The opening keynote of the Oculus Connect 6 has just finished and there have been tons of interesting announcements there. I will leave the description of all the news presented at OC6 for a big roundup article that I’ll write during the weekend (as I do every year). Today I want to focus only about the most important announcements, that de facto define the road that Facebook will pursue in the short term future. And it is a quite surprising one, that I completely missed with the prediction post that I wrote some days ago.

Oculus Link will let you connect your Quest to your PC

Mark Zuckerberg announcing the Oculus Link

One of the most (if not the most) important announcement has been the fact that Oculus Quest will be able to connect to your PC to play PC VR experiences on the Oculus Store thanks to a USB-C cable. This solution is called Oculus Link and will be out in November of this year.

Yes, you have read it right: you will be able to use your Oculus Quest as a standalone headset, and also as a tethered PC VR headset! That’s an amazing piece of news for all of us Quest owners!

The death of Rift S

I thought that Oculus wouldn’t have done this move, because it de facto kills the Rift S. Who would still be interested to buy a Rift S when with the Quest you can do all the things that the Rift S does, even better thanks to its better resolution, IPD adjustment, etc…?

The Rift S: the only VR headset becoming useless in less than 5 months (Image by Oculus)

And if you think that this is just my impression, you have to know that the Facebook people on the stage have very seldom talked about the Rift S and made NOT EVEN A SINGLE ANNOUNCEMENT about it (apart from content).

Jokingly, I told on Twitter that if I had one euro for every new feature announced for the Rift S, I had zero euro. And that’s true: it has been mentioned only for the new PC VR games announcements and nothing more.

I feel sad for everyone that has bought a Rift S instead of a Quest, but now it is an absolutely useless headset. I also send a hug for all people that have bought all the non-cross-buy content paying it two times. I think that Oculus should have handled this situation in a different way.

A user in the comment of the livestream (Lorne Michael Fade) has rebranded the “Rift S” as “RIP S”.

I just wonder when it will be officially discontinued…

Oculus Go apps coming on Quest

The Quest is also getting Oculus Go emulation and Oculus will take care of making available Go’s best apps (more than 50) to Quest. People that have bought them on Go won’t need to buy them again on Quest, of course.

Oculus announcing Go apps on Quest

The death of Go

I had alraedy given you on this blog the exclusive news of Xiaomi disbanding the team dedicated to the Oculus Go project for the future. I commented the news saying that most probably that was the tombstone of the Oculus Go.

Some people told me that it was fake news and that it was wrong. Well, today we got almost no announcement on Oculus Go as well, and the Go emulation on Quest is another sign that Oculus is not betting on Go for the future.

I believe that the Go has a place in the market now because of its low price, but I don’t think it will have a future.

VR is now and it is the Oculus Quest

Facebook has remarked many times on the stage that “VR is now”, and that VR is the Oculus Quest. When Michael Abrash took the stage to show amazing things for the future (like realistic avatars, varifocal headsets, etc…), he said that next-gen VR is years away and in the meantime the future is in devices like the Quest.

Facebook has clearly killed all its other devices and kept only the Quest, the holy grail of present-time VR. It will be able to emulate perfectly both the Go and the Rift S, and even offer much more. Don’t misunderstand me… Oculus has not discontinued the Go and the RIP S… it is just that they will get always less attention and they will die of starvation. I wouldn’t be surprised if for the next years there will be only new releases of Quest devices.

And since the Oculus Quest is the diamond device for Oculus, it is getting lots of fancy upgrades.

Oculus Quest gets hands tracking

Hands Tracking on Oculus Quest, supporting all fingers tracking

Oculus has managed to implemented hands tracking on the Oculus Quest. You will be able to get full fingers tracking on Oculus flagship device: not only gestures, but full hands tracking. This is a really impressive work, that I didn’t think it could be possible, given the limited computational power of this device. Kudos to Oculus for having made this possible!

A full mesh of virtual hands superimposed to the video stream of the hands of the user

This will open up amazing new possibilities for interactions in VR, that can so become more natural and efficient. Even all the menus of the Quest will be usable just by using your hands! There will be no need to mess with the controllers every time. It will also be possible to demo the Quest without having to give every time the controllers to users.

