Facebook will hold its sixth annual Oculus Connect this September at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, CA. This is anticipated to be one of the biggest virtual events of the year from Oculus.
At this event we can expect Oculus to make some major announcements, especially for AR this year. Last year, we got a full description and look at the Oculus Quest, fun 6DoF demos, and even learned what Facebook is planning to do with Expressive Avatars. We will be sure to gain some insight from the company on its latest projects inside of AR and VR.
If you explore over to the Oculus Website, you will be greeted with a message saying the following, “The future we’ve all been working towards starts here. It’s our moment to think bigger, build smarter, and realize the true potential of what we’ve created together. This year, we hope you’ll join us to begin a new chapter of virtual and augmented reality.”
We believe that this statement is heavily linked to the long awaited Oculus AR Glasses. If you reference back to an interview from Ficus Kirkpatrick – head of AR for Oculus – he says the following “Yeah! Well of course we’re working on it,” states Kirkpatrick. “We are building hardware products. We’re going forward on this . . . We want to see those glasses come into reality, and I think we want to play our part in helping to bring them there.” For the head of a whole entire project to say this, we can almost guarantee a project, or at least an announcement, is on the way.
If you mixed all of this information with the fact that Facebook was searching for AR chip engineers late last year, the filing of glasses patents in 2017, and the companies advancements in VR, we can expect a big release in September.
For specs on the augmented reality headset that we can expect, we have no official news or numbers to give out. What we do have though, it a great guess based on prototypes we saw last year at the Oculus Connect five. We expect an impressive 140° field of view (better than most VR headsets), eye-tracking that can predict your next move, and even varifocal optics.
In addition to this augmented reality news, we could see a big exclusive game release during September as well for Oculus. Respawn Entertainment, who helped make Apex Legends, Titanfall, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, will be a featured attendee at this event as well.
If Oculus is going to speak to any technical advances they have made in this past year, you can expect those to come out of this event. Oculus has aways done a good job of not leaking anything, and it will stay exactly the same this year. If you are a developer looking to make it to the events this year, simply visit the Oculus Connect website for further details. The Conference will be on September 25th and 26th.
