Oculus Connect 4 | Day 1 Keynote

[Music] [Applause] [Applause] hey welcome to OC for now before we get started I just want to take a moment to say how much it means to us that you're all here today looking around I see a lotta familiar faces and people we've been working with for a while here people in the industry who have been pushing this forward for a while and I just want to take a moment to thank all of you for all of the work that you've been doing to push virtual reality forward thank you guys now we're all here because we're legitimately excited about the future and we're committed to making it a reality and we believe that one day almost everyone is going to use virtual reality to improve how we work how we play and how we connect with each other but we know that the most important technologies don't start off mainstream right in fact a lot of them seem maybe even too crazy or complex to start and the conventional thinkers will always say that there's gonna be something more familiar or that delivers enough of the value so why build a completely new platform all right they say why build the PC when most people just want a word processor why build the whole internet when most people like dialing up through AOL why put a computer in your pocket when most people are just asking for a phone that texts well and why build virtual reality when most people think 2d screens are pretty good today now the reality is at every step along the way the future is built by the people who believe it can be better the people who are dedicated to creating that foundation for all of us to build upon and that's what we're all here and that's why I am excited to be here with you so thanks for all coming out today now a lot has happened since the last time we were all here a couple years ago most of us wouldn't predicted that today there would be doctors prescribing VR for pain relief in hospitals or the overall there would be more than a hundred million VR app downloads out there virtual reality is about imagining the world as it could be and last year we talked about how VR can put people first and put us at the center of the experience more than any other computing platform out there and that's because VR is unique in creating this sense of presence like you're right there with another person or in another place now some people say that VR is isolating and antisocial I actually think it's the opposite yeah today we need this big headset and that's not great we're working on it but saying that VR is isolating because it's immersive is a really narrow view of the world that you're all building the reality is what we all have limits to our reality places we can't go people we can't see things we can't do and opening up more of those experiences to all of us that's not isolating that's freeing and it's already starting to happen there not long ago if you were paralyzed your chance of recovery was almost zero but today there are groups like the walk again project that are using rift to help patients see their legs moving again and that helps restore neural function and their brain and in one study all eight patients who had this therapy regained some motor control so this is a video where someone is starting to take their first steps towards kicking a ball again and then there were people like Dorothy Howard Dorothy is an 8 year old grandmother living in the UK she owns an oculus rift and a few weeks ago she posted in the official rift group on Facebook to troubleshoot an issue and she said I'm not going to do the accent well I bought a rift is I am no longer fit to go on holidays it is fantastic and I'm looking at spectacular worlds Dorothy is awesome now now a lot of us are probably thinking hi maybe I don't have a disability I can I can see my friends whenever I want to I'm definitely not nay dear old British grandmother all right fine you got me but look if you can't think of any way that your reality can be better then you're not thinking hard enough now take your work how long is your commute every single day now I don't know anyone who sits in traffic and thinks to themselves man right here this is the best that reality can be now a lot of people have ideas on how to make transportation better all right self-driving cars Hyperloop sand don't get me wrong I love all of that stuff but you know it's 2017 and the biggest trend in transportation is that it's a lot easier to move bits around than atoms last month one of my neighbors told me that his company is distributed so they do all their meetings in virtual reality this is actually the Facebook spaces team's regular Friday meeting and they do it in spaces because they're located in all different cities and this way they don't have to get on a plane or drive in cars I hope that's not what they're discussing in their meetings but you know you know it's much better than a video conference you can see people's gestures you can actually do work together but this is bigger than than just recreating the physical world right in my office on my desk I will I've one screen but in VR I can have this completely custom setup right I can have people pop in I can show them what I'm working on on a bunch of different displays but still this is even bigger than this it's even bigger than saving a few hours on your commute every day or a few thousand dollars on your setup or this year I've been traveling around the country and a lot of the places that I visited just don't have as much economic opportunity as we do here but we have the ability to help create a world where fewer of us are limited to only doing jobs that are nearby us enabling us to be present anywhere creates opportunities for people everywhere now beyond work think about all the experiences that you may never get to have most of us will probably never get to experience zero gravity or travel to the International Space Station but you can in VR and you know what that's somewhere that I think I'd like to take my daughter's one day or think about the education opportunities in this one this is a real program at Stanford that helps pediatric cardiology students visualize heart issues and how to fix them there should be a version of this for every education lesson and job training program out there or let's think about entertainment our reality can be a lot better there too because I don't think anyone's ideal of playing games with friends is that you're each sitting at your own home looking at your own stream or we want to be together and in VR you can do this because it's immersive and this year Echo Arena won best VR game at e3 and you know this is a game that I think most of us have been waiting to play since we read Ender's Game in middle school I think more games are gonna be like this a decade from now and my team didn't beat me but there's more than games here you know what about live sports and concerts and we're creating a new experience that we're gonna release next year called venues and venues lets you watch live concerts and live sports and premieres of movies and TV shows are all around the world with your friends and with thousands of other people at the same time and it's another example of how VR is gonna bring us closer together in ways that might not be possible in the physical world so here's here's a that was a look at our early development there all right so whenever people say that we're building virtual reality because we're not satisfied with the one we live and my answer is of course we are and that's a good thing and we believe that the future can be a lot better optimism is good now it's true that nothing is ever gonna replace being with someone in person or doing something physical but when we can't experience those things when we run up against the limits of reality VR is going to make our reality that much better so we're setting a goal we want to get a billion people in virtual reality and they're gonna be challenged us to work through and we have to build a safe environment and we have to make sure that virtual reality is a force for good in the world and we have to make sure that virtual reality is accessible to everyone now today there are two main categories of VR products there's mobile like gear VR which is affordable and you can take it with you but it's not as powerful as a PC and it doesn't have positional tracking so you can't move through space and then there's PC VR I like the rift and this is the world class virtual reality experience but it's a little more expensive than it ties you to a fixed computer if we're gonna get a billion people in virtual reality we have to keep working on both affordability and quality but we also have to find the sweet spot in the middle that high-quality affordable experience that doesn't tether you to a PC so today I'm excited to announce the first product in this sweet spot it's an all-new stand-alone headset that doesn't require you to snap in a phone or attach a cable we're calling it oculus go and oculus go is the most accessible VR experience ever it's it's an all-in-one headset it's great for playing games for watching movies and for hanging out with friends and the price is only $1.99 [Music] [Applause] [Music] and it's gonna ship early next year early next year all right but that's actually that's not the only thing we're working on in the sweet spot here between mobile and PC last year we talked about how the key to unlocking new categories of VR experiences is inside out tracking but this idea that instead of having cameras around the room that look at you to determine your location you put the cameras on the headset and use computer vision software to determine your location as you move through space so last year at at OC 3 we gave you an early look at our progress on building inside out tracking and today I am happy to announce that we're going to have Santa Cruz headsets in your hands in the hands of developers in the next year and it's gonna ship with six degree of freedom tract controllers and so this is a big deal right because this is the first time that anyone has ever shown a complete experience of inside our tracking working on a standalone headset and fully tracked controllers so here's what it looks like [Music] all right so standing up here today I am more committed than ever to the future of virtual reality it's not about escaping reality it's about making it better it's about curing diseases connecting families spreading empathy rethinking work improving games and yes bringing us all closer together VR is about imagining the world as it could be and the road ahead it won't always be easy but we have some of the most talented people in the world here in this room working on this and if we all do what we need to if we all keep working on building great experiences and putting them in the hands of more people that VR will change the way we see the world and it will make all of our lives a lot better thank you for being here today thank you for being on this journey with us and now I'd like to introduce for the first time at oculus connect our new head of virtual reality Hugo Barra [Applause] okay all right Thank You Marc and good morning first of all a very warm welcome to all of our developers here today this entire show is made for you and welcome to our friends from the media our partners our colleagues from oculus and Facebook and a special welcome to everyone who's joining us on the live stream on Facebook and Twitter we also have folks joining us in VR we're live-streaming for the very first time in 4k 360 we've got a phenomenal oculus connect for you this year with 44 talks over a hundred speakers and