Hands Tracking is coming at the beginning of next year.

Oculus Quest gets Passthrough+

The Rift S had an amazing feature called Passthrough+, that let you see your surroundings through the front cameras of the headset in a super-optimized way. Well, since the Rift S is abandonware, Oculus has ported this feature to the Oculus Quest. This means that you will be able to see the real world as it is, without distortions and latency, through the display of the Quest! And passthrough will be activated by just a double click on the system button.

On the left you see the distorted view of the real world on the Quest as it is today and on the right the undistorted view as it will be with Passthrough+

I am impressed that Oculus managed to undistort the video stream of the 4 cameras of the Quest and made a rectified low-latency passthrough for the Quest. Again, I thought it was not possible. Oculus never ceases to amaze me.

Passthrough+ for Quest is coming next week!

Oculus Quest will have forward compatibility

Facebook is building a platform all centered on Quest and all the things built for the original Quest will be compatible with all the next generations of Quest. That’s fantastic news.

Oculus Quest is getting a metaverse called Facebook Horizon

Zuck announcing Facebook Horizon

Facebook Horizon is the new social VR space by Facebook. After the failure of Facebook Spaces, Facebook is trying again to create a social VR ecosystem and its new product is called “Facebook Horizon”, which will be compatible with Quest and RIP S.

A screenshot from Facebook Horizon: as you can see, there are many people in a cartoonish metaverse

Facebook Horizon keeps the same nice cartoon touch of Facebook Spaces, but this time it is a full-fledged metaverse. You will be able to create your places, to create games all while in virtual reality (so no need to remove your headset to do that), with tools that won’t require you to know to code, thanks to the use of visual scripting tools. And then you can invite people in these worlds and in these games and gather in VR with all your facebook friends and other people that you want to join. You can chat, you can play games, you can create stuff (e.g. draw all together), with people from all over the world, just from inside your VR headset. Imagine it a bit like VRChat or AltspaceVR… a full metaverse, all in Facebook salsa.

Some screenshots of different things you can do in Facebook Horizon

Facebook Horizon will launch in 2020 in closed beta. Facebook is taking its time to do things well this time.

Oculus Quest is getting Beat Saber 360

In December, Beat Games will release a new version of Beat Saber that will let you play songs in 360 with your Oculus Quest. Since I’m developing a game myself from the ground up for the Vive Focus+, I can confirm you that if a game is developed from the start with a standalone VR headset in mind, it is much funnier to be played on a standalone device… so I’m sure that Beat Saber 360 will rock it! I can’t wait to test it.

What about AR?

Boz makes it clear: Facebook is building AR glasses!

Facebook has just teased that it is working on augmented reality glasses, that will run on a platform that looks really like the AR Cloud that Ori Inbar described so well. Facebook wants to reconstruct the 3D mesh of the whole world using the cameras of smartphones and smartglasses , so that to be able to supply us a full mixed reality future through Facebook glasses. A virtual digital twin of the world is what we need to create the mixed-reality metaverse, and all companies are working on it, Facebook included.

3D reconstruction of the world around you through your AR glasses

I admit that I am scared by a future where Facebook scans all our places and it puts ads everywhere for us. Very scared.

Thanks to the AR Cloud, facebook could put notifications in the world at the position in which they are useful for the user. But this also means ads and distractions everywhere

No AR glasses has been shown, not even a prototype. I wonder if the reason is that the glasses will have the Facebook brand and not the Oculus one. I guess we will discover that at F8 2020.

Content

The content that Oculus and Respawn were making together is called “Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond” and it is a realistic war game set during World War 2. It looks incredibly cool: you can pilot thanks, airplanes, be on trains, submarines, etc…

Asgard’s Wrath will release on October 10th and Stormland on November 14th, but preorders are already open.

All this game will work with the Rift S, and of course also with the Quest connected through Oculus Link…

This the short recap of the most important news announced today! Subscribe to my newsletter not to miss the big roundup with all the news when it will be out!

What do you think of the news announced today? Are you happy with the Quest being the only true king of Oculus VR? Let me know in the comments or on my social media channels!

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