Oculus Connect 5

Oculus Connect 5 (OC5) was the fifth annual developer conference of Oculus VR, then part of Facebook, held on 26 and 27 September 2018 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. More than 3,000 people attended. In the opening keynote, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the Oculus Quest, the standalone six degrees of freedom (6DoF) headset that had been shown in prototype form as Santa Cruz. Oculus gave it a price of US$399 and a spring 2019 launch.

The conference also brought news for Oculus Go and the Oculus Rift, including the general release of the Rift Core 2.0 software, and a first look at the Manifold volumetric camera built with RED. Oculus chief scientist Michael Abrash revisited the five-year technology predictions he had made at Oculus Connect 3, and CTO John Carmack gave his unscripted keynote on the second day.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Checked dates, venue, attendance, keynote and stream schedule, Quest specs and price, game, Go, Rift and Manifold announcements, and the Abrash and Carmack talk claims against all 17 cited Oculus, Meta, TechCrunch, Road to VR, UploadVR and Engadget sources. About review dates.

Background

Oculus first demonstrated Project Santa Cruz at Oculus Connect 3 in 2016 as a standalone VR prototype. At Oculus Connect 4 in 2017 the company showed the prototype again with two positionally tracked controllers. The OC4 keynote also announced Oculus Go and Rift Core 2.0, a rebuilt Rift software layer that included the Oculus Dash interface and a new Oculus Home; Santa Cruz developer kits were then slated for 2018. Oculus Go launched at Facebook's F8 conference in May 2018.

Oculus announced the OC5 dates and venue on 5 June 2018. The announcement framed the event as a look back at five years of VR progress and ahead to the next five, and said registration details would follow.

Event

The opening keynote began at 10 a.m. Pacific Time on 26 September. Oculus streamed it on its YouTube channel and Facebook page, and Oculus Go and Samsung Gear VR owners could watch inside the Oculus Venues app. The second day opened with Carmack's keynote at the same time.

Beyond the keynotes, the second day had 16 other talks. Topics included deep learning for VR characters and attracting users to apps, a fireside chat between Robin Hunicke of Funomena and Ruth Bram of Oculus Studios, a session on spatial audio for Quest, and one on preparing apps for launch. An Innovation Zone let attendees try prototypes of arena-scale tracking, mixed reality and co-location, the latter demonstrated with Dead and Buried. The Season 2 Grand Finals of the VR League were also held at the event, for The Unspoken, Onward, Sprint Vector and Echo Arena. The Onward finals were streamed on the evening of 26 September, and the Echo Arena finals on the afternoon of 27 September.

Announcements

Oculus Quest

Zuckerberg revealed Oculus Quest during the opening keynote. Oculus described it as its first all-in-one VR system with six degrees of freedom and as an all-in-one VR gaming system, and called Santa Cruz an earlier milestone on the way to it. The details given at OC5 were:

Item	Detail announced at OC5
Price and launch	US$399, spring 2019
Display	1440 x 1600 panel per lens
Processor	Qualcomm Snapdragon 835
Optics	Same optics generation as Oculus Go, with an adjustable IPD slider like Rift's
Tracking	Oculus Insight inside-out tracking using four ultra wide-angle sensors, with no external sensors; also used for Guardian
Controllers	A new version of Oculus Touch made for all-in-one VR
Software	More than 50 titles planned for launch

Oculus told developers that existing input schemes, PC tools and Unity and Unreal Engine integrations would map to Quest, and that Quest content could be ported to Rift with minimal code changes. Full documentation was promised for 2019. The developer post also carried a notice that the device had not yet received the authorization required by the US Federal Communications Commission. Oculus positioned Quest alongside Go as the low-cost entry point and Rift as the PC-powered option.

Games and content

ILMxLAB announced Vader Immortal, a Star Wars VR series that would debut exclusively on Quest in 2019. UploadVR reported that Quest would launch with ports of Rift titles such as SUPERHOT VR, Robo Recall, The Climb and Moss, and that Oculus hosted an arena-scale multiplayer demo of Dead and Buried at the event.

For Rift, the keynote announced Lone Echo II and Echo Combat from Ready at Dawn, Defector from Twisted Pixel Games and Final Assault from Phaser Lock Interactive. Vox Machinae was released on the same day.

Oculus Go

Oculus said 80% of Oculus Go owners were new to its ecosystem and that Oculus Venues had hosted more than 80 live events, with NBA games, films and concerts scheduled for the autumn. It also announced that YouTube VR, with more than 800,000 VR videos, was coming to Go, and that Go would gain casting to phones and TVs, demonstrated with Z-Strike and Bait!.

Rift and platform

Rift Core 2.0 left beta and began rolling out to all Rift users on the first day. The Oculus mobile app gained Rift support, so users could browse the Oculus Store, find events and friends, and install games on their PC remotely. Oculus also described a Hybrid App SDK (called a Hybrid App project in the developer post) for bringing existing desktop software into VR with its full interface.

Manifold camera

Oculus showed Manifold, a professional 3D/360-degree camera created by Facebook 360 in partnership with RED Digital Cinema. It recorded from 16 RED Helium 8K sensors at 60 fps, arranged for full 360-degree 6DoF capture, and Facebook's depth estimation was meant to let viewers watch the footage in positionally tracked headsets. No price or launch date was given; the companies said they would continue "on the road to commercial availability".

Talks

Michael Abrash

Abrash used his OC5 talk to review the predictions for 2021 he had made at OC3 in 2016. He said they were "pretty much on track" but about a year late, and that he had "underestimated in some areas". On displays he said he had "clearly undershot": the Half Dome prototype, shown earlier in 2018, already met his 140-degree field of view and variable focus targets, and panels at his predicted resolution of 4K x 4K per eye had been shown publicly.

He pushed foveated rendering and eye tracking back by a year, to four years from the talk, and showed an image with 95% of its pixels removed and the rest reconstructed by a deep learning algorithm. He said personalized head-related transfer functions might take longer than his original five-year estimate. He also said he now expected "useful haptic hands in some form within ten years". On form factor, he named pancake lenses and waveguide displays as routes to much thinner headsets. He showed a concept drawing and said it did not hint at a product, and he gave no date for such a device. The talk also included real-time capture of physical spaces and codec avatars.

John Carmack

Carmack's second-day keynote covered technical challenges for VR developers, lessons from the Oculus Go launch and what Quest experiences would need. He said Go had "exceeded even my expectations" and that its user retention was "as good as Rift". He said current Go headsets would get microSD support over USB, a night mode and a low-power mode, and listed a larger battery, a better chipset, more storage and possibly 6DoF controllers as likely features of a next Go. He described Quest as the company's main focus and suggested it could be seen as a portable gaming device similar to the Nintendo Switch.

Aftermath

Oculus Quest went on sale on 21 May 2019 at US$399 for the 64 GB model and US$499 for the 128 GB model, the same day as the Oculus Rift S. The next conference, Oculus Connect 6, returned to the San Jose McEnery Convention Center on 25 and 26 September 2019.

See also

• Meta Connect
• Oculus Connect 1
• Oculus Connect 2
• Oculus Connect 3
• Oculus Connect 4
• Oculus Connect 6
• Oculus Quest