more than 29 hundred attendees which makes this the biggest Kinect yet it's also my first oculus connect but my journey in VR started 20 years ago it was my freshman year in college and my first winter break since moving to the US I took an internship in LA at Walt Disney Imagineering working on this project called Disney quest which was the world's first VR theme park and back in the late 90s this is what VR looked like these were CRT headsets with VGA resolution they were not stereo but by ocular and you needed three SGI onyx machines stacked up together to drive them this was cutting edge for those days and it was awesome now fast-forward to 2017 I got this incredible opportunity to join the oculus team at Facebook but before diving into this awesome new job I decided to take some time off into a mini world tour and I took my oculus rift with me everywhere I went I got to show VR to friends and family around the globe but the highlight was when I took it back home to Brazil this is my dad now you have to understand in my family my mom is really the techie one she's the one who likes all the cool toys that I bring home and there she is that's my mom and my dad was pretty skeptical about VR so I got him to try it and watching here you're gonna see he's gonna throw off a lantern off a cliff and then look down over the edge to watch it fall and then he says in Portuguese in this video Kiko is a fantastic ax what a fantastic thing that's a lot for my dad to say he's not really a tech guy he just really enjoyed that experience that feeling my dad got that is the magic of presence in VR and it's unlike anything else all of us in this room have shared we are with a friend or a family member and seeing that same reaction once you feel it there's no going back you know it's the future and that's why we're here to share that magic with the world so now let's talk about how we make it let's start with hardware you know building the our headsets requires a fundamentally different approach compared to any other consumer electronics you really have to understand how the human perceptual system works and you need to learn how to convince the brain this means delivering the right set of photons and sound waves to make the perceptual system believe you're really there it's that amazing sense of presence which makes the VR Hardware disappear when you're in VR as Mark said earlier we're expanding our oculus device portfolio we're doing that to get more people in VR we're doing that to extend the reach of the apps and experiences that you you develop before we dive into new products I want to briefly talk about where our consumer VR journey started our partnership with Samsung is bringing VR to millions around the world faster than anyone expected and gear VR is by far the most popular way to experience VR today thanks to Samsung's global reach and amazing technology combined with the work of this developer community back in April this year in partnership with Samsung we launched the gear VR controller and that was a big upgrade for the gear VR experience to put it in perspective when gear VR users pick up their controller they average 50 minutes in VR that day which is a 60 percent increase and they're looking to do more in VR too in fact they download 25% more apps which goes to show the new controller and the apps that you build for it are making a big difference gear VR set the beginning of the VR consumer era we're really proud of this community that we built in partnership with Samsung and we're gonna continue to push this VR energy innovation frontier together next up let's talk about standalone VR as Mark said standalone is this sweet spot between mobile and PC VR and we're starting to invest in this new category with a focus on two things accessibility we're going to bring more people into VR and innovation we're pushing the envelope on the experiences that you can build oculus go as you saw is our first stand-alone product it's an all-in-one experience hands down the easiest way for people to get into VR and for our developer community it's a platform for you to expand the reach of the apps and experiences that you're already building you know we think people are gonna spend a lot more time in VR when they get a standalone device so we really wanted oculus go to be leap in both comfort and visual clarity first of all oculus go is super lightweight despite the fact that it's an all-in-one full mobile computer secondly we designed soft elastic traps straps with really high adjustability so it feels natural to wear it and it practically disappears when you're in VR and third we designed the facial interface with a new mask fabric that's extremely breathable and a foam layer that conforms beautifully to your face it feels incredibly soft soft to wear we also wanted oculus go to deliver the best visual clarity of any VR product we've ever built so oculus go will ship with an all-new custom optical design the lenses are the next generation of the ones on oculus rift same wide field-of-view and significantly reduce glare now we matched these custom lenses with a wqhd fast switch LCD display that is specifically optimized for VR it has a much wider or higher pixel fill factor then all adds and that has a dramatic effect on visual clarity it reduces the screen door effect so you get much sharper text and beautifully defined images we haven't seen this kind of visual clarity in VR before it's awesome and lastly oculus gol also ships with an integrated spatial audio experience the audio drivers oh yeah the audio drivers are built right into the headset so you can't you can use them without headphones if you want it makes getting in and out of the are much faster and also much easier to share with another person gear VR and oculus Go are binary compatible their apps are binary compatible and they share the same controller input set that means if you're building for gear VR you're also building for oculus CO and we're bringing the best of our library from gear VR to oculus go on day one also thanks to our amazing friends at unity and epic you can now also build for oculus go in unity and universal engine we will start shipping oculus Go dev kits to you our developers in November all right and that's oculus go our first stand-alone VR headset it's lightweight and comfortable incredible visual quality perfect for watching movies and concerts playing games and of course just hanging out with your friends in VR we believe oculus go will be the most accessible VR experience you heard it from mark it'll be available early next year for $1.99 awesome ok so we've talked about mobile and standalone VR and now I want to turn to our most powerful VR device oculus rift rift pioneered VR magic to the world and touch changed the game by giving us hand presence in VR with such high fidelity that you can naturally do things like throwing and catching a frisbee with while flying why not in zero gravity or holding a comic book in your hands and flipping through the pages just like the real thing or scaling a cliff with your own hands and then why not taking a quick break to check out the scenery and so many other great experiences here's just a taste of what's possible in VR with rift and touch when you commit your past I guess you were on your own follow you dreams to a place a space the grace that takes you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] to keep me [Music] [Music] [Music] thanks to the amazing developer community right here our rift catalog today features over 300 super high quality touch titles including triple-a blockbusters like lone echo Robo recall and Arctica one which just launched yesterday we have a bunch of rift announcements for you today first of all in response to the feedback that we received from a lot of you in our developer community we're launching a new program called oculus for business this program is designed for developers small business owners and enterprises basically for companies who want to explore VR to create new workflows or completely change how they serve their customers we're kicking off this program with a new oculus rift bundle the bundle includes rift and touch as well as an extra sensor for room-scale VR and extra facial interfaces you also get a full VR commercial license enterprise-grade warranty and dedicated customer support plus businesses can now place bulk orders [Applause] now we've already been working with a few leading companies around the world who have been pioneers of the are in awesome new ways I'm here are some great examples OD OD is installing rift in hundreds of their dealerships worldwide they're allowing potential customers to try different configurations of their dream car like the awesome r8 Spyder right here and you do that while experiencing the car in an immersive new way which is so much better than even the best web configuration tool it's really really awesome and of course love the car Cisco Cisco created the VR collaboration environment on top of their SPARC platform that lets coworkers meet in real time to work together or in this particular case play around with 3d jet engines why not and that's definitely not all here are many more of these global leaders that are working with this developer community right now to bring VR into their businesses it's great to see they are continue to expand so quickly across an impressive range of industries if you want to learn more check out our website alright this past July we launched the summer of rift promotion and it reran it for a few weeks it was a huge success in the rift community grew a lot now check this out we're making a bold move we're setting a new permanent price for oculus rift and touch starting today rift and touch will be available for 399 the best VR system now at the best price period and we have even more exciting news to share with you about rift later this morning now since the beginning of this journey we've been asking ourselves would it be possible to one day get the magic of rift into a portable fully untethered VR device could we deliver the magic of rift without a PC well let's talk about the future that question I just asked is what originally kicked off the Santa Cruz project and last year right at oculus connect we demoed the first generation Santa Cruz prototype it was an early prototype it had a full mobile computer strapped to the back of your head so not quite a super organic masterpiece but he gave us a powerful platform to build and demonstrate a standalone VR headset with inside out tracking it's hard to explain but the feeling that you get when you're completely untethered is this overwhelming sense of freedom in VR now the second you have that freedom of movement you really want to walk up to everything and interact with it you really want your hands in VR you want that magic and freedom that you get with touch so the next step with Santa Cruz was to build an amazing controller and that's what we did the same award-winning team that created touched design the Santa Cruz controllers and you're gonna love these we carried over the features that made touch so successful you have both grip and trigger buttons and the ergonomics that make these controllers disappear in your hands also we designed the Santacruz controllers with a touchpad which is very intuitive to users and gives developers more flexibility to create great experiences in this new category now these are still prototypes but they already look incredible and feel great in your hands and I promise you'll get to try them before too long so let's take a look at how the santa cruz controllers work we use