Oculus VR is holding a conference called Oculus Connect, the company announced in a blog post that went up on its official site this morning. The event will be held September 19 and 20, at the Loews Hotel in Hollywood, California.
Attendees will be able to go to sessions about a variety of virtual reality issues, including getting info about upcoming Oculus technology. There will even be workshops where members of the Oculus team will share design and engineering feedback on games.
The event will feature keynotes, which will also be streamed online. The keynote speakers include Brendan Iribe (CEO), Palmer Luckey (Founder), John Carmack (CTO) and Michael Abrash (Chief Scientist) and will focus on "Oculus, virtual reality, and the future of the medium." This may indicate that details of the consumer version of the Oculus Rift headset will be revealed at one of these keynotes, whether it is just specifications, final design or the actual release date.
In the same blog post, the company also announced it had acquired RakNet, a networking middleware solution for gaming. This is the code that is used when you play online with a variety of games. Oculus has made RakNet open source and posted the code on GitHub for others to use. This software will likely be used for direct online play between Oculus Rift games.
Oculus released one development kit last year. In March, the company announced an improved development kit, DK2, and began taking pre-orders. The DK2 will begin shipping sometime this month. These kits are to help game developers create titles compatible with the Oculus Rift. Facebook acquired Oculus in March for $2 Billion in cash and stock, just a few days after the DK2 was announced.
Between DK1 and DK2, there have been over 100,000 Oculus Rifts sold. Except for the concept that the consumer-version will be better than the DK2 in every way, no other details about that version of the Rift have been revealed.
Along with recent announcements like the acquisition of Carbon Design to help design products and the hiring of Jason Rubin to create games, the announcements of Oculus Connect and the acquisition of RakNet seems to indicate that Oculus is preparing for the actual launch of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset.
