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Having a billion-dollar company behind you means you can equip a large convention center in your logo.
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An Oculus Rift photo montage from Oculus Connect.
Kyle Orland
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This guy just set up a permanent, unauthorized demo for his product in the lobby. Apparently it’s big in Germany.
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Oculus is trying to use the / symbol as recognizable branding for its annual Connect conference.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to spend part of his keynote address explaining to the crowd that “virtual reality is now a thing”.
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“Why do you look like a young Justin Timberlake?”
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Oculus Head of Research Michael Abrash gave a heady, optimistic view of where VR technology will be in five years’ time.
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Oculus CTO John Carmack couldn’t walk down the hallway without being harassed by onlookers. He was happy to have long impromptu question and answer sessions.
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An Oculus Connect attendee tries out the company’s new avatar builder at last year’s Oculus Connect.
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In the green screen room, you could generate a video where you’re actually in a VR environment (sort of like this one).
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A participant gets emotional while working on a sculpture in Oculus Medium.
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This is more or less what every business meeting will look like in the future.
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If you thought about playing Wii Sports you looked crazy, you haven’t seen anything yet.
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This guy looks like he’s waited his whole life to pretend to be in a hockey fight like this.
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Look, the first rose bud of spring.
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I took this shot from the Intel streaming “stage” mainly to emphasize the new “from Facebook” branding below the Oculus logo.
SAN JOSE, Calif. — I wasn’t really expecting too much hard news from my trip to Oculus Connect this year. Instead, I expected another pre-launch opportunity to try out the immersive Oculus Touch controllers and a chance to chat with the big and small developers who have been the first to dive into the still-tiny virtual reality space.
Instead, Oculus pulled out quite a few big reveals. The company announced a new fully-tracked wireless headset in the works and even let me try out a prototype. The company helped justify Facebook’s investment with a major avatar-powered social VR initiative. And then there’s the new software technology that has lowered the minimum specs for the Rift headset without touching the hardware itself.
The many keynote announcements and the wide array of new software on display created a palpable buzz among the several thousand attendees at the conference, almost all of whom were developers or true believers in the future of virtual reality. Virtual reality may not yet be part of the computing mainstream, but walking around Oculus Connect, it was easy to believe it could be in the not-too-distant future.
Frame image by Kyle Orland