Oculus Connect Keynote: Brendan Iribe and Nate Mitchell

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome CEO Oculus, Brendan Iribe. Wow.

Good morning, and welcome to the first Oculus Connect Developer Conference. It's awesome to see all of you out there. This is a really special moment, and this is a special day for everyone. Today, after just 2 short years of launching the Kickstarter, I truly believe that you will also join us in the belief that VR is finally ready. We have some very exciting things to tell you and show you. We're gathered at this time where we've thought about VR for decades. We've dreamed of VR. It's been in books and movies. If you're a sci-fi enthusiast, this is the Holy Grail. This is the thing that you've always imagined would finally happen. It's not 2030, it's not 2050, it's 2014, and today it is happening. Virtual reality is here. Just let that sink in. We thought about flying cars, maybe hoverboards. We thought about virtual reality, and it's now here. There are more developers in the world creating virtual reality with dev kits than ever before. You guys, the community, made this happen. There's over 100,000 Rift developer kits shipped to more than 130 countries around the world. We launched 2 years ago. That's incredible. Thank you. I never expected it to go this quickly. None of us did. Again, it's because of you guys. It's because of the dream of virtual reality and hardware and it being finally the time. Today, you and the VR community have an opportunity to come together and take VR to the next level. That's what this conference is all about. That's what today is all about. Now, I hope you have a lot of fun, While you're doing this, we always pride ourselves and say at Oculus, while we're on this crazy journey, this amazing journey, one of the most important, if not the most important parts of it, is to have freaking fun. We're going out there, we're changing the world, we're realizing this dream. Let's enjoy it. Let's embrace it, and let's do it together as a community. We're not ten, we're not a hundred. We're literally over 100,000— I think it's 130,000 now— on our developer forum. That's incredible. There's never been a hardware platform with that many developer kits. Together we have a chance to create something really special, something that will change the lives of the entire future of human race. It's going to be that impactful. It really is. I didn't believe it when we first started. I thought it was a neat science project by a 19-year-old that was potentially one of the coolest experiences I've ever seen. But I didn't realize just how important this was going to be for the future. Think about it for a second. We've been looking at different realities, different fantasies on 2D surfaces for over 100 years, whether it's books, film, photos, video games. We all love video games. But it's always a 2D surface, and you're trying to immerse yourself in it. You're trying to believe that you're in that fantasy, in that world. Luckily, you look around and you're reminded, it's okay, I'm not really there. Until now. With virtual reality, When you put on the headset, and it's good enough— and you're going to see something very special today— when it's good enough, suddenly the back of your brain believes you're there. You now are reminding yourself, no, no, no, no, I'm not really there. It's a pretty amazing experience. You start fighting this. We went from trying to convince ourselves we're there to trying to convince ourselves we're not there. So we're not all going to be running around Call of Duty. You don't really want to be in Call of Duty. You don't want bullets going by your head. I have a feeling we'd all be crunched down in a bunker, really scared. I know I would be. But that's what virtual reality can bring. It is truly amazing. Thank you. Our mission is to transform gaming, entertainment, and the way we interact. We truly believe this will happen. And yes, it did start with games and gaming, and it is going to continue with games. Because virtual reality, for it to truly work, you have to create 2 virtual cameras that are in the exact place of your eyes. You have to trick the brain that you're there with all the movement. And you have to have the exact same amount of pixels That's all built at the core in software in a 3D game engine, and it will continue to be. And it's us, the VR and gaming community, that are going to make that happen. To do this and to really get out there and connect a billion people, 2 billion people in VR, we see 2 categories. PC and mobile VR. These each have trade-offs, advantages and challenges. Today on PC, you get this awesome comfort and high fidelity, and you get the sense of presence, which is the magic of VR. Using features like positional tracking, high frame rates, low persistence, Incredibly powerful GPUs. You can create unbelievable worlds. You can create believable worlds. Again, this is just the beginning. It's only been 2 years. Think