OC6 Keynote: Developer Features and Tools

At Oculus, we’re continuing to enable a self-sustaining developer ecosystem through the many developer tools, features, SDKs integrations and services that we hope will ensure your success. As OC6 kicked off today with our leadership keynote, see below for the many developer-focused announcements to our products and tools that will enable a more efficient, flexible developer experience for you and your team.

With our latest set of Mixed Reality Capture (MRC) libraries, you can now integrate this feature into your games and applications on the Oculus Quest and the Rift Platform with much less effort than before. If you are using Unreal or Unity Integrations 1.38 or above, these tools are already built-in, while native SDK support will be launched later this fall.

Integrating MRC into your game, and using our Mixed Reality Capture Tools will enable you to develop even more immersive trailers, and deliver event experiences that are sure to gain the attention of those passing by your booth. More importantly, later this fall we will release an update to the capture tools with a focus on creators, including a user friendly calibration experience. This update will enable streamers and game video creators to share their experience in your game/app with their audiences across Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, etc, driving more visibility to your game.

The MRC engineering team will be going into more detail about these features at OC6. Be sure to keep an eye out for the video + blog post for more detail on how this system works + what’s coming soon.

With this analytics update, we’re enhancing the Developer Dashboard for Quest Developers by providing the metrics for you to analyze how your application and marketing assets are performing on the Oculus platform.

This new report gives you visibility into how users discover and evaluate your application before purchasing, as well as conversion rates. Using this dashboard, you will be able to clearly view your app’s performance, but also begin to understand the areas where you could improve your app’s presence across our platform, whether you need to focus on your application’s discoverability or your product detail page for example. Links to insights will be clearly labeled within the dashboard itself, making this a much more seamless reporting experience.

Equipped with this data + insights, you will be able to understand where in the conversion funnel you might be losing potential purchasers of your application, so you can be sure to maximize your success on the Oculus Platform. This feature is going into private beta soon and launched publicly to all Quest developers later this year.

We know how challenging it can be to build an amazing virtual experience, and we’ve been working to improve the tools available to enable you to hit a high-level of performance on Quest.

RenderDoc is an open-source frame debugger that works on Android. We’ve contributed to the latest RenderDoc release, so that it uses less memory, running more smoothly on Quest, and supports our VR-specific extensions in both OpenGL and Vulkan. Going forward, we are fully committed to supporting RenderDoc on our platform so that everybody can understand exactly what is being requested from the GPU.

OVR Metrics Tool is our own performance tool, openly available to our Unity, Unreal and native developers. It offers the ability to view real-time metrics in a VR overlay while in heads-up mode, as well as a report mode that provides a performance report after a VR session has ended. We are looking to extend the information that we provide in OVR Metrics Tool, while decreasing developer friction by releasing it with the OS, and building ways to turn it on and off by simply using the controllers.

Lastly, we understand the need for developers to get more low-level profiling information which has traditionally been lacking on mobile GPUs, and so we’ve been working with Qualcomm to develop an API that provides various types of GPU performance metrics for Quest on-device, building on the basis of a true standalone HMD. We’re committed to releasing this as soon as possible, first through a low-friction CLI tool which will be packaged with the OS before end of the year, and then by extending the data’s reach by integrating it in RenderDoc and OVR Metrics Tool. We’re confident that these tools will help to improve your overall efficiency when tracking and resolving your performance challenges.

We received a great deal of feedback from developers requesting new ways to engage their communities in a user friendly, low-cost manner. Launching this week, Developer Posts will enable you to build game-specific imagery, video and text, and publish it to the user Home Feed + product description page. This content will be accessible in VR, and within the Oculus companion app, and early engagement results from our beta partners have been very promising.

Along with this feature, there will be a new section of your dashboard to access developer post analytics, including clicks, conversions and overall reach. This feature will be available for all apps on Quest, Go and Gear, while you can now check out the recently launched Developer Posts documentation page.

Be sure to keep an eye on our developer Twitter + Facebook channels for more developer-focused insights + announcements as OC6 continues.