the same constellation tracking technology that we developed for rift and touch using these tiny leds we of course want the controllers to sort of discreetly fade away into the background so we built our tracking system with infrared LEDs that are not visible to the human eye but they are visible to the sensors I'm sure you already noticed the Santa Cruz controllers look different from touch the tracking ring is in a totally different position well that's because Santa Cruz tracks the controller's using the same sensors that enable inside out tracking of the headset and we specifically decided to use four ultra wide-angle sensors here and place them strategically to maximize tracking coverage the top sensors in particular are placed very close to the edges and they're pointed slightly backwards so they can see when the controller is above your head and by the way we also tried a system with just two sensors in the earlier phases of this project and we found that it was really limiting you can see that here tracking controllers with just your visual field of view in VR really restricts the experience and especially what you can do with your hands now here's how this looks when you go to four sensors you get a much wider tracking volume more natural and unrestricted movement with your hands now what's really cool is to see this in action with this four sensor tracking architecture something as simple as picking up an object and throwing it becomes delightful you can see how smooth the tracking is from every angle here and from here you can imagine actions like you know a tennis serve or you know bow and arrow or a quick draw it gives you just a really good idea for the incredible freedom of movement the Santacruz can deliver I want to show you a sneak preview here of what happens when you add awesome content and it all comes together [Music] [Music] by the way that was BOGO she's our adorable mascot for Santa Cruz still learning her way around but you'll get to meet her soon thanks BOGO okay we have more work to do as we build the next generation of stand-alone VR technology with santa cruz but we're planning to put this in the hands of developers next year as Mark said after all it's your work and your creativity that always deliver the real magic so that's what I wanted to cover today from our hardware roadmap there's a bunch of things we're really excited about here number one gear VR continues to lead the mobile VR category number two delivering our first standalone VR device oculus go super comfortable and easy to wear the best visual clarity you've seen in VR and a very accessible price that will bring more and more people into this community number three a new milestone for our industry with Santa Cruz the first complete standalone VR system with full inside out tracking and hand presence and number four oculus rift now permanently available at 399 the best VR system now at the best price end of story [Applause] now we get to talk about software we've been working on some really cool updates to the rift platform and to share that with all of you now please welcome Nate Mitchell good morning and oculus we believe VR is a fundamentally new computing platform one that we'll use every day to work play and connect as Hugo mentioned we're constantly pushing forward in hardware but this morning I'm excited to share more about how we're also realizing this future through software over the past year we've rebuilt rifts core software experience from the ground up to lay the foundation for the future of VR computing we call it rift core 2.0 and it's the biggest update to rift yet core 2.0 makes rift more powerful more intuitive and more personal today I want to introduce two of the most important new systems in the core 2.0 update we've been looking forward to sharing with these with you for a very long time so let's dive right in first we've taken all the functionality that was in Universal menu and oculus home and we've replaced it with a brand new system interface designed specifically for touch I'm excited to introduce your new command center for rift oculus dash [Music] [Music] [Music] so - puts the power of rift at your fingertips everything you need is available in - your apps and games your friends settings and notifications - you can bring up - anytime anywhere we've made it instantly accessible and it runs as a 3d overlay so it opens inside your current experience there's no need to go back to home you just open up - where you are and where the old UI was designed for gamepad we've designed - it's natively for touch you can just swipe naturally to scroll and once you've found what you're looking for you simply tap to select it it feels great - completely streamlines complex actions I can easily jump from one app to another directly from - or let's say Hugo invites me to play some rec room I can open up - accept the invite and we're off but that's just scratching the surface of what - is capable of and that's because - unlocks the full power of your PC letting you use your desktop apps from inside VR [Applause] this is a total GameChanger imagine I'm jumping across the galaxy in elite dangerous and I want to check out the latest music video from Odessa with - I can take the video in chrome pin it to the side and it stays there permanently as a 3d overlay inside my cockpit the possibilities here for multitasking with your PC are endless you can check the the latest news in a web browser you could set the perfect playlist and Spotify or even stay in touch with friends / messenger and as you can see this is more than just a mirror of your physical monitor your workspace here is infinite every application can have its own virtual display and they can be positioned anywhere at the right size and scale for VR these are true virtual displays enable at a hardware level on the GPU with best-in-class performance and visual quality using the same underlying technology that we use for asynchronous space form and it's hardware improves and resolutions get better we're now on a path to replacing traditional monitors entirely it took a huge amount of work under the hood to get this right a big thank you to our friends at Nvidia and AMD for all their support internally our teams are already getting a ton of benefit from having access to their traditional development tools inside VR we actually use - with Visual Studio to debug - from inside - that is as awesome as it sounds and these same workflows work with unreal and unity to the - is built using react VR our open source framework for VR UI this makes - super extensible and we're really looking forward to working with the developer community to add more - - in the future so that's - all together - is a massive step forward for the workspace of the future and VR computing this is groundbreaking technology that you won't find anywhere else and we're thrilled to enable it first on rift now the next major highlight of core 2.0 is oculus home this is what home looks like today one of the most requested features for rift has always been the ability to create and customize your own space and with - taking on more of the platform UI homes freed up to be more personal and more immersive so we leveled home and rebuilt it let's check it out [Music] home is now yours to customize and explore creating and designing your own space is easy everyone starts with a great collection of items to create a space that feels totally unique we have furniture toys even works of art and you can place these items anywhere in the room using touch they just snap into place super easily and of course you can mess with reality a bit too now there are a bunch of fun new features inside home your achievements can be put up on display for your friends to come check out and your collection of apps actually comes to life as old-school cartridges that can be launched from inside home you can even play with fireworks or practice your aim from the safety of your virtual living room we also wanted home to deliver an even greater level of presence now home has a much more realistic and vibrant look with state-of-the-art lighting and dynamic soft shadows powered by Unreal Engine 4 and it looks absolutely stunning in rift finally your space is now completely persistent you can share with friends or visit your friends spaces to see what they've created you can even leave your friends a note for the next time they log in this initial update to home is really focused on customization but we're gonna be making it easy for you and your friends to hang out at home and even create shared spaces together in the future so that's a quick preview of rift core 2.0 I'm excited to announce that rift core 2.0 the beta will be available this December as a free update to all rift users when it comes to rift we are really just getting started home and dash are both fundamental parts of our vision for the future of VR computing and we're looking forward to sharing much more with you in the year ahead thanks so much wow that rocked now it's time to dive into the developer section of this keynote as you can see here today we get to bring the entire community together to celebrate how far we've come the number of developers building for oculus has doubled in the past year and together you shipped over 2,000 apps and experiences you can see a couple of them here we have some great developer announcements and a few surprises for you today and over the next two days we'll talk about your app performance supercharging discovery creating safe communities in VR and a lot more our next speaker is an oculus og who's had a big hand in growing many of our product teams from the beginning she PMDD the very first version of oculus home with exactly 2.6 engineers and every version of home since then among many other awesome things please welcome product manager Christina Womack to the stage hi everyone this may be the biggest Kinect but I know many of you have been with us since the very first one I didn't make it to that one I was in Irvine with my team frantically trying to get oculus home ready so gear VR could ship so I feel like we've all been in the trenches together for a really long time now so much has changed since we took dk1 but what hasn't changed is our commitment to this industry and to our developer community today I'd like to take a moment to answer the questions we hear from you time and again how are we helping you to develop and how are we helping you reach people this is how we think about supporting your work let's dive right in I don't need to tell most of the people in this room this but it bears acknowledging that building for VR is super demanding you have to hit standards and software development that have never existed before so every time we find an opportunity to take the pressure off we're going to do it here's just some of what we've shipped for the past year most of these are so you can find problems earlier and fix them faster take lost frame capture shipping this week it's in the oculus debug tool and with it you don't have to wait for our rifts store team to tell you that you're dropping frames this is what we use to evaluate apps and we're giving it to you so you can find exactly where you're dropping them and fix before you submit and while we're on performance we know my team knows the Nemesis of VR development can be the CPU so let's take a look at multi-view unity developers know this is single pass stereo rendering it's an extension to OpenGL ES that can lower the CPU cost of draw calls by up to 40% helping you hit frame rate and giving you room for more complex and creative scenes it's not