Oculus Connect 3: what to expect from it?

From 5th to 7th of October, Oculus will hold its annual event in San José, California: the Oculus Connect. It will be a day where super-smart people (like god-like programmer John Carmack or super smart-man Michael Abrash) will hold super-interesting talks and where Oculus will make lots of important announcements.

It will be an event totally worth to be seen. The talks of Oculus Connect are always interesting… look at this one made by Michael Abrash some times ago when he talked about illusions perceived by our brains:

But the thing we are waiting the most are the announcements. What will Oculus announce? We don’t know… but we can make some speculations. And I hope you will speculate with me in the comments, saying your predictions about the next Oculus Connect!

In my opinion this is what will be announced at Oculus Connect 3:

• Oculus Touch launch date and price. Oculus has still to release its super-innovative VR controllers to be used with the Rift. With Oculus Touch a room-scale-like behaviour should be included with the Rift (thanks to Constellation), so Oculus should in the end become very close in performance to Vive. About price we already know that it will be 199€ for Europe, but we’re still waiting for an official announcement, because sometimes leaked prices prove to be completely wrong. This is surely the most awaited news;
• Lots of news about new contents. Content is the king, we all know this. And also all the headset manufacturers know this, that’s why they’re giving lots of money to game studios to create games for their hardware. The Achilles heel of the VR, especially of some headsets like OSVR, is the lack of contents: lots of gamers complain online about too few games for their platform or about scarcity of good content in VR. So I expect Oculus to announce some new partnerships to have fresh new content for their device (games, but also 360 videos and this kind of stuff);
• Social integration. Oculus is Facebook and we all know that facebook is pushing a lot on VR. I imagine the announcement of some kind of fancy new social features for Oculus ecosystem and maybe the announcement of some VR features for the most well-known social network (maybe enjoying and sharing of VR experiences through facebook?);
• Some new features for GearVR. Let’s be honest: GearVR has remained quite the same since the initial Innovator Edition. Some features have been predicted, like positional tracking (Carmack was working at it… do you remember?) or hand controllers (Rink controllers were announced at the beginning of the year), but nothing has ever hit the market. I think that with the upcoming advent of Google Daydream platform, Oculus would want to rise the bar with a new fancy feature for their mobile headset;
• Xbox partnership. This is complete speculation by me. Facebook and Microsoft have been good friends for a while and Oculus Rift CV1 shipped with a Microsoft Xbox Controller. Xbox Scorpio will support VR, but Microsoft has not a VR device, because it is working on it marvelous AR hardware, the Hololens. So it would be natural if Oculus would become the default headset for Xbox, wouldn’t it?

Obviously all of this is complete speculation… I have no idea about what will be announced.

And you? What do you think about the upcoming Oculus Connect? What will be announced? Let’s start the discussion!