about the beginning of PCs and 2 years after Steve and Bill brought PCs to the world. Think about where we are now with VR. The next few decades are going to be incredible. With mobile, the magic is accessibility, affordability, and ultimately portability. Not having that cable tethered to your head, yanking at your head, is an awesome feeling. It is an awesome experience. Being able to pass around a set of VR glasses or goggles to anybody in the audience, anybody in front of you, is awesome. Being able to just share it, being able to take it with you, throw it in a backpack. It is very unique. I was recently at a hackathon where I was able to take the mobile VR headset and just hand it around and let dozens of people try it in a room. People were blown away. They never expected it to be so good. And I never expected you to be able to do that so easily. It really is awesome. What Carmack and the team have pulled off on today's mobile hardware is nothing short of incredible. But again, now it's up to you guys to carry that forward and create the content and make it a reality. So long-term, we do see these 2 categories continuing to converge, overlap. But ultimately complement each other. The cell phone is not replacing your laptop; it's complementing it, and you'll be using it for a lot of different services, just like mobile VR will continue to complement PC VR. We strongly believe it's important to lead in both to do this right, and ultimately to connect billions of people in VR. When we launched Oculus. Our prototypes were far from consumer ready. The early duct tape versions, hot glue, it was early days. We then added plastic, made it a little more comfortable, finally took it to China, built the DK1, shipped the DK1. Slightly terrifying moment. Then we created the HD prototype, Crystal Cove, and finally DK2. On the mobile side, which started a little bit later, we got to skip duct tape, hot glue, and go right to 3D printing. We started with a holder, we glued our DK1 sensor on, and we started iterating. So we started with the prototype. As quick as we could. Started using a few other DK1 parts and realized that it was probably better to just go straight to a partnership with Samsung to really make this happen. It also became clear it needed some magic. Welcome Carmack to the picture. I never expected it to be so good. It really is pretty incredible. And now we have early prototypes of Gear VR, which you've heard. So today, we have DK2 on the PC, positional tracking, low persistence. It really delivers a great experience. It's not quite there yet, but it is very, very good, and it's a great place to start if you're creating content on the PC. We also have— Samsung Gear VR Innovator Edition, which we recently announced on stage with Samsung in front of millions of people. Just think about that. 2 years after we launched a Kickstarter for an idea that pretty much never worked, one of the largest hardware companies in the world has announced it as an official product that they're going to be selling. A year or 2 from now, it'll be in every phone store out there. A little scary. But it's going to be you guys creating the content to make this happen. We're all in this together. We really are. This is a community. This is not 10 or 100. It is 100,000. And all of this started with the original Rift DK1 being Kickstarted. I'm really excited about the announcement that Nirav made last night. We decided to give back to the community and fully open source the entire DK1. All the hardware design, firmware, tracker, the PCB. I can't wait to see all the Chinese knockoffs. God help us all. But we do believe this is important. It's important for the hackers and the makers out there to be able to pick this up, take that tracker, glue it onto different things, take some source code, change it, modify it, ship it, make something awesome. All the source is on GitHub right now. Have fun, China. So as we look back at the history of how this all got started, It's just awesome. It really is. It's still kind of all surreal. I got a phone call in around June 2012 that I needed to meet this guy named Palmer Luckey. I thought, okay, Palmer Luckey. And they said, yeah, he's on to something awesome. It's virtual reality, and it's finally going to work. And I thought, ah, VR has never worked. I'm too busy. I'm sorry. Then I looked up on the internet and saw some interesting news coming out of E3 and thought, okay, well, might as well go. meet this Palmer Luckey. I wouldn't want to be the guy that misses the thing that changes the world. That would be bad. Pretty depressing. So we packed up, grabbed Michael Antonov and Nate Mitchell. We were all working together at the time. We drove up to LA, booked a nice restaurant, steakhouse, and invited Palmer Luckey to meet us for dinner. In walks Palmer Luckey in an Atari t-shirt, Shorts, and these awesome flip-flops. My first thought is, wow, he's a lot younger than I expected. He looked like 16, 17 at the time. I