We’re at GDC 2015 in San Francisco this week meeting with developers and showing off brand new content on the Crescent Bay prototype and Gear VR Innovator Edition. This is hands-down one of the biggest weeks for virtual reality in the history of the industry, and we’re excited to be a part of it.

Throughout the week, Oculus team members will be giving talks on the latest Oculus tech. John Carmack, CTO, kicked the show off this morning with his keynote, “The Dawn of Mobile VR“.

You can watch the full video of John’s keynote on the Oculus Twitch channel.

Tomorrow (Thursday) we have two more engineering talks…

Brian Hook, head of audio, and Tom Smurdon, audio engineer, are talking about the new Oculus Audio SDK at 10:00am PT. Located in the West Hall, Room 2024.

Anuj Gosalia, head of SDK, will be presenting on ‘Developing VR Games with Oculus SDK’ at 12:45pm PT. Located in the West Hall, Room 2024.

We also released two technical posts on VR rendering earlier this week:

“Optimizing VR Graphics with Late Latching” by Atman Binstock, chief architect

“Asynchronous Timewarp Examined” by Michael Antonov, co-founder and chief software architect

The Oculus Rift ‘Crescent Bay’ experiences

On top of the Crescent Bay demos and Epic’s Showdown with remixed 360 spatial audio, at the Oculus booth we’re showing a brand new experience created in collaboration between Epic Games, WETA Digital, NVIDIA, and Oculus, called “Thief in the Shadows“.

Thief in the Shadows by Weta Digital

©2014 WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC. AND METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER PICTURES INC.

Running exclusively on Crescent Bay and debuting at GDC, viewers will find themselves face to face with Smaug, the legendary dragon from the Hobbit. Thief in the Shadows is built in Unreal Engine 4 and powered by NVIDIA’s new flagship GPU, TITAN X. The experience also leverages the Oculus Audio SDK for incredible, 3D VR spatialized audio.

You can find Crescent Bay prototypes all over the GDC Expo floor! Visit Crytek’s booth for a brand new “Back to Dinosaur Island” experience in CryEngine, pop by Unity’s booth to see a demonstration of the great new features in Unity 5 for Oculus developers or head over to Epic Games and NVIDIA’s booth to see the latest Showdown and Thief in the Shadows experiences running on NVIDIA’s new TITAN X GPU in UE4.

The Oculus booth is in the South Hall, Lower Level, #1224.

We’re also hosting private, technical sessions where developers can get help from Oculus engineers on VR performance and design challenges. You can sign up by emailing dev-clinic@oculus.com with your name, company, and contact information. Please include as much detail as possible in your initial email so we can make sure the right folks are available.

Oculus Audio SDK Preview Available Now!



A preview of the Oculus Audio SDK is now available for download on the Oculus Developer Center! This is the same technology that we announced at Oculus Connect and that powered the remixed demos and experiences we debuted at CES.

Great spatialized audio is a powerful amplifier for presence — By providing 3D audio plugins for Unity3D, AudioKinetic Wwise, Firelight FMOD, and VST compatible digital audio workstations, the Oculus Audio SDK provides content creators the tools to immerse players sonically in a virtual world, surrounded by realistically spatialized sounds.

Let us know what you think over on the Oculus Developer Center in the new Audio Development forum. We’ll also have Brian Hook and Tom Smurdon’s GDC talk on the Audio SDK available shortly after the show.

Unity and Mobile VR Jam 2015

We recently announced the Mobile VR Jam 2015, which invites developers to compete for $1,000,000 in prizes by creating innovative, new VR content for Gear VR Innovator Edition.

Yesterday during the Unity 5 keynote, John Riccitiello, Unity CEO, and Palmer announced that Unity will be sponsoring this year’s Mobile VR Jam! Eligible developers participating in the jam will receive a $50 credit toward the Unity Asset Store for assets they can use in the competition. You can find full details on the official Mobile VR Jam 2015 site

Thanks for an incredible kick-off to GDC 2015 — We’re looking forward to connecting with you this week at the show!

— The Oculus team