Over the last year, we've seen the Oculus community share some of the most innovative and compelling VR experiences in the history of the medium. It’s been inspiring to see so many of these projects and teams go on to raise investment from the community and venture capital groups to build something special. And this is only just the beginning.

One of the key components for truly awe-inspiring virtual reality is great content. At Oculus, we’re constantly looking at new ways to support Oculus developers, foster the ecosystem, and truly fuel the future of virtual reality. One of our long-time, favorite ideas has been to actually fund and publish Oculus games, applications, and experiences ourselves by providing additional support and resources for key developers building the games and content that we believe will define the platform.

We’ve been working quietly, behind the scenes with a select group of amazing developers on this new publishing initiative. Now, we’d like to introduce you to a new team member who'll be leading this effort full-time!

Welcome David De Martini!

We're thrilled to introduce David De Martini, our new Head of Worldwide Publishing!

David brings an incredible amount of game development and publishing expertise to Oculus. David was formerly at EA, where he worked on a huge number of games and franchises, including NASCAR, March Madness, Tiger Woods PGA Tour (2002-2006), and The Godfather. Eventually, he moved to EA Partners, EA's co-publishing arm dedicated to publishing games developed by external developers, where he worked with top development studios around the world to create hit games like Rock Band, the Crysis series, and Titanfall.

David will be leading Oculus’s publishing initiative, providing Oculus developers additional resources to help them achieve their vision. This means new opportunities for key developers for direct support from Oculus, and ultimately, more great content on the Oculus platform.

Please join us in welcoming David to the team! We couldn’t be more excited to have him.

We'll have more news on the publishing initiative and some of the key developers that we're working early next year. Stay tuned!

New Blog Post: “Help! My Cockpit is Drifting Away!”

Steve LaValle has written a new blog post on magnetometers, sensor data, and the science behind drift correction in the Rift. If you've ever wondered why your virtual reality cockpit will sometimes begin drifting away, and what we're working on at Oculus to address it, this post has your answers.

“It turns out that the Rift Development Kit similarly suffers from yaw drift error, which is a steadily growing error in the estimated “forward” direction. Fortunately, the sensor board inside the Rift contains a magnetometer. Determining which way your Rift is facing ought to be as simple as reading the magnetometer values to obtain a virtual compass arrow, right? Like most research pursuits, however, the quest to solve a problem leads to several waves of confusion and further enlightenment. In this post, I will explain how we correct yaw drift error in the Rift. The key for me, at least, was to shatter my belief in the perfect compass, and understand what a magnetometer, the real sensor, is actually trying to measure.”

You can read the full post over on the Oculus Blog.

Quick Shipping Update

We're finally shipping development kits within 3-5 days of the order being placed! It certainly took us longer than expected to reach this point, and we appreciate everyone's patience as we worked to get here.

VR Jam Shirts Shipping

The VR Jam shirts are now shipping out to teams who submitted a build for each of the jam's milestones. If you were on one of these teams, you should receive your shirts within the next few weeks, depending on region.

Thanks again to all the teams for making VR Jam 2013 such a success!

Happy Holidays from Oculus!

It's been an incredible year, and we owe an enormous thank you to you, the community. We wouldn't be here without you.

We wish you all the best this holiday season, and we'll see you in 2014!

— The Oculus Team