think he was 19. And I had a slight concern over whether they'd actually even seat us. They did, luckily. We got talking, and we had this incredible evening, basically just listening to Palmer talk about the future of VR. His headset collection, his infectious vision for where this was all going to go. We were still pretty skeptical, but it was just awesome to hear him talk, and we wanted to see more. We wanted to see the demo. So a few weeks later, we met him on July 4th at a hotel in Long Beach. He lives in Long Beach, at the time at his parents' garage. So we meet him at this hotel, and in he walks with this little Tub, like the trays under your school desk, dangling wires and circuit boards, and we're looking at it going, okay, what— this is going to be interesting. He puts it all together and turns it on, and at the time, turns out the light, and you had to hold the thing in your hand. It was like a viewfinder. But when you looked through those lenses, you saw this bold new world. You saw this incredible virtual world that was believable. It was a hint of it. It felt like it. It wasn't all there. But it was there enough that it got us excited. We were hooked. We wanted to help. This is something I think happens with everybody who tries VR. You see it, you believe, and then you want to help. You want to get involved. So within days, Oculus was born, the Kickstarter was launched, and the journey had begun. Literally A few weeks after we met Palmer and saw this demo. This happened overnight. None of us expected this to go as fast as it went. Again, it's because of you guys. It's because of the community. It's because everybody rallied together. So most of you know the story from here on out. You're part of the story from here on out. We iterated on the hardware and the prototypes, and you guys bought it. Thank you. You bet, man. Really, without your support, it just wouldn't have happened this fast. So we worked across all these different disciplines. We had to recruit people for hardware, electronics. These are things we had never done before. We're software programmers for the most part, and Palmer's a hardware hacker. We had to get all these incredible disciplines together to make that developer kit really work. What was awesome was everybody was believing. Everybody wanted to sign up and get involved. We were able to recruit one of the most talented engineering teams of all time. I mean, Carmack and Abrash back together again. It's pretty awesome. These are the guys that brought us 3D, and now these are the guys, and this is the team with you guys, the community, that's going to go out and bring virtual reality and change the world. When we finally shipped DK1, I can tell you it wasn't always smooth sailing. We really didn't know how the community would react to this. To be honest, we were pretty terrified. It had its issues. It was kind of like a lunchbox strapped onto your face. with 1990s graphics and a whole lot of motion blur. It was early days, that's for sure. But when you used it, you saw the potential. You got excited. Everybody did. YouTube really got excited. Grandma got excited. The community rallied, and VR had a second hope, a second chance. It just hadn't worked before, The timing wasn't right, hardware wasn't ready, but now it was, and the community was there. But the story wouldn't be complete without mentioning another major contributor. It really is important. This is one of the most important parts of my journey along the way. While we were working on iterating the Rift, getting the developer kit out, scrambling as fast as we could to ship you something, Michael Abrash, Otman Binstock, and the Valve VR team were hard at work on R&D. They were working on trying to solve the elephant in the room: motion sickness. In September 2013, Abrash called and said, Brendan, we have something I think you're going to want to see. When Abrash calls and says that, you go. I jumped on a plane right away, hopped up to Valve, listened to Abrash, Otman, and their crew talk about the different challenges and how they were approaching solving them. And it was incredibly fascinating. And it was a little over my head, but I was trying to grab it all at once. We spent a few hours there. It was very exciting. Finally, Abrash and Otman led me into a room covered with black and white fiducial markers, VR wallpaper. And on the way in, Abrash said, you know, No one's gotten sick yet. I'm curious to see what you think. I said, not even you? And he said, no. And Michael and I are the most sensitive guys out there. Literally a few head turns and we're out. So I was intrigued but very skeptical, because it had still been hard for me to experience VR for long periods of time, or even short periods of time, to be to be honest. So they strapped on this kind of clunky 3D-printed headset, circuit boards exposed, dangling wires. It was really reminiscent of Palmer's prototype, but a little bit better. No hot glue or duct tape. Then came