new we've talked about it before but it's taken years to change the standard and get the chips and the devices with the right drivers and get engines and SDKs updated ready for you to use this was a four year marathon across the industry with all of these partners and it's finally ready for primetime this is the same being drawn without multi-view and with multi-view you can see multi-view finishes faster and this is all done automatically behind the scenes for you illustrative videos are great but what about a real game this is république the camouflage team has been hard at work bringing this from mobile and console to VR this game would not be possible in mobile VR without multi-view camouflage told us they got as much as a 30% boost to frame rate with it enabled and now I'm super excited to announce it's coming soon to gear VR but great VR isn't all about frame time we at oculus just don't want you to have to build everything yourselves we want to give you building blocks as shortcuts when I ask people what their most memorable experience has been in VR often they say it was when they were with their best friend or a family member that's why you hear about people first experiences that's why we want to give you a whole pile of blocks for building great social apps our oculus avatars debuted last year and they showed up in some super fun apps like Kings Bray and brass tactics we are still working on the best ways for people to express themselves in VR we've learned a lot through research and play today I'm super excited to announce you and to introduce you to the brand new oculus avatars this is a brand-new visual style that gives people more ways to customize skin clothing and hair color independently some of us in the team have a vested interest in unusual hair color with this update we're giving people trillions of permutations and with the redesign we're also adding the ability for people to unlock custom avatar clothing and accessories that you create to match your game or app for example this is an awesome skin we're making available for people to celebrate res infinite coming to oculus our new avatars are coming to rift and mobile in 2018 and we've heard you finally I'm very excited to announce that your most requested avatars feature is on its way you'll be able to take our keyless avatars to other platforms including steam and daydream in 2018 [Applause] our new direction is about more than just representation and we're still iterating to give you a sneak preview of what's coming later next year please meet my friend and the 0.6 engineer you heard about when Hugo introduced me who helped us build the first version of oculus home will step two hi everyone it's great to be here at OSI four I wanted to show you how we're updating oculus avatars to be more dynamic and expressive our new skin shading makes for a more realistic look and our new clothing options help you personalize to your own style we're also adding real-time mouth movement driven by our lip sync library and we've worked hard to make the eyes build true to human behavior they'll identify and track interesting objects in the scene around you we really think that these changes make social experiences more fun and engaging and we're excited to introduce them to you next year thank you very much now back to you Christina okay Avot has a one shortcut void in our rooms api's or others and we wired these together into a social status scene to make it even easier to get started building social apps you can find this in the developer Center but we know this is only the beginning let's be honest being in VR with other people especially strangers can be intimidating for communities to thrive people need to feel safe and it costs developers a lot of money and time and effort to build and maintain safe places we care deeply about protecting the future of social vr so we want to help we decided to build an API that does a lot of it for you so early next year you'll be able to get platform level safety tools like blocking and reporting for free it's like built-in best practices that carry app to app for example if I block a person an app one and we both happen to move to app - I can still be protected whoever I blocked can be blocked everywhere and the same API I think it's great and the same API that powers that also lets people who have enjoyed playing together simply pull up the UI add a friend so they can play together again in the future these features all start rolling out in early 2018 and will add more as the year goes on these are just a few of the things we're doing to help you develop to get to the store faster and with better performance now Hugo spoke earlier about how we're going to bring more people into VR so let's answer that second question how are we going to help you reach them first for everyone already in the headset we're still making the store better it's the first point of discovery for most people Nate just introduced you to the new oculus home on rift an early next year rift will include an amazing new store this is just a hint of what's to come but discovering great content isn't limited to this store in home on gear VR we've introduced a new section called Explorer it's a feed of personalized recommendations we're matching content to people so if you're like my kids and all you want to see is sharks and dinosaurs as I'll show you and if you spend time in horror and puzzle games we'll show you more of those explore stories can come from us the oculus when we need to tell you about promotions like bundles or to highlight trending apps and experiences but they can also come from you you can create developer stories right from the developer Center New York Times can use developer stories to deep link directly from Explorer to specific videos inside their app face your fears can announce new doors and deep link right to those you can use these to announce new content features levels or game modes which is especially awesome for getting news to people who already own your app but maybe haven't launched it in a while also super useful for time-sensitive events like concerts where we're trying to get people together in via at a specific moment in speaking of concerts Samsung VR used an event to promote a Coldplay concert and this is amazing this blew my mind when the stat came in almost half of everyone in gear VR at that moment jumped in to join the fun now we're gonna give you a new way to get your content into Explorer we're opening our Explorer API to all developers on gear VR today and we're bringing Explorer to rift in 2018 but as you know not everyone owns a headset yet so for now it's still super important for us to have increasing awareness of your work and really VR itself with people outside of VR - and this is a multi threaded effort for us first one of the ways we think we can help is to make it super easy for your app to be seen on Facebook it's where your fans can become evangelists so we've built hooks directly into the platform to make it easier from inside your app you can dream up all these creative ways to let people capture videos and stills and then call the brand new share API to let people quickly and easily post to Facebook another great way to be found on Facebook is live-streaming we're already seeing people live streaming long VR sessions visiting multiple apps and starting today live streams on gear VR will be more interactive so I can see comments and reactions rolling in right over my head and VR and we're going to bring live streaming to rift next year okay so we've talked about discovery in the headset and on Facebook but we think we can do something to bridge the gap in the middle - we're adding a feature - let me connect with my friends when they're in VR and check out the game they're playing wherever I may be the oculus app will notify me when a friend goes into gear VR from the notification I'll be able to ask to tune in my friend can choose to accept and when we're connected I'll be watching a video stream seeing what they see in VR and we'll be chatting live and if I have my headset nearby I can jump in and join them bridging the gap is also super important for people who have never put on a headset though I don't know about you but explaining VR to my parents without showing it to them was pretty difficult so it stands to reason that marketing VR experiences outside of the headset is really hard mixed reality is a way for people to understand what your VR experience might feel like even if they've never put on a headset here's our team working behind the scenes on a video for dead and buried our native stack makes it possible to combine real-world footage with in-game capture including the dynamic lighting your video can then be used in live streams gameplay trailers or even at a live event and here's an end result this one shows the medium medium teams mixed reality capture with artist Niles Smith at work you can get started creating these videos in unity and unreal [Music] each and every developer in this room is paving the way for the future of VR your success is VR success keep giving us feedback keep us honest we're so excited that you're with us okay now I'd like to introduce you to one of your fellow developers and our good friend whose team is leading the charge to bring the Facebook community to the oculus platform and beyond but before we welcome Rachel Franklin head of social VR at Facebook let's check out what her team has been working on testing one two three four five we're live from spaces [Music] I'm really moving and I'm really talking and and this is me and I have a pizza in my hand what you're eating right now is a virtual accent this is a horrible star the world's worst star see these glasses [Music] [Music] [Music] so you just saw how virtual reality has the power to build communities by helping people feel like they're really together even when they're actually very far apart and VR also lets us share experiences that we couldn't otherwise have but with people we care about now just six months ago we took our first step toward building VR with people at the center Facebook spaces is a place to be yourself with your friends and family no matter where you are in the world it's available for rift and it's coming to other platforms soon now people are getting creative and having fun in spaces from tic-tac-toe games to karaoke showdowns and what this tells us is that putting people first in VR really works there's something just incredibly wonderful that happens when you take people who care about each other and have them share fun activities and immersive content in VR and we're continuing to build on that foundation in three ways the first is that we need to bring people even more fun engaging activities to share in VR second we need to provide more immersive media for people to explore together in VR and third we need to connect people across virtual and non virtual worlds so everyone can share immersive experiences from a headset from their desktop and even from their phone so let's dive deeper on that first one engaging activities we started with a few core features and spaces but everyone's idea of fun is personal and who better to tell us how to make space is even better than the people who are actually using it so we're focused on building tools that give people the power to be creative with their friends in VR we've added a way for you to create your own toys and props from your Facebook photos so you can make a 3d collage or even a mask we've added dice so you can easily challenge friends to your favorite games like my personal favorite craps