Oculus Connect Conference and RakNet Acquisition

[Tbone]

Full story: http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/announcing-oculus-connect-raknet-open-source-and-e3-2014-awards/

We’re thrilled to announce Oculus Connect, a developer conference that brings together engineers, designers, and creatives from around the world to share and collaborate in the interest of creating the best virtual reality experiences possible.

In the last two years, we’ve seen more virtual reality content built than in the last two decades, and that’s a direct result of incredible work by the community. With virtual reality’s momentum at an all-time high, this is a unique moment for the developer community to come together to take the virtual reality to the next level.

Oculus Connect 2014 takes place Sept 19 – 20 at the Loews Hollywood Hotel in Los Angeles, CA. Attendee applications will be available on the Oculus Connect website, www.oculusvr.com/connect, starting on July 10th and attendance confirmations will go out the following week. We’ve reserved a block of discounted rooms at the Loews for registered guests.

Attendees will be the first to learn about upcoming Oculus technology, with sessions and workshops led by Oculus engineers and industry pioneers. Developers at the event will also have opportunities to receive design and engineering feedback directly from the Oculus team in hands-on labs.

Oculus Connect will also feature keynotes from Brendan Iribe (CEO), Palmer Luckey (Founder), John Carmack (CTO) and Michael Abrash (Chief Scientist) on Oculus, virtual reality, and the future of the medium. The full session list will be announced as we draw closer to the show.

You can get the full details on the official Oculus Connect website, www.oculusvr.com/connect. While the conference is open to the public, be aware this is a developer-centric event. Attendance is limited, but we’ll be livestreaming the keynotes for developers around the world who can’t make it to the show.

If you’re an Oculus developer interested in helping to build the future, we’re looking forward to meeting you in person Sept 19th!

Oculus Acquires & Open Sources RakNet

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve acquired RakNet, one of the leading networking middleware systems in the games industry. We open-sourced it starting today under a modified BSD license (the same license Facebook uses for its open source projects) from the Oculus GitHub repo: https://github.com/OculusVR/RakNet.

For those unfamiliar with RakNet, it is a comprehensive C++ game networking engine designed for ease of use and performance. The tech is tuned for cross-platform, high-performance applications that operate across a wide variety of network types. Key features include object replication, remote procedure calls, patching, secure connections, voice chat, and real-time SQL logging. The technology has been licensed by thousands of indie developers, as well as companies like Unity, Havok, Mojang, Maxis and Sony Online Entertainment.

We’ve known Kevin Jenkins, founder of Jenkins Software and lead engineer on RakNet, for years, and we’ve used RakNet internally at Oculus for various networked systems and tools. After working with Kevin for a few months, we were all excited by the idea of open-sourcing RakNet to the community.

If you’re interested in checking out (or forking) RakNet, head over to the Oculus GitHub repo at https://github.com/OculusVR/RakNet. We’re looking forward to seeing where the community takes the project next!

Should we expect a consumer announcement at Oculus Connect? My money is on YES! RakNet also has interesting implications for a Metaverse!