this game-changing moment, a moment that I will absolutely never forget, when I knew VR was really going to work. And it was going to work for more than just enthusiasts and nerds like us, like me. It was going to work for the entire world. As I looked around, I felt great, and I felt like I was there. All of a sudden, this switch in the back of my head flipped. Instead of thinking, wow, this is a really neat VR demo, bam, I was in it, and I believed I was there. And I started trying to convince myself, wait, wait, wait, no, this isn't real. You're still in that room with those markers on it. After about 10, 20 minutes, I even had to look up at one point and just make sure the world was still out there. I was like, yep, I'm still in that crazy room. Okay. I put it back down, and suddenly I was somewhere else. That's the magic of presence. I hadn't felt it before until that moment. And it felt great. Thank you. I left the room more motivated than ever. I left the room feeling good. Pretty unique. The bar had been set. This was it. This was what we had to deliver for the consumer VR to really work. You had to feel like you were there comfortably. You had to get presence. We continued to work on the hardware, building all kinds of prototypes, ramping up as fast as we could, racing towards this goal. As soon as the prototypes were working, we would either show them, or even in many cases ship them out to people. You guys, the community. Let you experiment with them. Give us feedback. We did our best to balance the trade-offs of moving fast without breaking too much. We still broke sometimes. I think one of the best articles was, DK2 is a hot mess, and that is okay. So we apologize for just how hot it is, but we are trying to ship things as fast as we can on this race towards presence. It's really important to get it out to you guys, the community. So to make this work, we needed the best and brightest. We needed to ramp up. We needed to build a team that could really deliver on this. We couldn't sell VR wallpaper. We couldn't sell this dual-paneled crazy 3D-printed headset. We had to sell something that was lightweight, that felt great, that just needed a single camera or 2. Something simple, consumerizable. So along the way, we tried to balance what was the right path for us. How do we achieve this vision and really do VR right? So we decided, after a lot of debate internally, And really, this was this was a decision that we didn't take lightly. It was a decision that we felt was the best for the future of VR. I can only imagine what Andy Rubin thought was best for the future of Android. We decided to partner with Facebook. We know this deal created some intense debate in the community. We had some of our biggest followers become. Our less biggest followers. I think Notch is coming back. Congrats to Microsoft buying. Good job. How ironic! So a lot of you were concerned about what this meant for the future of VR, and whether we're going to slow down or change course, or what this. What this is effect this is going to have. Ultimately, it's on us to show you that the Facebook partnership is the right thing for VR and the right thing for Oculus and the community. I can say it's only been six months, but since we signed with Facebook, we have supercharged recruiting. We actually used part of our acquisition to go out there and try to entice and incentivize. some of the best and brightest, to come to Oculus. Michael Abrash joined. That was awesome. Along with over 100 of the top engineers out there, we literally more than doubled our staff with incredible dream team recruits in just 6 months. So, so far, so good. Again, it's on us. We'll see how this goes. We're trying to do what's right. So, what's next for Oculus? That is a big question everybody has. Well, we're really sprinting towards the consumer version. Everything we do is in this pursuit of presence. We need to deliver that experience that we saw in the Valve room. We need to deliver that to everybody that buys an Oculus Rift. You should be completely immersed in this experience. You should believe you're there, and you should feel Great, even if you're super sensitive like me. But presence is a bit like a house of cards. Without any one component, the whole thing kind of falls, falls apart and comes tumbling down. So how do we get presence right? Let's start by looking at the full chain. This is important. This is how you deliver virtual vision. You have motion of your head, you're moving around. It gets captured by a tracking system, which feeds into the CPU. You have your game engine, you are processing, you are running all your algorithms to determine that new position. You are then generating the commands to be sent to the GPU to render the new left and right stereo image that then goes to the display. The display scans out and emits photons that flow through the optics. We finally understand this full path. Had we known what we needed to pull off to really deliver presence