Oculus Connect 4

Oculus Connect 4 (OC4) was the fourth annual developer conference held by Oculus VR, then part of Facebook. It took place on 11 and 12 October 2017 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. The conference is part of the series now known as Meta Connect, and it came between Oculus Connect 3 in 2016 and Oculus Connect 5 in 2018.

The opening keynote introduced Oculus Go, a US$199 standalone headset for early 2018, and showed a second prototype of the Santa Cruz standalone headset, now with six-degrees-of-freedom controllers and developer kits promised for 2018. Oculus also made a US$399 price for the Oculus Rift and Oculus Touch bundle permanent, launched the Oculus for Business program, and previewed Rift Core 2.0, a software update that added the Oculus Dash interface and a customizable Oculus Home. The headset first shown as Santa Cruz was announced a year later at Oculus Connect 5 as Oculus Quest.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Event dates, venue, pass prices, keynote speakers, each OC4 announcement, the content slate and the aftermath dates checked against all 21 cited sources. About review dates.

Organization

UploadVR reported on 22 June 2017 that the fourth Oculus Connect would be held on 11 and 12 October in San Jose. Attendance was by application through the Oculus Connect website, and applications opened in July 2017. Road to VR listed a regular pass at US$400 and an early-bird price of US$300 for applications completed by 21 August, with developer passes at US$200 and student or academic passes at US$100.

In August 2017 Oculus published a first list of sessions. It included a postmortem of Lone Echo by members of Ready at Dawn, a talk on VR esports, a session on what was new in the PC SDK, and John Carmack's app critique, in which developers present their apps on stage for his feedback.

Keynotes

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg presented in the day 1 keynote on 11 October, as did Hugo Barra (Facebook's vice president of virtual reality), Nate Mitchell (head of Rift) and Jason Rubin (head of content). Michael Abrash also took part in the opening keynote, giving a look at the work of Oculus Research. The official recap of the first day was titled "The Path to a Billion People in VR". On the second day, Oculus chief technology officer John Carmack gave a keynote that UploadVR said ran for more than 90 minutes, his usual update on what he had been working on.

Announcements

Area	Announcement	Details given at OC4
Hardware	Oculus Go	US$199 standalone headset, launch planned for early 2018
Hardware	Project Santa Cruz	Updated standalone prototype with tracked controllers; developer kits in 2018
Hardware	Oculus Rift price	Rift Bundle at a permanent price of US$399
Enterprise	Oculus for Business	US$900 Rift bundles for companies
Software	Rift Core 2.0 (Oculus Dash, new Oculus Home)	Beta as a free update in December 2017
Social	Oculus Venues	Shared live events for up to 1,000 people, launching in 2018
Content	Respawn Entertainment partnership	Undisclosed VR game for 2019

Oculus Go

Zuckerberg unveiled Oculus Go on stage as an all-in-one wireless headset priced at US$199, with shipping planned for early 2018. Oculus described a 3DOF headset with a high-resolution "fast-switch" LCD, built-in speakers and a controller tracked for orientation only. Road to VR and PCWorld reported the display resolution as 2560 by 1440. The controller had the same inputs as Samsung's Gear VR Controller, and Oculus said Go was binary compatible with Samsung Gear VR: an app built with the latest Mobile SDK, Unity or Unreal Engine could target both devices with one binary. Developers could apply for early hardware through Oculus's hardware request form; TechCrunch reported that developer kits were expected in November. The headset had not yet received authorization from the US Federal Communications Commission, and the official recap noted that it could not be sold until it did.

Project Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz had first been shown at Oculus Connect 3 in 2016 as a prototype focused on the positionally tracked headset, with tracked controllers added later. At OC4 Oculus presented an updated prototype with tracked controllers that allowed hand presence in a standalone headset. Zuckerberg said developers would receive the headset the following year. Oculus said the headset's four "ultra-wide sensors" gave a large tracking volume, used both for inside-out positional tracking and for tracking infrared LEDs on the new 6DoF controllers. All computing was done on the headset; it was not a wireless PC headset.

Press saw the hardware in closed-door demos. In Road to VR's hands-on with "Prototype II", Ben Lang noted that the compute and battery module, which the 2016 prototype carried on the back of the strap, had moved into the front enclosure. Speakers hidden in the head strap replaced over-ear headphones, and the headset had new Fresnel lenses. The controllers resembled Touch, but their tracking rings faced upward toward the headset cameras, and a trackpad replaced the stick and face buttons. The demo was Dead and Buried. Lang walked an area of about 20 by 10 feet and saw a small, consistent jitter when standing still.

