Oculus Announces Developer-Focused Conference, Acquires Game Networking Engine

Oculus VR, the Facebook-owned maker of the upcoming virtual reality headset Oculus Rift, today announced that it will hold its own developer-focused conference. The inaugural Oculus Connect conference will take place September 19-20 at the Loews Hotel in Hollywood, California.

Oculus Connect aims to bring together engineers, designers, and creative types from around the world to talk about how they can create the top-notch virtual reality experiences. "With virtual reality's momentum at an all-time high, this is a unique moment for the developer community to come together to take the virtual reality to the next level," Oculus wrote in a blog post.

If you want to attend Oculus Connect, you can access and submit an attendee application at the conference's website starting on July 10. Attendance confirmations will be distributed the following week. Oculus has even reserved a block of hotel rooms for conference attendees with a special $199 room rate.

Oculus Connect will feature sessions and workshops led by Oculus engineers and other "industry pioneers." Developers who attend the event will also have a chance to receive feedback from the Oculus team. The event will also include keynote speeches from Oculus executives like Brendan Iribe (CEO), Palmer Luckey (creator), John Carmack (CTO), and Michael Abrash ("chief scientist").

Oculus Connect is technically open to the public, but Oculus warns people that it's a developer-focused event. Attendance is described as "limited." If you can't attend, the keynote addresses will be live-streamed. A full session list will be published as the event draws closer.

Oculus VR also announced today that it has acquired RakNet, a C++ game networking engine used for the production of numerous titles, including Lego Universe. Some of its key features are object replication, remote procedure calls, patching, secure connections, voice chat, and real-time SQL logging.