in the beginning, we may have never started. Palmer probably would have. I don't know if we would have. It was much harder than we thought. So there's 5 essential ingredients to getting this right. And we try to be as open as we can about these. You've heard some of these talked about. In the past. Tracking is one of the most important. You've got to have 6 degrees of freedom tracking. You have to have full head tracking. Everywhere you're moving, those virtual cameras have to be in the same place as your eyes. They have to be there in 360 with submillimeter accuracy. They can't jitter. They can't shake around. We have a test internally that we call the tap test. And you're sitting there tapping the headset to see if the The image stays perfectly still. It has to. You also need a comfortable volume so you can lean around, lean down. Of course, all sitting down, right? We're always sitting. The other part that you've heard talked about a lot is latency. Latency is very, very important. The latency at every step of the way on that chain has to be as low as possible. Ultimately, To make this work, you need to get to sub-20 milliseconds of latency from motion of you moving your head to the last photon hitting your eye. That's incredibly hard. But if you can get to less than 20 milliseconds, you can actually use the optical tracking fused with the IMU to predict the last 20. Prediction doesn't really work. And you'll hear a lot of people say, oh, we have prediction, and we have 0 milliseconds latency. It doesn't really come together unless you can get down to 20 milliseconds of real latency. Then you can predict the last 20, and you don't get jitter or noise. So minimizing this loop is incredibly hard. But it's actually not good enough. Believe it or not, if you leave an image sitting on your eye for more than just a few milliseconds, it starts to smear across your retina. What you have to do is get the persistence of that image down to just 2 to 3 milliseconds. So either— you have 2 options. Either you are running at 300 to 400 frames a second, 300 to 400 hertz display updating. You guys excited about making a 300 to 400 FPS game? Yeah! I think Carmack is. I know he loves high FPS. But to get this— to really get this something that everybody can pull off, the guys at Valve figured out a trick: low persistence. Instead of leaving the display on for 10, 12 milliseconds, 16 milliseconds at 60 Hz, Turn it off. Turn it off and only leave it on for 2 to 3 milliseconds. Now the image sits in your eye for a very short amount of time, and then you get black in the headset. And believe it or not, if you can do this fast enough, at around 90 Hz, you can get rid of the flicker, and it all comes together. So low persistence is an essential ingredient. It actually ends up requiring some pretty custom hardware. Hardware along the way. You also need resolution. DK1 resolution, maybe not so great. You need at least 1K by 1K per eye. That's a lot of resolution. You need that in stereo. Left and right image have to be— left and right eye have to be rendered separately. They have to be completely Correct. You can't use tricks, or you'll perceive them, and it won't work. And you can't see the pixels. If you see the pixels— and I am super anal about this— if you see the pixels, it breaks presence. Suddenly you're reminded, oh, I got this thing on my face. I got screens sitting in front of my eyes. If you don't see the pixel structure, you can stay focused on the object out in the world. Finally, you need the optics, that last bit as it— as the display scans out and flows into— the photons flow into your eye. You need optics to deliver a wide field of view. If you have a small field of view, it feels like you have a screen in front of you. And your brain just says, oh, I just have this— I'm looking through this window screen thing, and it— the whole effect is lost. If you have an over 90-degree field of view, Suddenly, you're there. You also need a comfortable eye box. This is something we've wrestled with. Believe it or not, optics have been one of the hardest challenges we're still up against right now. We're still battling optics. The eye box allows you to put on the headset and get comfortable pretty quickly. It also allows you to look around a scene and track an object. If you have an object out in the world, which— And naturally in the world, as you are moving around and walking around, you are always staring at objects, and then you are moving from one object to the next object. As you are doing that, and yet you are still moving, if when you move and you look through, it starts to blur and get distorted, the experience falls apart. Having that wide eye box is really important. Calibration of these optics. Is incredibly hard. We have somebody at the office, Brant Lewis, who we nicknamed GoldenEye. He sits with the headset, and he manually calibrates these things for hours. I can't imagine what it feels like. And it works well, but not quite