and playing cards are coming soon too okay what's even better though is that we're introducing a new way for anyone in spaces to combine items so you can make your very own kit and then you can save it and share it with friends so maybe it's all the pieces of your favorite costume or the elements of a handcrafted board game kits are launching in the coming weeks and we are really excited to see the creativity of our community but that's just the beginning as we continue to build on the core of Facebook spaces we know that all of you as developers will contribute ideas that we could never have imagined so next year we're gonna open up new ways for you to build with us let me show you an early example from our collaboration with resolution games there are the creators of the successful gear VR game bait so it lets you turn the spaces table into a game where you can go ice fishing with your friends 10 seconds left here we go okay [Music] and you can try this on the show floor today in a demo but it's not only fun it's actually a really clever way to adapt the spaces environment for a totally different purpose and these are experiments that help us learn how to build in this new product we learn what works we learn what doesn't and we learn what tools will empower developers to bring their great ideas to life we'll share more specifics with you guys on our plans for next year but in the meantime please let us know if you're interested because we do want to hear from you now it's not just creative activities that bring people together it's meaningful media too and there's a huge opportunity for artists and filmmakers and visionaries to bring their creations to people in VR so let's talk about a few ways that we're going to enable that this year live 360 video has opened an immersive window into new experiences right from the Facebook app with live 360 videos produced by many of you people are exploring new places and experiencing moments from the personal to the incredible as they unfold we got a locals view of some awesome spots from one of my favorite creators Ariel Viera and he gives these live 360 walking tours of New York know funny enough which showing up here is actually called the oculus I thought that was very cool we got a close-up 360 view of the red carpet at a movie premiere as all the stars arrived now this is something that most of us could never be a part of but with VR we can take these experiences to the next level we can actually be there posing for the paparazzi on that red carpet and we can do it with our friends so today I'm excited to announce that live 360 video is coming to Facebook spaces this means that you can stream full 360 video into your space letting you be anywhere in the world with your friends in real time and you'll have the full wealth of Facebook live 360 content at your fingertips in VR so you can experience places and moments in an entirely new way together it's the first step toward true telepresence and it's rolling out later this year today we're doing an early demo so if you're not able to be with us here at OC 4 you can jump into spaces and you will find a live 360 video that puts you right on the show floor so you can join us from wherever you are with your friends now a 360 video becomes a new medium for creative expression there are also artists around the world that are pioneering this new form of media that's created from inside VR they're embracing tools like quill a simple but powerful app where artists make unique VR native works of art that you don't just look at you're actually immersed in them and these stunning experiences can leave a powerful emotional impression in fact when you're seeing right now was nominated for an Emmy as with all our people naturally want to share it with someone else but up till now that hasn't been possible today we're announcing that quill art or as we like to call them quill astray shion's are coming to Facebook spaces this lets us amplify the power of the VR native art form to not only evoke powerful feelings in all of us but also to connect with others at the same time we're starting with a beautiful VR animated short story painted in quill by our incredibly talented resident artist Goro Fujita [Music] [Music] now you can experience this story in spaces on the show floor today I will encourage you to do it it's really beautiful and it'll be rolling out to everyone soon and then next year we'll open it up for any quill artists to be able to publish their work in spaces as well this is the beginning of a future where people can meet up with their friends to watch stories and shows and movies created specifically for VR and anyone can create them from a college student to a professional student or sorry a professional studio whether they're working in quill or any other 3d platform and it's a brand new way to share art with each other like never before so this brings me to the third piece of the puzzle I shared with you earlier connecting people across virtual and non virtual worlds with all of this powerful content being created within VR we're seeing the beginnings of an ecosystem take shape we're seeing talented artists emerge and they use tools like oculus medium to create new kinds of virtual content but why should all that content be confined to VR we want to allow creators to distribute their immersive content beyond the boundary of the headset so the people can discover and share immersive experiences with all of their friends no matter where they are by linking virtual platforms to the Facebook platform we can make this possible starting today objects created in VR can be shared in a new more engaging way with a completely native 3d media type in your news feed introducing the Facebook 3d post it's interactive and it's immediately responsive to scroll in touch it makes content pop off the screen and you can do this today and with anything that you create from medium or marker drawings from spaces now these posts use a standard 3d format so soon we're gonna be widening support for even more 3d creation tools and we plan to open up an API for any developer to share 3d posts from your app to Facebook so not only can you share these creations from VR to Facebook you can actually move them in and out of VR seamlessly and this is really cool since spaces gives you access to all of your Facebook content any piece of medium art on Facebook can now become a virtual object in Facebook spaces and soon there'll be more ways to apply this technology for instance you could take a VR sculpture into AR and create an AR object using the Facebook camera and then bring that object into your real-world environment very cool we'll also be able to create fully interactive 3d scenes for people to discover on Facebook like this one so you can see how the objects are animated and you can even open the door by just scrolling your finger it is so fun and we can't wait to open this up to more 3d content types so all the our creators can share their work in brand new ways we're working toward a world where everyone can share their immersive experiences seamlessly and everyone can contribute their creativity that's what's awesome about Facebook people and developers and professional creators all coming together in communities sharing meaningful moments and impactful experiences with each other but now with a whole new dimension thank you [Applause] [Music] 2017 was a blockbuster year for VR content and you brought home awards and accolades including six Emmy nominations and of course Echo Arena winning iii-v our game of the year it's awesome last year we announced we were doubling our original investment of 250 million to fund VR content and our dedication to this community isn't slowing down we're bringing more and more big-name developers and publishers into the game in just a minute oculus VP of content Jason Rubin is going to join us on stage and share with you some of the brand new experiences Triple A experiences coming to oculus but first let's take a moment to celebrate the insane things that we accomplished together this year [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] at the beginning of 2017 we said this is going to be the year of content but you exceeded our wildest imagination the number of great titles you've brought to our platform this year is staggering now let's take a minute and level set gear VR is about two years old rift is 18 months old touch believe it or not has not yet celebrated its first birthday and before these amazing pieces of hardware we're on the horizon just wasn't that much VR development going on if someone had told me two years ago that as a community these were our goals I would have said Yeah right we can achieve one of them maybe you know what you achieved all four now we've become impatient as a society we expect things to happen overnight but that's not the way change happens the road to mass adoption in VR is gonna take a while but if this last two years is any indication we're well on our way how many of you have ever been inside the White House okay a few how many of you have ever been in orbit I didn't think so how about in front of a dinosaur not likely right well if you're in VR you can do any of these things in an hour and importantly the diversity quality and immersiveness of these experiences is just gonna get better Felix and Paul won an Emmy by bringing us inside the White House for people's house it's amazing and it's the promise of their films that makes us truly are believers let's talk about onward for a second onward is an amazing first-person shooter but what's really incredible is it was developed by one individual in one year he's self-taught misses his first game while oculus was focusing on comfort teleportation Dante said to heck with that I went with old-school first-person controls you know what he found a willing audience that's awesome Dante thank you we're extremely proud to announce that onward is coming to the rift in the next month indie developers are vitally important to VR their creativity and often risk-taking pushes the medium forward and indie developers like Dante keep us on the edge of our seats waiting to see what's next face your fears is one of our biggest success stories it's been downloaded over a million and a half times if you go to youtube you can see tons of hilarious videos brothers and sisters and grandmothers facing their fears it's easy to understand why this is a mega hit how many of you are fans of Netflix's stranger things I figured but we're gonna mash these two IP together into a new fear that's coming in the next month allowing fans to step into their favorite TV shows and movies brings tears to people's eyes if any of you have been to comic-con recently and seen the lines for our activations you know what I'm talking about VRS potential for wish fulfillment is limitless which brings us to lone echo from ready at dawn two years ago there was no such thing as a made for VR genre there were no best practices nobody had ever tried to figure out how to wrap a hand around an arbitrary shape you know we've been here before I remember 20-some odd years ago trying to figure out how to get a character action game into 3d in retrospect seems like it should have been easy but at the time who was really hard work you guys are doing really hard work well hard work pays off loan echo is our fastest title to a million dollars and it's still going really strong and yes they scored an 89 on Metacritic why is this important in the 20-some odd years of Metacritic data lone echo is one of the top hundred and fifty titles on PC 2d 3d anything and