I’ve been in the industry for over 20 years working on PC/console games and platforms at Microsoft, Valve, Devolver Digital. I joined Oculus about 2 yrs ago and head up the Development Engineering, Platform department out of Seattle. You can check out my latest talk from Oculus Connect 4 where I show you how to turn a new project in to social VR in just 30 minutes.
I’m excited to hear your questions today and will be answering as many as possible – Ask away!
Are there any future plans to support using Oculus Hardware with Steam more officially?
Using an Oculus does not allow the Steam overlay to open, which means a LOT of Steam features are blocked for anyone using an Oculus headset on the Steam Platform (Friends, IAP, etc)
(We're using UE4 as the engine, not sure if this is the case with Unity or not)
Is there a way to have a toast notification shown when a user earns an Achievement? If not, could that be added in the future (possibly with a callback to the client application to get a good
(I'm sorry if this gets double posted, I'm having problems with the forum software)
How do you see plans for more work based activities happening in VR and what obstacles need to be removed for this to become productive compared to non VR based work (conventional desktop).
Has the release schedule for Oculus avatars cross platform support progressed since the October blog post, as in is there a more clear time frame available for a developer beta or initial release?
"We’re hard at work making the Oculus platform a cutting-edge VR service. This includes providing the most amazing content and utilizing advanced technologies like ASW and ATW to ensure 90fps and best-in-class performance on the widest range of machines. As more headsets come to the market, we’ll continue to evaluate ways we can expand the impact of Oculus’ VR technology both on and off our devices."
To add to that I'll just say that we are trying to do a tonne of different things to move VR forward. We only have so many hands to help out so we can't tackle everything at once.
Hey John, I have an hand full of questions about developing for GO with UE4.
I am starting things off with a wild card question - 1. Why is Oculus GO 3 DOF opposed to 6 DOF? 2. I am a indie using Unreal Engine 4. What performance increases in UE4 have you found that gives you that buttery smooth 90 FPS? Either for the Rift, Gear VR, or the Oculus GO. 3. What hobbies do you do in your spare time?
Yes. You should be able to grab the image data from the User object. Check out the native call ovr_User_GetImageUrl(). In Unity there should be a field for the same data.
For me the differences between a great VR game and an average VR game are very similar to 2D/3D games. It's a collection of small refinements and tunings to things like game mechanics, audio cues, UI flow, etc. that make the game feel "good" for the gamer. I think polish level is an underappreciated thing in game development and it is often the difference between games that do well and others that don't.
When looking at VR specifically there are a few things that are new for areas of polish. The most obvious is hand interaction. My hands need to feel like hands and the way I interact with objects in the scene needs to feel natural. General comfort is the other area I would look into. It's amazing the amount of tweaking that people have done to make experiences feel more comfortable and that is the difference between someone enjoying an experience or quitting after 5 minutes.
Any plans to allow developers developers to create objects/decorations for the Home environment in core 2.0? Would love it if we could connect objects to achievements.
