Oculus VR Connect 2: Minecraft, Oculus Ready PCs, games, new Gear VR - all the news here
Oculus VR held its second Oculus Connect event today, and quite a bit came out of it: compatibility with Minecraft on Windows 10, Oculus Ready PCs, games from SEGA, Midway, and Namco and Epic Games introduced its own VR experience, Bullet Train. Full report below.
Let's start with the tech bits
First up, during Oculus Connect 2 company founder Palmer Luckey announced that the Windows 10 edition of Minecraft would be supported on the system. Not much else was said on the matter, other than it would be made available on the Rift headset in spring 2016.
The firm's head of product development, Nate Mitchell, discussed Rift's recommended system requirements> He said the need for an Intel i5-4590 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GTX-970/AMD 290 video card would make sure "everything works," according to PC Gamer.
While on stage he also announced the Oculus Ready PC Program which is a partnership between big names in the PC realm: Alienware, Asus and Dell. Each will create products which "guarantee a simple, plug-in-and-go VR experience" on PCs which are made by the respective companies. All are built using nVidia and Intel hardware with pricing starting under $1,000.
Other partners will be announced at a later date.
Samsung also made an appearance to announced the redesigned Oculus-powered Gear VR which will work with the mobile maker's 2015 Galaxy model smartphones. The headset is around 22% lighter with a better touchpad.
It will be released just in November and will run you $99.
Gear VR will also support Netflix and Twitch, according to Oculus VR. The firm has also partnered with Lionsgate and 20th Century Fox to allow users to watch movies developed by the companies with an incentive called Oculus Video. It will also allow users to watch the 360 degree videos where are now being supported on Facebook.
Finally, Oculus' mobile SDK 1.0 will be released in November and v1.0 of Oculus Rift SDK will be released in December this year. This will ensure developers can create games which will be "ready for launch" when the Rift is released in Q1 2016.
What about games other than Minecraft?
Well, it looks as through there will be plenty to choose from. Midway, Namco and SEGA have teamed up with the VR makers to create Oculus Arcade.
This will provide users with classic titles using RIFT such as Gauntlet, Pac-Man and Sonic the Hedgehog. A release date was not provided.
Bossa Studios also announced Surgeon Simulator: ‘Experience Reality’ Edition today, which is coming to "multiple VR" offerings. And don't worry: the studio has accurately mapped the VR controls so that the game’s core physics-based gameplay will preserve the difficult, comedy prone elements.
A release date was not announced, only that it would be coming "in the near future."
Bullet Train from Epic Games was also shown today for Oculus VR. Using the Oculus Touch controller for locomotion, the game features a world-scale VR gunfight with gameplay that "weaves in and out of bullet time."
Players take on the role of an agent taking part in an infiltration simulation set inside a modern train station. He will need master skills such as teleportation, time manipulation, and close-quarters combat to stop resistance forces. It will alos allow players to virtually interact with the game's weapons such as guns, grenades to missiles. They can even feel them through haptic feedback.
A video for Bullet Train VR experience from Epic is posted below.
Finally, a brief clip at some of the other games coming to the Rift headset was shown, and it includes a few titles you may recognize such as Adr1ft and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.
If anything else comes out of the conference, we'll be sure to inform you.
A price and firm release date have yet to be announced for Oculus Rift, but with a Q1 2016 release date pegged, it's expected sometime before April 1.
Thanks: PC Gamer, Eurogamer, Gamasutra, Polygon, Sahcknews (links are above).