VR is just getting started we're gonna double down on that potential I'm really excited to announce that ready at dawn is going to be releasing a major expansion to Echo Arena next year [Applause] echo combat is a new multiplayer zero-gravity first-person shooter expansion to Echo Arena I'll be seeing you in there and ready at dawn has also let me say after a lot of pushing Jack and Liv's story will continue there's more to lone echo coming wait for a big announcement shortly so yeah we're incredibly proud of the reception that loan echo and echo arena have gotten the most common thread and reviews is that these are experiences like no other we fundamentally believe that VR will continue to little I'm sorry continue to deliver experiences like no other what VR has that differentiates it from every other technology that it keeps getting compared to is infinite potential and we believe in you and we believe in your ability to unlock that potential now as has become customary we'd like to show you a few videos of just a sample of some of the things that are coming out in the next year [Music] [Music] Wow this is amazing oh really watch this [Music] Wow [Music] go [Music] acolyte it's your time to fight unlock the secrets channel your energies and become ascendant join us I've never met a blade runner before welcome to your memory something's wrong we're in a different memory don't worry we made you we'll take care of you [Applause] [Music] do not like that so yeah 2017 has been the year of content and it isn't over yet we just released article one yesterday we have a lot of fantastic titles coming before the end of the year but as you can see 2018 is the year of infinite potential we believe that it's going to reach even greater heights now before I leave there's a question that I keep getting asked over and over again when are the biggest developers and publishers coming to VR and every time I answer it in the same way be patient they're coming well today I'm extremely excited to make a down payment on that promise oculus is honored to be working with one of the greatest developers in videogame history thank you you go from knowing you're dead by noon to I'm gonna live I'm not even wounded in a matter of a few it's like no feeling you've ever had before war in combat have been part of human civilization since the beginning people have a fascination for what it must be like putting your life on the line for something bigger is a universal appeal every spawn it's about creating an authentic experience we really want to depict being a soldier in combat in a more fully fleshed out in realistic way was about evolving the combat now not just on the ground looking left and right and worrying about flanking do you have to worry about what's above you it makes you think differently my combat experience in VR really gives you the chance to experience life closer to what a soldier would experience in real combat it gives you more of that feeling of paranoia and the tension fear and adrenaline and anger it's more visceral it's more terrifying VR puts you into those situations so you can start imagining a small part of what it must be like right now we're just getting started the drive to create this new VR experience was so great that it was a natural fit for us to partner with oculus they believed in the vision they believed in what we're doing we won't be satisfied until we're working on a game that was going to have an impact on the industry I think together we're gonna make something really I could tell you in words but really you have to be here thanks Jason I loved how you just dropped the mic right there well thank you everyone for joining us today we've covered a lot of ground this morning mark shared his vision of the power of the art to collapse distance we introduced you to oculus Go launching early next year and gave you a glimpse at the future of standalone VR with Project Santa Cruz you saw the new oculus home in - and our evolving suite of developer tools plus awesome new content partners including the mashup of stranger things and face your fears and Pixar and ringspot respawn jumping into VR for the very first time you've seen how far VR has come in the past year and that's just a tip of the oc4 iceberg over the next two days you'll hear from developers artists filmmakers engineers and astronauts why not covering design development distribution and the future of our industry I can't wait to experience my first oculus connect but before we all hit the show floor we have one more treat for you today up in Washington State the team at oculus research is hard at work exploring the unknown and taking our next steps into the far future of VR they're working on bleeding edge optics haptics computer vision applied machine learning and this a one-of-a-kind multifocal perceptual testbed designed to better understand new display technologies traditionally oculus chief scientist Michael Abrash closes the Kinect keynote with a little magic on stage this year we're gonna do things differently Michael will be joined on stage by critically acclaimed journalist / VR whose yest Steven Levy for a chat about the future of immersive computing you might recognize Steven from back channel wired and yes the whole earth software catalog I'm excited to see what comes from this conversation between two of the most vibrant minds in the industry and with that it's my pleasure and honor to introduce Michael and Steven to the stage [Music] well thank you as Hugo said a highlight of previous oculus connects and f8 have been Michael's talk so I am so honored be speaking with him up here I was also backstage with him when Mark said that a billion people were going to be in virtual reality was the first time Michael heard that and no pressure he didn't say one okay so right after this talk you're gonna publish an article on the blog the oculus blog revealing a little bit of what's happening up there in Redmond Washington with your fairly secretive lab that's you know looking and trying to make happen the far future of virtual reality there and you compare it to Xerox PARC in probably the early 60s when they were coming up with conventions of computing as we know it now tell me what what made you come up with that comparison what part of park are you thinking about and where does that comparison lie well in the 70s what happened at Parc particularly in the computer sciences lab was that there was this amazing critical mass of people many of whom are now famous like for example Alan Kay or Chuck Thacker Butler Lampson but people came together and brought all these pieces into a platform that is the platform we use today so laser printers Ethernet bitmap graphics windowing WYSIWYG word processing this whole package and really for the last 40 years we've all been using that platform and elaborating on it and I do wonder sometimes if those people hadn't come together in that place how different our world might be right now would you be sitting here with an iPad I don't know so I haven't seen him with Dynabook ah sorry so the the thing is that was really the first great wave of human oriented computing and we all take it for granted now that everybody in this audience is seconds away from the virtual world effectively and you can look at it through this nice flat two-dimensional surface you can interact with it that's how we all have gotten used to it and that's great but what VR is is it's the second great wave it's the wave in which instead of looking at it through these portals we actually just live in it and to do that we're gonna need another critical mass of people very similar to Xerox PARC covering a whole range of things right computer vision optics audio interaction all these pieces have to come together into that platform that will let us be really in that digital world and I've said this before the thing I want is I want a virtual workspace where I can just put on the headset and I can have whatever configurations I want switch between them teleport to see people and that is going to be that second great wave and that's what we're trying to put together well in order to do that just as they came up with you know these tropes and conventions that enabled us to communicate computer is better than typing in a command line there you know there's not gonna be no keyboards you know and if they were gonna be immersed in this reality there we're gonna need new conventions and new kinds of interfaces I know you're you know like a big admirer of what dog Angle Bart did he was the man who really came up with his team of you know the tools we use like the mouse and windows and you know definitely desktop you know in order to do this so what-what when you think about what these conventions will be in virtual reality you know what what do you think and how do you come up with the conventions that are going to allow us to you know move around and you know can accomplish things in this new platform I think we are at an angle Bart ma what I think's interesting this time instead of one person with a specific vision what we have is we have all these people and everybody here in one way or another is running that experiment of how do we interact with the virtual world when we're immersed in it and one of the places I see that that I think is great is how do you move without having discomfort right and I've seen many many different approaches I'm hypersensitive to that and it's amazing how much better that has gotten over the last year and it's really because we're running all these experiments so I think that what it's gonna be is that's going to be the community you likee you drill down on that why is it easier to move this year than it was last year there are just more people in it and they've built up that knowledge base one of the things that it's hard for all us technical people to realize is that the world is too complex to deduce everything and you really have to run a lot of experiments and what's happening is we're running more and more experiments the community's getting bigger and bigger and how you know you know Xerox PARC you know it's sort of a dangerous analogy to make was a one hand they did amazing work on the other hand it's notorious for not really delivering all the value that they created to the company that paid the bills and that's that's interesting and I would say that's a question I get asked every single time I use the phrase Xerox PARC and what's your answer well my answer is that really if you look at it it's hard to see how it could have worked Xerox had a business that would have been undercut by the technology from Xerox PARC and in fact it was ultimately and there was this misalignment where they created this lab the lab did great work the work didn't really fit with their business so different here because it is incredibly clear even you know even today you look at Facebook spaces for example and you say how well VR matches Facebook's mission to connect the world right I mean I think VR ultimately will be the most social thing that effectively has ever happened because now space doesn't limit who you can can connect with so this is something as everybody saw today that mark really believes in and it fits tightly and so all it is is a matter of delivering that and it will fit beautifully that's interesting because I was going to ask you how much you know as opposed to the you know a raw research lab a research lab really owned by Facebook shaped the research and it seems to me whether it's you're just a natural sync with marks vision and Facebook's mission or not that seems to be a direction you're going