Oculus Connect Is Happening Now, Here’s What You Can Expect

Oculus’s biggest event of the year, Oculus Connect 3, runs from October 5 to October 7. We expect to hear big announcements at the developer conference, not least of which includes the price and release date of the Oculus Touch motion controllers.

Oculus Connect is Oculus’s annual developer conference. The company pools together its resources and the wider VR development community to showcase the latest innovations in the VR space. In the past, the conference showcased the latest prototypes and games under development. Now that the Rift is out in the wild, this year’s conference should be more about showing off finished, or near finished software, rather than prototype experiments. In short, we expect OC3 to be more in line with E3 than previous Oculus Connect events.

By the time you read this, day one of Oculus Connect will have already begun. The first day likely won’t be exciting for the general public. You won’t find a live stream (unless you find someone streaming it through Facebook or Periscope) of the first day. Oculus is reserving that time for developer workshops and game demos.

Day 2 is what the world is waiting for. The opening keynote presentation, which is undoubtedly when Oculus will reveal all there is to know about Touch, is scheduled for 10:00 am Pacific on October 6. The keynote is the only presentation that the public can take in live. Oculus promised to discuss the long-awaited Touch controllers at the event, and we expect to hear everything; the games that support the motion controllers, the cost of the hardware, and the date that you can pick them up and play with them in your home.

Following the keynote, attendees of the conference will have an array of developer workshops, such as “Designing for VR Comfort” and “Failure Workshop: Things That Didn’t Work.” Day two is also filled with game demos from 1 pm until 10 pm.

Day 3 is a short day. Game demos start bright and early at 9 am PT, and workshops begin at 10 am. Day three’s workshops include “Accelerating Your VR Applications with NVIDIA VRWorks” and “The Making of Dead and Buried: The (almost) Port-Mortem.” John Carmack will round out the event with an hour and a half long closing keynote that starts at 1:30 pm.