Live from Facebook-owned Oculus’s annual VR conference: Day 1

Virtual reality has largely remained stuck in the future, posing a dilemma for marketers. But Facebook-owned VR company Oculus is expected to bring more of that future to the present at its annual developer conference, Oculus Connect, which kicks off on Wednesday in San Jose, Calif.

Below is our live blog of the event’s opening keynote, which starts at 1 pm ET/10 am PT.

• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened the keynote and announced Venues, a platform to watch live sports and concerts in VR that will launch in 2018.
• Zuckerberg unveiled Oculus Go, a standalone headset that will cost $199 and ship in 2018.
• Facebook’s head of VR Hugo Barra announced Oculus for Business, a program to get companies using VR. For $900, companies will receive a bundle of Oculus equipment, including a headset and controllers, as well as a commercial license, commercial warranty and preferential customer service.
• Oculus will drop the price of its high-end Rift headset plus Touch controllers to $399.
• Oculus will make its next-gen Santa Cruz headset and controllers available to developers next year.
• Oculus will roll out a redesigned user interface, called Oculus Dash, in beta later this year. It is designed for touch.
• Oculus Dash will let people use desktop computer apps inside of VR.
• Facebook will roll out live 360-degree video to the VR version of its social network, Facebook Spaces, later this year.
• Facebook will add a 3D posts format so that people can share objects created in VR as interactive posts on Facebook. Eventually these objects will also be available for use on Facebook’s Camera Effects augmented reality platform.

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About The Author

Tim Peterson

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat's ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar's attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon's ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube's programming strategy, Facebook's ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking's rise; and documented digital video's biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed's branded video production process and Snapchat Discover's ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands' early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo's and Google's search designs and examine the NFL's YouTube and Facebook video strategies.