Facebook Connect: Session and Lightning Talk Recap

As the VR community continues to grow and expand, Facebook Connect highlighted the ways that developers are becoming more self-sustaining and successful in this ever-changing environment. The following sessions shared some major improvements that can be used to simplify and streamline the development process, expand distribution, and build a community of superusers that create and share content around your game.

From test groups to play testing, Facebook Product Managers Raisah Aziz and Greg Smith and Facebook Developer Support Engineer Giselle Gomez shared ways to maximize user experience and immerse users in your application. They explored the benefits of Mixed Reality Capture and new marketing tools and distribution paths that make it easier than ever to promote your apps and track conversions. They also covered two important announcements regarding subscription support and Quest distribution that developers won’t want to miss.

In this session, Oculus and Unity engineers demonstrated the latest advances in Quest development with Unity, including Vulkan API, the XR Plugin system, development iteration time improvements, and the Universal Render Pipeline.

Oculus and Epic Games engineers showcased major improvements to Oculus integrations for UE4, including iteration time improvements, new sample code, and a sneak peek into the future of the Unreal Editor. They also announced a free 12-module online training course on developing VR games with Unreal, hosted on their online learning site.

VR provides a unique medium for people to connect, defy distance, and be present with friends, family, and their community. In this session, Product Managers Mike Howard and Jewel Lim walked through updates to the Oculus social platform, including new tools and new ways to unlock personalized and engaging social presence.

The Oculus ecosystem is growing and changing in many exciting ways. As a developer, these ecosystem changes have likely generated questions about the decisions you should make to set you and your team up for success. In this lightning talk, Oculus Content Launch Manager Bruce Wooden discussed publishing options and opportunities within the Oculus ecosystem.

VR is best experienced while wearing a headset. But for many users, their first experience is watching someone else in VR on a 2D surface, either in person or online. In this talk, Facebook Product Manager Greg Smith discussed how to make your application more watchable and attractive to users on these surfaces with Casting and Mixed Reality Capture. He shared best practices to empower influencers to create content around your application and discussed some new announcements around turning users into promoters of your app.

Facebook Software Engineer Shaheen Gandhi shared some steps to make sure your content is secure.

The holy grail of a social or gaming application is a thriving and healthy community. Your idea or application is only as strong as the community you can build around it. In this lightning talk, AR/VR Community Experiences Manager Lisa Kotecki walked through ways to intentionally build your community and how the Oculus toolkit can support you with fostering community connections and empowering superusers to create content around your game.

What was your favorite session from Facebook Connect? Are there any areas that you’d like to learn more about in the future? Let us know in the comments.