The Oculus Connect 3 developer conference bought the VR developer community together from around the world to collaborate and share their passion for virtual reality. Nearly 3,000 people attended the big three-day event, making it the largest Connect conference to date.

Oculus has released a series of developer session videos online that are worth watching for anyone with an interest in learning and developing for VR. See also: Oculus Connect 3 Developer Sessions – Part 1

Designing for Comfort in VR

Speakers: Dave Linsalata – Product Manager (Oculus), Matt Dickman – Health & Safety Product Manager (Oculus)

‘Creating comfortable experiences is critical to the long-term success of virtual reality. This talk will highlight best practices for building comfortable gameplay in VR, including how to implement comfort modes. You’ll also learn more about new safety improvements for Rift and Touch, including how to work with the new boundary system.’

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Failure Workshop: Things That Did not Work

Speakers: Brian Allgeier – Designer (Insomniac Games), Holden Link – Founder (Turbo Button), Alex Schwartz – CEO (Owlchemy Labs)

‘Sometimes prototypes and ideas feel amazing in VR—other times they don’t work at all. In this session, three developers share their concepts that failed, what they learned from them, and how they carried those experiences forward to make better games.’

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The Secrets of Building Great Multiplayer Games in VR

Speakers: Shaun McCabe – Production Director (Insomniac Games), Stephane Intissar – CEO (OZWE), Chad Dezern – Studio Director (Insomniac Games)

‘Social is a powerful experience in VR, but building a game that is responsive in your headset as well as with other players around the world presents a whole new set of challenges. In this session, you will hear from leads on Unspoken (Insomniac Games) and Anshar Wars 2 (OZWE) on the lessons they’ve learned in creating responsive, low-latency, multiplayer games in VR.’

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Best Practices using AMDs LiquidVR and Introducing AMDs Project Loom Real-Time 360 Video Stit

Speakers: Mikhail Mironov – Principal Member of Technical Staff (AMD), Mike Schmit – Director of Software Engineering (AMD)

‘Join AMD for an engaging technical discussion of two of AMD’s latest VR technologies. We’ll start with LiquidVR SDK best practices based on integration of its multi-GPU feature into UE4, including detailed code-level discussions. Next, we’ll introduce technical details of AMD’s new open-source 360 VR video stitching framework, Project Loom. Highly optimized for GPUs, Loom is built on top of the open standard OpenVX computer vision accelerator AMD open-sourced early this year. Loom handles both real-time (low latency) and offline workloads, with an open-source, extensible framework so that ISVs can modify or add their own custom IP to suit their needs within their applications and plugins for existing tools.’

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Minecraft Breaking the Rules of VR

Speakers: Soren Hannibal Nielsen – Lead Programmer (Microsoft)

‘Mojang broke many rules of VR design with Minecraft for Rift and Gear VR. In this session, the creators of Minecraft discuss how they successfully brought their traditional first-person 3D game into the realm of virtual reality. Learn more about their design goals, technical tricks, and lessons learned.’

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Making Arizona Sunshine Cutting and Polishing a VR Gem

Speakers: Patrick le Duc – Programmer (Vertigo Games), Steve Hughes – Senior Graphics Application Engineer (Intel)

‘A deep dive into the development of Arizona Sunshine from design and content to achieving 90FPS in Unity and more. We’ll cover how to enhance your VR title’s realism with multicore CPUs and the lessons we learned along the way.’

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Elevate Your VR Experience with Ambisonic Audio Design

Speakers: Tom Smurdon – Audio Content Lead (Oculus), Pete Stirling – Audio Manager and Lead Architect (Oculus)

‘Want to know more about how to use ambisonic audio to increase the immersive qualities of your VR experiences? This session discusses workflows, middleware, the Audio SDK, and plugins to improve audio design for VR developers. We’ll also discuss how to use ambisonic beds for ambiance and music.’

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Oculus Avatars: Maximizing Social Presence

Speakers: Mike Howard – Product Manager (Oculus), Will Steptoe – Software Engineer (Oculus)

‘Social presence, the sense that you’re sharing a physical space with other people, is one of the most transformative experiences you can have in VR. Come learn about the exciting new products we’re building to make your apps more social and powerful.’

Stay tuned to OVRnews for more coverage on the latest Oculus news and updates, as it develops.