Oculus Connect 5 kicks off today, and it’s poised to be an exciting event. The company is touting this year’s conference as the biggest Oculus Connect event yet, and we’re sure to learn about some exciting new technology coming out of the Oculus research labs.
We expect to learn more about the company’s upcoming premium standalone headset, the Oculus Santa Cruz. Last year, Oculus showed off the Santa Cruz prototype, which featured inside-out room-scale tracking and a pair of modified Touch controllers to go with it. There’s no question that Oculus and Facebook see standalone VR headsets as an important evolution for the VR hardware market, so it'll be interesting to see what Oculus has in store for consumers for next year.
We haven’t heard much about a successor to the tethered Oculus Rift headset, but we suspect that Oculus will at least give us a tease of the next-generation device. The Rift CV1 is close to being three-years-old now, and it feels like its time to start talking about the next-generation device. A new Rift headset would likely include advanced technology, such as Oculus’s Varifocal lenses, and it would certainly offer a wider field of view. The new device would also include upgraded lenses and displays, such as those available in the Oculus Go headset. Embedded eye tracking sensors are also highly likely.
New content is sure to be on the list too. Oculus has done a great job curating high quality titles for the Oculus VR platform, and we expect that trend to continue. Game developers have now had several years to learn the tricks of building content for VR, and we expect to see previews of the premium content that fans have been wanting.
The Oculus Connect 5 Keynote presentation begins at 12 pm EST and is scheduled to run for two hours. You can catch the live stream above. Oculus is also offering a VR stream through Oculus Venues, which you can watch from a Samsung Gear VR or Oculus Go headset. Rift owners must settle for the flatscreen video.