well enough. You have to do it perfectly. So we've had to invest this huge amount in a system that would actually go out there and capture the screen through the lens and give the exact right distortion model to be corrected. If you don't do it, when you're looking around, you'll see this kind of warpy effect and swimmy effect, and it will not feel good. So all of these things have to come together to deliver presence. These are the 5 core components. When you put these together, and you get it right, and you get the content right, and it all pulls together, suddenly you're there. The switch flips, and you're in a new virtual world. Today, I'm excited to show the progress that we've made heading to the consumer Rift with a new feature prototype, Crescent Bay. It's a beautiful beach, very close to where we're located. This prototype shows off the features, the quality, the presence that we need to deliver for consumer VR. This is along the path, much like Crystal Cove was. This is not the consumer product. It's much closer, but it's not the final thing. It is a massive leap from DK2. It's as big of a leap as we made from DK1 to DK2, as DK2 to Crescent Bay. It is awesome. It has updated display technology including a higher refresh rate, higher resolution, improved optics. It also has 360-degree tracking. You can see the LEDs on the back. That was not easy. It's still not perfect. None of this is perfect yet, but it is much, much better. It also has improved weight and ergonomics over DK1 and DK2. It is much lighter, thank God. And finally, you'll notice integrated audio. Woo! Still optional, integrated audio. You can move them out of the way. Many of you are going to want to use your own earplugs. But audio is a big multiplier for presence. And we're committed to delivering great audio, not just in the hardware, but also in the software. And this is all part of that commitment. But the most important thing about Crescent Bay is that this allows for sustained presence. This allows you to achieve the impossible and believe you're truly in a world comfortably. It's not perfect, but it is a huge step forward, and it is getting much, much closer to consumer Rift. This is still very early hardware and software, but it's in a state that we're ready to show you today. One more. Let's go! Literally right now, Crescent Bay demos are being set up. I hope they all work. It's a little dicey. It is very, very early. But they are being set up to show you. Please be very careful with them. They are fragile. They were handmade at Oculus HQ just the last few days. I broke one last night— 2 nights ago. They are really delicate, so take them on and off really slowly. But when they work, the magic comes alive. Along with the new hardware, our in-house content team made a set of magical experiences to go along with this new hardware. They're awesome. The experiences are designed to demonstrate the sense of presence, the power of presence. We hope you— this gives you a glimpse at the future of virtual reality. The next decade is going to be incredible. To see the progress that we've made in just 2 short years, to get to a point where we're able to deliver presence, is amazing. Thank you. What is going to happen over the next few decades? I have no idea. It's wild. All of you here are going to be the first to try Crescent Bay at Oculus Connect. Can't wait to see what you think. As I said, Crescent Bay includes audio. Let's come back to that. Audio is very, very important. It's essential to delivering this experience. Experience. We're very passionate about it. In fact, Palmer is one of the biggest audiophiles in the office. He has this incredible headphone collection, not quite as significant as his VR headset collection, but it's big. Headphones everywhere. He's got a lot of particulars about what it needs to do. It is going to be awesome. Along with the integrated headphones, we have a huge focus on getting the audio software right, getting 360 VR head-tracked software right. This is something that ultimately we should be able to simulate exactly the sound you expect to hear. The cues have to be right for you to believe it's real. That's hardware and software coming together. As part of this initiative, we've licensed RealSpace 3D's audio technology. A high-fidelity VR audio system developed over 10 years at one of the best universities in the country, University of Maryland. Yeah! Yeah! Go Terps! Literally today, we are working on audio as aggressively as we're working on the vision side. We have a whole team ramped up. Brian Hook is going to be discussing The unique audio challenges, and what we're doing to solve them. 3D audio spatialization, sound design— there's all these different aspects that have to come together. A lot of it is going to come on you guys too. Audio is important, much more important than it's ever been. So we're going to get it right. We're going to get the vision right. We're going to get the audio right. This is our commitment to you guys. This is our commitment to VR, and this is our commitment to Consumer Rift V1. Now I'd like to welcome Nate Mitchell, Head of Product, to talk about what we're doing on the platform, user experience, and content. Please welcome Nate Mitchell. Thank you,

