Our annual developer conference kicks off in less than two months, and it’s shaping up to be our biggest Oculus Connect yet. Today, we’re excited to unveil our first round of panels, tech talks, and interactive show floor sessions—and to announce that registration to attend OC5 September 26 – 27 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center is now open at oculusconnect.com!

Whether you want to design a groundbreaking immersive experience, learn how to distribute your content in innovative ways, or dig into the technical side of VR development, OC5 connects you with industry experts who can help set you up for success as the industry continues to grow and evolve.

Advances in the Oculus Rift PC SDK

Volga Aksoy, Oculus Software Engineer + Dean Beeler, Oculus Software Engineer

The PC SDK is the foundation of performance apps and games. This session will cover our latest features and new runtime advances designed to help you boost visual fidelity and performance.

Blood, Sweat, and Tears: A Tale of VR Esports

Christopher K. McKelvy, Oculus Head of Esports

Catch up on the latest and what's next for Oculus's journey into VR esports. During this talk, developers and business leaders will learn what makes a great VR esports title and how to capitalize on industry trends. Attendees will leave with a deep understanding of Oculus' long-term strategy to revolutionize every aspect of esports including gameplay, competition, and viewership.

Bootstrapping Social VR

John Bartkiw, Oculus Platform Engineering Manager

The best way to get the real feeling of presence in VR is to share an experience with someone else. In this session, we’ll debunk the myth of how challenging it is to build a multiplayer VR experience. We’ll walk through a Unity sample project step-by-step to help you build with invites and matchmaking, coordinated app launch and Avatars, VoIP, and P2P networking.

Building Brand + Community (On a Budget)

Lisa Brown Jaloza, Oculus Tech Comms Manager

Come learn about the unique opportunities available to you as Oculus developers and pick up some tried-and-true best practices while you’re at it. From blogs and asset creation to reddiquette and beyond, we’ll help you put social media and the VR community to work for you—without breaking the bank.

Evolving Stormland: How Insomniac Draws from the Past to Create an Open-World Structure in VR

Mike Daly, Insomniac Games Lead Designer + Duncan Moore, Insomniac Games Principal Designer

Insomniac Games has a long history of making games with smooth gameplay, player empowerment, and open-world freedom. The creators of Ratchet & Clank, Sunset Overdrive, and The Unspoken will share some of the VR-specific gameplay tips and tricks discovered over the course of developing four VR titles that culminate in Stormland ’s free-roaming exploration and combat gameplay, as well as how these aspects enrich the player experience in VR.

Fireside Chat: Tender Claws

Samantha Gorman, Tender Claws Co-Founder + Ichha Arora, Oculus Associate Producer

Join us for a chat with Tender Claws, the studio behind Virtual Virtual Reality on Rift, Oculus Go, Gear VR, and Google Daydream and PRY for iOS. We’ll hear about their approach to multi-layered interactive narrative and taking cues from other media to seamlessly blend story and interactivity.

The Hierarchy of Being: Embodying Our Virtual Selves

Isabel Tewes, Oculus Developer Relations Specialist + Yelena Rachitsky, Oculus Executive Producer

How do you design an experience optimized for immersion and make someone feel like they’re there? We’ll take an interdisciplinary approach to investigating how the body, movement, and presence of others can deliver immersion across Rift and Project Santa Cruz.

How To: Driving Discovery and Engagement Across the Rift Platform

Lucy Chen, Oculus Product Manager

The Rift platform extends well beyond the headset to surfaces online, on mobile, and on desktop. Learn how to put these tools to work to help you distribute and market apps—and engage with your players, fans, and followers in new ways. We’ll share insights on our roadmap and developer needs we’re working to address. Bring your ideas and feedback to this interactive session.

Integrating Locomotion in Unity, Unreal, and Native Engines

Tom Heath, Oculus Developer Relations Software Engineer + Luke Thompson, Director of Sigtrap Games

Oculus and Sigtrap Games are pleased to announce and provide open source plugins and tools to readily incorporate a range of locomotion comfort techniques into your Unity, Unreal and native applications. We'll explain how to easily integrate these solutions, and explain the theory behind why they work.

Need to Know: Oculus Content Policies and App Review Standards

Debbie Rosenbaum, Oculus Lead Counsel + Ashley Woolheater, Oculus Public Policy Manager

Get help understanding Oculus Content Policies, company philosophy, common best practices, and pitfalls developers should avoid when submitting content to the Oculus Store. Join us for this unexpectedly fun and refreshing legal, comms, and policy training.