Rift price and Oculus for Business

Barra announced that the Rift Bundle would stay at US$399. The bundle included the headset, two sensors, two Touch controllers and six free apps. Oculus had first tried that price in its "Summer of Rift" promotion earlier in 2017. In Japan the bundle bought on Oculus.com fell from 63,800 yen to 50,000 yen, shipping included.

Oculus for Business sold Rift bundles in bulk to companies at US$900 each. Each bundle contained a Rift, an Oculus Remote, Touch controllers, three sensors for room-scale use and extra face pads for multiple users. The program came with enterprise warranties, a commercial license and dedicated customer support. TechCrunch named Audi, which used it for VR car showrooms, and Cisco, which built a collaboration environment for design work.

Rift Core 2.0, Dash and Home

Oculus called Rift Core 2.0 its biggest software update for the Rift, following 19 earlier Rift software updates. The new Dash interface brought the Rift's menus into one overlay that could be opened from inside any VR app. It supported virtual desktop windows that the user could move and resize, and developers could debug VR apps from within VR in Visual Studio, Unity and Unreal. Oculus said Dash was built with React VR. The new Home could be decorated with furniture, toys and artwork, showed achievements, and displayed the game library as retro cartridges that launched apps. Oculus planned to let friends visit each other's Home spaces. On stage, Mitchell said Dash put the platform "on a path to replacing real monitors entirely".

Social features and developer tools

Oculus Venues was announced as a way to watch concerts and premieres of films and TV shows with up to 1,000 people, launching in 2018. Facebook also announced 3D Posts, a News Feed format for VR-made content starting with Oculus Medium sculptures. Facebook Spaces would gain Kits, for assembling games or activities, and Quillustrations made in Quill, and later in 2017 users would be able to watch Facebook Live 360 videos together there.

For developers, Oculus announced more skin, clothing and hair color options for Oculus Avatars and said Avatars would become cross-platform in 2018. Other tools were in-app blocking and reporting, MultiView for mobile, which Oculus said cut draw calls by up to 40%, and an Explore API for Gear VR, with Explore coming to Rift in 2018. The recap stated that the Oculus platform had more than 2,000 VR apps. The Japanese Facebook newsroom said Fuji Television showed HAKONE WEB TRIP, a travel app built with React VR, as the conference's only Asian developer partner case.

Content

Oculus said Respawn Entertainment was "going all-in on a major VR release in 2019", with the game not yet named. Ready at Dawn announced Echo Combat, a competitive zero-gravity multiplayer shooter set in the world of Lone Echo and Echo Arena; Road to VR reported it for 2018, along with more single-player Lone Echo content. Thor was revealed as a playable character in Marvel Powers United VR, a Rift game due in 2018, with demos at retail stores from 3 November.

Title	Creator	Platforms and timing announced at OC4
Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab	Tie-in to the Alcon Entertainment film	Rift 19 October, Gear VR 26 October 2017
Coco (Pixar's first VR experience)	Pixar	Rift 15 November, Gear VR 22 November 2017
Stranger Things: Face Your Fears	Turtle Rock Studios and Netflix	Gear VR, "coming soon"
Space Explorers	Felix and Paul Studios, with NASA	Gear VR and Rift, early 2018
MELITA	Future Lighthouse	Gear VR and Rift, 17 October 2017
Dispatch	Here Be Dragons	Gear VR and Rift, 21 November 2017
Campfire Creepers	Future Lighthouse (directed by Alexandre Aja)	Gear VR and Rift, fall 2017
Pale Blue Dot	Eliza McNitt, Kaleidoscope and Intel	Gear VR and Rift, spring 2018

Aftermath

The Rift Core 2.0 beta arrived on 6 December 2017 as a free update. Rift owners had to opt into the Public Test Channel to get it. Dash ran on Windows 7 or later, but the full desktop overlay needed Windows 10. At its F8 2018 conference on 1 May 2018, Facebook announced that Oculus Go was available from oculus.com in 23 countries, starting at US$199. In May 2018 Oculus set 30 May as the launch date of the Venues app on Oculus Go and Gear VR, with partners including NextVR.

At Oculus Connect 5 on 26 September 2018, Zuckerberg announced Oculus Quest, the headset Oculus had first shown as Santa Cruz, at US$399 for spring 2019. It tracked its position without external sensors using four wide-angle cameras on the front. Respawn's game was revealed at Oculus Connect 6 in September 2019 as Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, a Rift exclusive due in 2020.

See also

• Meta Connect
• Oculus Connect 1
• Oculus Connect 2
• Oculus Connect 3
• Oculus Connect 5
• Oculus Connect 6