Brendan. Good morning. Thank you, Brendan. How is everyone doing? Still awake out there? Feeling good? Woo! A lot of good stuff to show you guys after this. So Brendan talked a lot about how building the hardware and software that enables great VR is really what we are focused on at Oculus, but that is really only part of the challenge. People need to be able to discover great content, and developers need the tools and systems to reach users around the world. Over the last 2 years, our focus has actually been more on connecting developers with developers, like everyone here in this room. And that initiative really started with Oculus Developer Center and Oculus Share. So, as Brendan mentioned, we now have 130,000 developers signed up on the Oculus Developer Center, which is pretty remarkable. And to date, we have seen over 550,000 downloads of the Oculus SDK. which is obviously incredibly exciting for us. The other big piece of that equation has been Share. Share has really grown immensely since we launched it last August, and today, there are over 325 VR games, applications, and experiences available on Share. We are actually seeing new submissions every day, somewhere in the range of 5 to 10, sometimes even 15. What you guys have done in the last 2 years, I mean, we have seen more content built for VR in the last 2 years than we have seen in the last 2 decades. It is remarkable. You guys continue to innovate and trailblaze all across the medium, and it really does inspire us at Oculus. Some of my favorite games up there. An even more ridiculous number, is that we've seen nearly 700,000 downloads on Share to date. Pretty ridiculous, especially for a developer site designed for really developers and enthusiasts to share content. Of course, this wasn't at 700,000 when I prepped my keynote. I think it's crossed it by now. But we really are excited by this. And this is really just the beginning. Looking forward, we want to extend Share's core feature set to build out new tools and services that developers can leverage to engage with a much broader audience. These include services like identity, authentication, entitlement, distribution, and perhaps most importantly, monetization. The foundations of the Oculus platform are actually gonna be powering the Gear VR device this fall, and we're actually gonna be bringing these services to PC in the future. And where other platforms are really solely focused on content distribution, We're constantly thinking about the experiences that you're gonna have in VR inside the Oculus platform. As part of that initiative, and some of you may have tried this experience here at the show, when you turn on the Gear VR device and put it on, you actually drop into an experience, a VR experience that we call Oculus Share, or Oculus Home, sorry. Some of you may have tried it here, and Home is designed specifically to let users interact with the Oculus platform in a variety of different ways, All from within VR. We really, really wanted to make this a seamless experience where you can transition between content, find new content, and in the future do even more. Our team is really focused on making Home as comfortable and intuitive as possible so that anyone can dive in and get started exploring the Oculus ecosystem right from the start. Right now, the primary function of Home is absolutely content discovery and acquisition. All within VR. But you're gonna see Home grow and evolve over the coming months. With Gear VR, for example, we're expecting to launch with dozens of experiences all available from within Oculus Home on day one, many of which were built by the developers in this room today. And I wanna emphasize that all the systems we're putting together, they're not strictly only for VR. As part of Gear VR's launch, we're also gonna be shipping a 2D mobile application native mobile app where users can access the Oculus platform straight from their phone. We also have plans to let users discover and browse content on the web in a portal very similar to Share but obviously more evolved, and we'll have more news on that in the coming months. Along with Home and the mobile client, we're also shipping 2 VR applications as part of the Oculus platform. These are VR Cinema and— well, Oculus Cinema and Oculus 360, both of which are launching as part of Gear VR. Oh, let me back that up one slide. Or forwards. So we will be releasing, actually, the full source code for Cinema and 360 as part of the mobile SDK to help you guys jumpstart your Gear VR development on the platform. Yeah, we're really excited about this, and this is really just the beginning. So that's a small peek into the Oculus platform and some of the things we've been working on