In September, Oculus held its second annual Oculus Connect developer conference bringing together more than 1,500 of the top industry leaders and developers from around the world to discuss the future of virtual reality technology, and collaborate to learn techniques for creating immersive virtual reality experiences.

Connect developer conference bringing together more than 1,500 of the top industry leaders and developers from around the world to  discuss the future of virtual reality technology, and collaborate to learn techniques for creating immersive virtual reality experiences.

Oculus Connect 2: Developing with the Oculus Mobile SDK

Speaker: Johannes van Waveren (Oculus)

‘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.’

---

Oculus Connect 2: Building ‘Toybox’ for Oculus Touch

Speakers: Matt Alderman (Oculus), Brandon Dillon (Oculus)

‘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.’

---

Oculus Connect 2: Making the Tabletop Interface for ‘Lost Cities’

Speaker: Lesley Klassen (The Campfire Union)

‘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.’

---

Oculus Connect 2: ‘Gunjack’: The Making of a Gear VR Game

Speakers: Jean-Charles Gaudechon (CCP Shanghai), Kevin Liu (CCP Shanghai)

‘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.’

---

Oculus Connect 2: Virtual Reality is a Medium: Creating Art with Oculus Touch

Speakers: Lydia Choy (Oculus), Brian Sharp (Oculus)

‘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.’

---

Oculus Connect 2: Live Coding Session with John Carmack

Speaker: John Carmack (Oculus)

‘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.’

---

Oculus Connect 2: Introduction to VR Filmmaking from Oculus Story Studio

Speakers: Saschka Unseld (Oculus Story Studio), Max Planck (Oculus Story Studio)

‘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.’

---

Oculus Connect 2: Shipping Hardware: The Evolution of the Rift

Speakers: Caitlin Kalinowski (Oculus), Stephanie Lue (Oculus)

‘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.’

---

Oculus Connect 2: Bringing ‘Adventure Time’ to Gear VR

Speaker: Holden Link (Turbo Button)

‘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.’

Stay tuned for more coverage on the latest Oculus VR news updates, and Oculus Rift developments coming soon.