On Monday, Oculus VR, the team behind the upcoming Oculus Rift VR headset, announced its very first developer conference: Oculus Connect. This will take place on September 19 and September 20 at the Loews Hollywood Hotel in Los Angeles, California, bringing together engineers and designers to collaborate on all things VR.
"In the last two years, we've seen more virtual reality content built than in the last two decades, and that's a direct result of incredible work by the community," the blog reads. "With virtual reality's momentum at an all-time high, this is a unique moment for the developer community to come together to take the virtual reality to the next level."
Oculus Connect will include keynote speeches by Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe, founder Palmer Luckey (pictured), CTO John Carmack and chief scientist Michael Abrash. Subjects will include Oculus, virtual reality, and the future of the medium.
"Attendees will be the first to learn about upcoming Oculus technology, with sessions and workshops led by Oculus engineers and industry pioneers," the blog states. "Developers at the event will also have opportunities to receive design and engineering feedback directly from the Oculus team in hands-on labs."
In addition to the conference, Oculus VR also announced that it has acquired RakNet, a C++ game networking engine designed for "ease of use and performance." Oculus provides a list of key features that includes real-time SQL logging, voice chat, patching, remote procedure calls and more. This middleware is used by Havok, Maxis, Mojang and SOE.
News of the conference and acquisition arrive as Oculus VR recently suspended sales of the Rift SDK in China due to "extreme" reseller purchases.
"We need to make sure that we are doing what we can to make sure that resellers that are looking to flip our product for a profit are not taking stock away from legitimate developer purchases globally," an Oculus representative writes. "Our product, in its current form, is a developer kit, meant for developers that develop VR content. We are looking into alternative ways to make sure that our development kits are getting into legitimate developer hands in China."
"If you are an enthusiast, we kindly ask that you wait for the consumer Rift," the representative adds. "It will be worth the wait."
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