Oculus Lipsync SDK: Audio to Facial Animation

Elif Albuz, Facebook Computer Vision Engineering Manager

Oculus Lipsync SDK delivers newer, more accurate real-time facial animation from audio. This technology is supported across multiple platforms an animates face across many different languages. We will show you how easy it is to integrate Lipsync into your projects, share our future plans and discuss recently released features.

On Creative Development for Emerging Platforms

Ruth Bram, Oculus Studios Associate Producer + Robin Hunicke, Funomena Co-Founder

In this fireside chat with Funomena’s Designer & CEO Robin Hunicke, we’ll discuss the lessons she’s learned about creative development while working on emerging platforms. We’ll cover everything from working on in-flight hardware and the communication and team cultures required to remain calm in the face of moving targets, to designing for new affordances without leaning on tired UX tropes. Robin will also share about developing a studio that embraces iteration and the ways in which inclusive and diverse hiring helps increase a team’s ability to problem-solve under uncertainty and navigate towards blue ocean ideas.

Porting Your App to Project Santa Cruz

Gabor Szauer, Oculus Developer Relations Engineer

The introduction of standalone means the arrival of more approachable devices and, for developers, a broader range of consumers to target. The good news is you’re already ready. A stable of universal techniques and best practices can help reduce draw calls and hit perf without sacrificing fidelity. We’ll start with an overview of the device and basic considerations, and walk step by step through the process of reviewing and optimizing textures, scene geometry, and lighting. This session will also include a deep dive on engine profiling tools and specific Santa Cruz performance targets.

Preparing Your App for Launch

Phil Greenspan, Oculus Developer Strategy Specialist

You’ve built your app. Now what? Learn how to best prepare your game, app, or experience for a successful launch on the Oculus Platform. We’ll review how to develop a meaningful launch strategy for your project, key pre-launch action items and timelines, and plans for post-launch maintenance and support. You’ll walk away with some useful tools, resources, and best practices.

Real-World Immersion You Can Hear: Advances in the Audio SDK

Pete Stirling, Oculus Audio Software Engineer + Tom Smurdon, Oculus Audio Design Manager

The Oculus Audio SDK includes features and tools designed to mimic how sound waves work in the real world. We’ll present an overview of the latest features, provide best practices for maintaining optimal immersion across mobile, standalone, and PC, and include an early look at key considerations for Project Santa Cruz.

Reinforcing Mobile Performance with RenderDoc

Remi Palandri, Oculus Software Engineer

We’ve done a lot under the hood to make your apps shine across our mobile platform. Here, you’ll learn how to make the most of Oculus Go and Project Santa Cruz’s unique performance improvements, and use our diagnostics to debug quality and performance challenges. We’ll walk through these features, show how to identify and avoid common errors to boost performance across Unity, Unreal and native engines.

Using Deep Learning to Create Interactive Actors for VR

Kevin He, DeepMotion CEO

Physical character interaction is hard to fake—whether it’s between two in-world characters, between users and characters, or between a character or avatar and its environmental surroundings. Nevertheless, interaction is central to user-driven storytelling and building immersive VR and AR experiences that suspend disbelief. DeepMotion will discuss the challenges of, and science behind, building an interactive character authoring tool, as well as how developers can integrate intelligent character simulation into their own experiences.

Video That Doesn’t Suck: Stereo(scopic) 3D-180° for VR

Eric Cheng, Oculus Head of Immersive Media

Bringing great-looking video experiences to VR can be challenging, and container apps are only half the battle. 3D-180 video allows for higher-quality stereoscopic experiences with fewer resources spent on production. We’ll cover best practices for creating 3D-180 video for distribution and playback in Oculus Go through a live workshop. During discussion about camera hardware, software tools, real-world differences between 180 and 360, and spatial audio, we will actually shoot, edit, and distribute a short video for viewing in Oculus Go.

This is just a taste of the quality programming that OC5 has to offer. We’ll have more details to share as we head toward the event, so stay tuned to the blog and Twitter for all the latest news. In the meantime, head over to oculusconnect.com for some helpful information on travel and hotels and register to join us in San Jose as we celebrate how far VR has come in the past five years and look forward to an even brighter future.

— The Oculus Team