behind the scenes. And again, that's going to come to life first on Gear VR later this year, and then— first with Gear VR at launch, and then coming to PC later. In my opinion, one of the absolute best things about the partnership with Samsung is that it lets us bring the Oculus ecosystem and platform to a much, much broader audience, much more quickly. And with that in mind, there are a few other partnerships we would like to highlight today that have really been impactful for Oculus. Epic's Unreal Engine 4 continues to be one of the absolute best engines for developing VR content out there. And that is really because— some applause for Epic. Definitely deserved, yeah. And that is because Epic has dedicated a huge amount of resources into making it incredibly easy to use, to build awe-inspiring VR experiences, mostly for the Rift. Most of the Crescent Bay, the first-party Crescent Bay demos that Brendan talked about, are actually built with Unreal Engine 4. It is an incredibly stellar toolset. So almost every major Oculus prototype announcement has been accompanied by a new Unreal Engine demo. It started all the way back at CES 2013, when we showed Epic Citadel, that snowy flying craziness. It moved on to Elemental VR. We did Strategy VR, and then Couch Knights. And for each one of these demos that we worked on with the Epic team, They absolutely stole the show. Keeping that streak alive, Epic has put together an entirely new experience for Oculus Connect that they call Showdown. We are really, really excited to be able to share this with you guys today, running on Crescent Bay alongside our own suite of demos. Showdown is hands down the best demo that we have put together with Epic, and at least for me, it is one of the experiences that I am going to remember forever. in VR. I think you guys are going to like it. Another really key partner for us has been Unity. Unity has one of the absolute biggest Oculus developer communities that's active today. When we ran the VR Jam in 2013, we actually saw that about 90% of the 225 games and experiences that were submitted for the final build were all built using Unity. We've always had a major focus on trying to make Unity as accessible as possible for Oculus developers. And today, we're thrilled to announce that we've partnered with Unity to make Oculus an official platform and build target for Unity 5. We know this is something you guys have wanted for a really long time, we're really excited to make it a reality. This also means that Unity will now fully support Oculus and the Rift with a dedicated add-on that includes optimizations to stereo imaging, 3D audio support, and other engine-level and editor-level integrations. But best of all, it means that Oculus will now be supported in both the free and pro versions of Unity for everyone. Yeah. We've seen a huge amount of incredible groundbreaking content built with Unity and Oculus over the last 2 years. Some of my favorite experiences like Lucky's Tale— I know the Playful team is in the audience somewhere— Dumpy going up— Vince, yeah, shout out to Playful— Superhot. But ultimately, we really hope that this partnership and this step forward really enables more developers to leverage Unity's already super accessible toolset. set to build the next generation of VR experiences that help define the platform. So with that, I'll bring Brendan back out here. It really is incredible to see all you guys here today, and thank you again for being part of this.

All right. So we're almost done here. We're setting up Crescent Bay as we speak. We're getting it ready for you guys to see. It has these really magical experiences, one surprise that we haven't talked about yet that you'll have to see to believe, and then it ends with Showdown. And Showdown is one of the most incredible experiences out there. It's as close to Call of Duty as I want to get. Things will be whizzing by you. Good luck. This is an incredible time. It's a time where we're all coming together, and we are all a part of this. I want to give a big thank you to the Epic team for all of their work on the demos, the Unity team for coming together on this partnership, and NVIDIA for providing all the GPU hardware, and making a bit of a surprise announcement that we just heard about on their commitment to VR in their hardware, the advances they're gonna make. It really takes everybody coming together. As we say at Oculus, this is a team effort, and you're all part of that team. So you can grab the Oculus Connect mobile app, and you can start registering for your demo, your Crescent Bay demo. Now, as you're registering and this is getting set up, let me remind you that we have a few more speakers coming on. So the suits of the audience can get up and leave and go see the demos while the rest of us stay and listen to none other than Michael Abrash, Chief Scientist at Oculus, and one of the most inspirational geniuses I've ever met. Please welcome Michael A. Brasch to the stage. All right.