in all the research so it is a natural sync though I think I think it's obvious to pretty much everyone here when you look at what VR is now and what VR could be the different ways in which you want is it move forward right you want better visual quality you want the ability to move around freely you want the ability to mix the real and virtual world and all those things fit well with what Facebook is doing so I know one thing and I think you talked about this at a previous keynote the one thing you have a vision of useful sketches of it or a a very lightweight way to project reality of our senses like glasses they are and you're not alone in this maybe you know oculus was a little ahead of in the competition among the bigger companies there but right now we know that you know obviously Google and fate and and Amazon and Apple you know other players magic LeafSnap they're all looking at the same thing do you think this is going to be sort of the Alpha competition of the 2020s who's able to come up with like a lightweight like glasses way of projecting virtual reality or augmented reality on people and you know with the winner goes the spoils what I would say is it's obvious to me that this is the next platform and I think it's obvious to a lot of people and I think it's going to be a very exciting future doing it and I think we're incredibly well positioned but what I'm really thinking is I can't wait to get to that future so in your writings in your the way when you talk you talk a lot about a vision where there'll be a persistence to what what we have there were it won't be something we use just for a couple minutes a day but will be part of our daily existence there how important is that to have to develop something there's going to be a routine part of our lives as opposed to you know a special experience well I think that when you talk about something being a next platform the key is that it's something that is an important part of our life how much of the time isn't really the key the key is that it's something that every day you'll think yeah I'm just going to do this as a matter of course so trying to think of the last time that I didn't look at my phone for a whole and I think it's been a very long time last time I didn't look at a computer and really this is this is going to be a primary way that we interact with what we do for work for play for how we connect with other people and what are the challenges in making that happen you know maybe just start you know talking about the idea of like persistence you know in order to you know have something that that's you know uh gonna be be comfortable you know I think earlier in the keynote someone alluded to you know these headsets as great as they are you know are going to be evolved it's up to you and your team to it to evolve them what do you what do you how do you do that and there's so many ways that it does need to evolve to actually fulfill that potential I mean there's magic there now but I think everybody in this room would love to see super-high resolution with really good focus at all depths with the field of view as wide as the human field of view they would love to be able to bring in real world things like desks keyboards other people move around freely and they'd love to be able to interact with things in a more natural fluid way and everybody sees that in the long run the limit is can we do something that starts to rival our real experiences so I think we're just at the beginning of a very very long path that's going to be very exciting and so in doing that what kind of people are you looking for you know who works at oculus research so first of all it helps if they're really smart but I don't think that's gonna surprise you not looking for dumb people's out you're saying we are not OK so thank you for for helping limit that one but there's much more to it than that one of the things is that their virtual reality is so so technologically challenging and has so many different parts that have to work together that there's nothing that one person by themselves can really move forward enough it's really a team effort so they have to be team players where they have skills that are complementary to the other people and they also have to be very comfortable with working in an environment that's uncertain because all of this is unexplored territory and it's going to be explored but that process means there are inevitably going to be a lot experiments that fail and a lot of experiments that succeed and a lot of rerouting as it goes along and so people who would want to just be told here do this thing and this is what you need to do and not think about it probably not the right place what you want is someone who's a full part of the team who's always thinking about how do we succeed overall thinking about the big picture think about how all the pieces fit together and you know so you talk about some of the you know specific directions you're doing you know you said before and in one of your talks about you know we need some scientific breakthroughs that aren't here yet in order to really bring a realize you know what what you think that this platform should be you know so I know you're not gonna give us any trade secrets but but maybe talking about some directions you're going there the bring us closer to that vision so I'll talk about one specific thing which I think everybody here could identify with which is how do we get so that you can have really sharp visual clarity all the time and right now the headsets have fixed lenses that focus you at two meters and that means that everything closer than one meter is really not as sharp as it could be and as resolutions go up and as optics improve that will become more and more apparent and obviously especially if you can start bringing the real world you want to do things within arm's length so there are a number of ways that that could possibly be addressed so for example the ultimate solution would probably be holography if you could have glasses that gave you a holographic image it would be an awful lot like seeing the real world another approach would be to have a very very fine lens array of fine lenses that can create a light field that approximates reality another way to do it would be to have multiple planes each one at a different depth and yet another way would be to change the focal depth to match where you're looking all these are possible solutions the problem is none of them are workable product solutions yet so those are all interesting directions to go in and they're partly research and they're partly thinking about how they could be engineered and every one of them is difficult but every one of them is potentially a solution so in other words you know you've listed probably a half-dozen approaches there are you working on like every single one of those and experimenting in those I would say that at some level we are working with each of them the thing is that some of them are very far off or a huge amount of technological innovation would have to happen to make it work and others are more interesting engineering and human factors problems but yes we are looking across that whole range because who knows what the solution will be so that's really interesting you seen you talking about the long term there do you have any you know deadlines on when you've got to produce this stuff where is it totally open-ended well which is kind of a scary thing to shareholders maybe it is research which I define as when you start you don't know for sure that you can deliver what you started on and the way that I think about it is that when something is started within three to ten years if it works out that it you could imagine that it could ship in a product and really have impact so it's not open-ended and we don't have people who kind of think deep thoughts and things that maybe in 20 or 30 years could be interesting and publish a paper about it but at the same time we don't work on things that are obviously just engineering and deliverable well speaking of publishing you know is the research you're coming up with occulus research on the model of Facebook's approach to data centers where it's all very open and they want to improve the world by sharing their information or is it closer to what a traditional hardware manufacturer has in saying this is a competitive field this is proprietary information what how do you view that you know can how opening you about maybe not in the middle of it but eventually sharing your breakthroughs ultimately we'd like to share all of the breakthroughs but obviously ultimately is a ways off so we publish and we do want to be sharing information it is not our priority to publish it's a side effect of having done novel innovative work mm-hmm and if folks here wanted to become part of your effort there how would they go about that well we certainly have a page listing all of our openings and we would love to have people here join us so we are looking for the best people in the world and that's really the bottom line this is going to be ending a long journey with a great many challenges and we need great people Facebook itself is you know like a huge you know consumer and creator of artificial intelligence there what's the role of AI and machine learning and what you're doing machine learning is a critical part of making many of the systems that need to happen become good enough so for example if you take something like hand tracking it can help a huge amount if what you do is use machine learning to help help start the searches for things so it's not that you just throw things into a machine learning framework but from machine learning can be critical for helping parts of various pipelines work much better and so it's a hybrid system in the long run I do expect that machine learning and AI will be a significant part of the whole virtual experience I mean in the end what we'd really love to have is a great assistant right but that's not really something that I personally am working on what's the relationship between oculus research and the oculus that we see here you know and presents you know the products there as their stuff that you've done that is showing up in this generation of products talk about the pipeline so the relationship is that our purpose is to put things into that pipeline and work with the product team so that everybody here gets to use them and gets the right software that leverages them so that is that's the reason we're here there's nothing in the current generation that has come from us because there hasn't been enough time to even hit that three-year time frame but there's certainly a number of things that we could see over the next few years and especially certainly over the next five years four years because a year ago I said here's where I think we will be in five years and obviously we play a part in that for you on track with that or you know you would you say the same things here's well be in the next four years yeah I would say the same things I might actually bump a few of them up and you know obviously mark came here earlier this morning and gave a really optimistic view of of the arm you know and miraculous is going there has he been up to see if mark has been up to see us he did post about it so I don't think it'd be a big surprise to people and that was great I you know mark mark placed a great deal of trust on us to be going and doing worthwhile work and when he came it was a great experience to have him there so give me more of a sense of what the world will be like when you do realize or if you know let's assume you