeted to him, which included ‘More Facebook Spaces, ‘New Interface (mindreading!)’, ‘AR Hardware’, ‘New Oculus’, VR/AR Creation App, ‘More 3D Models’, ‘VR “Platform” (integrating everything)’, and two ‘Question Marks’, as spotted by Redditor Berkis.
Original Article (2/22/18): Hugo Barra took over as head of Facebook-owned Oculus back in early 2017 after CEO Brendan Iribe stepped down to lead the company’s PC VR division. Barra’s background in the mobile space—as former VP at Android and Xiaomi—shone brightly earlier this year when Oculus announced a major partnership with Xiaomi which would see the company bringing its own version of the forthcoming Oculus Go standalone headset to China under Xiaomi’s brand.
Now with the approach of Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference, Barra is teasing exciting news to come.
“F8 registration is officially open! We can’t wait to show you all the awesome things we’ve been working on, especially AR/VR,” he wrote in a tweet.
While Oculus has its own annual conference, Oculus Connect, Facebook has offered up plenty of interesting AR and VR news at F8 in the past.
At F8 2017, Oculus’ chief scientist, Michael Abrash, gave a keynote detailing how and when he expects that augmented reality will transform our lives. Facebook also used the conference to reveal its work on new ‘Surround360’ volumetric VR cameras, and launched its first social VR application, Facebook Spaces.
At F8 2018, we expect to hear updates from all of the above, especially about the company’s work with social VR and augmented reality.
F8 takes place on May 1st & 2nd, and we’ll be there to cover all the AR/VR action.