do what you want to do what well how will our lives be different by switching to that platform so the first thing I'll say is you know you and you say when if this is going to happen it's really a question of how quickly it happens because it's not technologically impossible and it is so powerful that it will happen so I could be wrong I'm clear on that right that's an amazing statement of confidence that you know maybe in this room you know it doesn't raise an eyebrow but I think outside it would why are you so confident you know maybe if it can be done it doesn't necessarily mean that it will be done that people will adopt it you know that grip that grandmother in England was really cool to adopt it but there might be some people who are a little reluctant to go there I certainly there will be but so let's take ourselves back to 1973 and let's say that what we have is we have a Xerox PARC Alto sitting on the table between us and you'll be saying well what makes you say that everyone's going to be using these things I mean you know you look at it it's kind of big it's kind of slow what would they use it for I remember back in the day what people would say is well you could use it to store recipes on which was not the world's biggest winning argument and you know no one would have foreseen any of the things that came on top of that right they were they wouldn't have first seen for example 3d real-time graphics they wouldn't have first seen Facebook they wouldn't have first seen the whole internet right and they certainly wouldn't for seeing computers in your pocket so it is true that one needs to have a little bit of vision here when you think about it but to me it is so obvious that just as back in 1973 you could have seen this unfolding at least in general by saying wait a minute you have access to all this information all this computing power it has to be incredibly valuable now to say what we have is we have access to driving your full perceptions with this so that you can actually be in this thing experiencing this thing so I've talked about you know the one thing that I want is that virtual workspace it's because that's the thing that would affect my life right now directly it's a virtual workspace look like the virtual workspace to me in the near future meaning in the next maybe five years you have a desk right you have a keyboard you have a mouse they're all mapped in by computer vision so you can use them but they're in a virtual space that reskin zit and then puts up whatever else you want with it so you could have a hundred screens you could have a hologram you can have a whiteboard and be talking with someone else other people can teleport in they you can teleport into them they can look over your shoulder you can work together basically think of it as it's like your real workspace except it's completely malleable and that is that I see that because that's what would affect me but there if you look at other people if you gave them access to it they would see so many other things that were entertainment productivity just for example just being a tourist going places just visiting with other people the the potential really is kind of the potential of reality right it's not even what is the killer app because what's killer app for reality it's all the things you can do well that that's the thing that I loved about some of your talks there when you really made a very convincing case that the reality that we think is our only reality is really you know just the construct that we make and the what the people out here can develop can be with the right tools yeah can the right system you know just as real not only is real to us but just as real as you know the things that are naked senses perceive there and you know and I think you know unlike you know using the alto right there there's a line that goes past when that thing you know subsumes or reality both in you know can VR in a mixed reality situation and some of your writings it seems what you're going for is a way where you know we'll be able to get every 100 percent of at least our vision you know and you know maybe you'll cover the years to get replaced by a mix of what's piped in from you know the physical world I don't want to say real and what's built by people like the folks in this room by developed by developers there that to me is significantly different and that's why you have so many challenges because you're trying to make that leap over some uncanny valley into what is you know totally just as real to us and that's absolutely right and I do think that that mixing of real and virtual is is the key here because what it will do is it will expand the ranges of experiences that we can have and that we can allow other people to have and really I mean that's what life's about is having experiences right with other people in other places and we can make basically as it gets good enough we can make almost anything possible so one thing you know I think you alluded to it in the essay you're going to publish today is a you have an apartment you've built in a like a real apartment up there you know tell me about that what's the point of building you know a model apartment up there and in Redmond well there are a couple of pieces to it one of the parts is that if you want to know how people might use virtual reality it would actually help especially once it's mixed with the real world with computer vision it would help to know how people actually do use things and so we can rather than having people in some artificial study setting what we do is we put them in an apartment and have them do real things and then we can see what they would need to have available in terms of functionality yeah they're there in an apartment wearing headsets or just in an apartment like watching TV or well you can noodles you can do both right I mean it's study people's patterns and then to say well if you had a mix of real and virtual now how would you use these things and what would be the problems that have to be solved the other part is if you're gonna make a computer vision system you need to know how good it is and it helps to have ground truth and this apartment is ground truth because we know exactly what is in it and where it is hmm so do you think in our apartments you know that basically will get you know the physical objects Dinn and then you know so well we won't bump into things but you know could we could make it some other place you know it could be a you know a palace or a cave and one of the things that I think many of the people in this room will ultimately be doing interesting work with is you can reskin things that's easy you can put virtual things in the scene not a big problem taking real things out of the scene probably not so the question is how you create interesting settings that adapt to what your physical surroundings are you know in it's just fascinating to speculate on what happens when we you know go in to immerse ourselves in this artificially created you know kind of kind of a reality there but in recent months we've been you know talking the determined alternative reality is being used in in a different context there the terms of political and even propaganda sense people talking about all alternate facts there and I'm wondering if this vision comes about there might be ways to tinker with our reality there or even hack it I'm wondering if we're going to be sitting here in ten years talking not about fake news but fake reality well I mean this this is a technology and how the technology gets used what the framework around it is is a separate thing and I think that the point you raise is a great point to think about is this matures and I mean do you have those kinds of conversations areas just heads down let's do the work the way I think about it is first we need to figure out how to make this work well enough and once that's in sight then it's useful to think about the entire framework but right now it is incredibly hard to move this forward and that's really where all the attention is and I and I know that you know we've been talking about this earlier to get like 95% of your scale vision there you know is a huge gap between 100% does it have to be and all-or-nothing kind of thing that deliver the experiences you want no not at all but a hundred percent boy a hundred percent is basically mapping to reality right and I think that one is long way off so the question is in my mind when do we even get to like twenty five percent because there's so much more that can be done and so I guess you know when you go back there you know what what's the next thing that you're going to be you know doing it in an oculus pacers what were do with what's your your focus now is it you know building the team is there any area that you in particular are working on in particular I am working on building the team and overall the direction that we're moving in but it isn't one thing that's the fascinating part this is a platform and so you know you wouldn't have gone to Xerox PARC and said well who's working on the mouse because the mouse without for example windowing graphics without fonts without a laser printer kind of limits what you can do and so there's how do we get photons into your eyes better how do we give you better computer vision for self presence for other people's presence for the surroundings around you how do we do audio better how do we let you interact with the world better it is a whole package and each piece can move forward some on its own but in the long run you really want all the pieces to come together and one really good example is suppose that we magically let you use your hands perfectly in VR right you just reach out you grab virtual objects well remember that thing I said about where you're focused everything within hands length wouldn't actually be very sharp and well focused right so you really need to solve that problem too and it just goes on and on like that where you need all these pieces to come together into the right system and platform you know I recently saw a system you know not not in your lab but where they were you know using an armband to take you know signals from the brain to control things I know elsewhere in Facebook they're working on the brain machine interface could that be part of what you're doing it absolutely could be you know the fascinating thing here is we are just at the beginning I mean everybody here is a pioneer on something and I I know that you're all excited about it I know you think it's going to be big I don't think you understand exactly how big it's going to be I'm pretty if you went back to those people from Xerox PARC in 1973 to now and you said did you realize how big this was going to be how much you were gonna change the world they would never have realized that and actually I'll tell you a funny story which is that I talked to one of the people who was key there and I said how did you have this vision and he said uh we didn't actually have a vision we're just working on a bunch of technologies so they didn't really realize what was gonna be and and someday looking back you will realize exactly how big this thing was and how important a part you played and there's just so much to do and it's so exciting well with that I've got to thank you I can't I hope to see that one day thank you thank you you you

Channel: Oculus

Views: 58,878

Rating: 4.7495108 out of 5

Keywords: oculus, oculus connect, oc4, virtual reality, VR, technology, keynote, Mark Zuckerberg, Hugo Barra

Id: QAa1GjiLktc

Length: 125min 16sec (7516 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2017