Oculus Connect 6

Oculus Connect 6 (OC6) was the sixth annual developer conference of Oculus VR, then part of Facebook, held on 25 and 26 September 2019 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. In the opening keynote, Mark Zuckerberg announced controller-free hand tracking for the Oculus Quest, Oculus Link for running Oculus Rift content on a Quest connected to a PC, and the social VR world Facebook Horizon.

The same keynote included new Half Dome varifocal headset prototypes from Facebook Reality Labs, presented by chief scientist Michael Abrash, and Andrew Bosworth's confirmation that Facebook was building augmented reality glasses, together with a proposed shared world map called LiveMaps. OC6 was the last edition held under the Oculus Connect name. The 2020 conference was renamed Facebook Connect and held online only; the series is now known as Meta Connect.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Checked dates, venue, keynote speakers, announcements, quotes and aftermath dates against the cited Oculus/Meta recaps and Road to VR, UploadVR, Engadget, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GIGAZINE and EA sources. About review dates.

Background

Oculus announced the dates and venue in June 2019, inviting developers to "join us to begin a new chapter of virtual and augmented reality". At that point registration had not yet opened. OC6 followed Oculus Connect 5.

Both days opened with a keynote at 10 AM Pacific Time. Road to VR reported that the opening keynote was slated to take two hours. The second-day keynote was given by Oculus CTO John Carmack. Besides the web livestream, Oculus Quest and Oculus Go owners could watch both keynotes in an Oculus Venues livestream event, and PC VR users could watch them in Bigscreen.

Announcements

Oculus Quest

Zuckerberg said that hand tracking would come to Quest in early 2020, as an experimental feature for consumers and as an SDK for developers, and a demo was available at the conference. According to Oculus, its computer vision team had developed a deep learning method that estimates finger positions using only the headset's existing monochrome cameras, with no active depth-sensing cameras, additional sensors or extra processors.

Oculus Link was presented as a way for Quest owners with a gaming PC to use Rift platform content. Oculus said the software would be released in beta in November 2019 and would work with most high-quality USB 3 cables, and that a premium optical fiber cable would follow later in the year.

Other Quest announcements in the official recaps:

• Passthrough+, the stereo-correct passthrough view first launched on the Oculus Rift S, would come to Quest the following week, with "passthrough on demand" for switching between the real and virtual views later in 2019.
• More than 50 Oculus Go titles would become available on Quest from the following week, and owners of paid Go apps would get the Quest versions free through the end of 2019.
• Content built for the current Quest would work on a future Quest headset, and the existing headset would keep receiving software updates.

Facebook also said that people had spent US$100 million on content in the Oculus Store, and that 20% of that came from Quest.

Facebook Horizon and social features

Zuckerberg described Facebook Horizon as a "social VR world coming to Oculus Quest and the Rift Platform". Users would travel between public spaces through portals called telepods, play games such as the aerial dogfighting game Wing Strikers, and build their own spaces with a World Builder tool. The official recap said tools such as World Builder would need no coding skills, and it invited readers to sign up for a beta scheduled to begin in early 2020. Engadget reported that Facebook Spaces and Oculus Rooms would shut down on 25 October 2019.

The recap also described a Facebook-powered social layer. Oculus said it would begin rolling out the new social layer later in 2019, after which users would be asked to log in with Facebook to use first-party social features such as joining parties, adding friends and co-watching in Oculus TV. New features included chats, events and posting to Facebook Groups from VR. A "new and improved" Oculus TV was presented as a central hub for media on Quest and Go, and a new Media Studio tool was introduced for publishing immersive media.

Games and content

The following titles were part of the OC6 announcements:

Title	OC6 announcement
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond	Revealed as the game from the Oculus Studios partnership with Respawn Entertainment announced at Oculus Connect 4; listed as coming soon to the Rift platform, with a full narrative campaign, multiplayer modes and a gallery of stories from World War II veterans and survivors
Vader Immortal: Episode II	ILMxLAB announced that the episode was launching on Oculus Quest and the Rift platform that day
Asgard's Wrath	Rift release date set for 10 October 2019; pre-orders opened
Stormland	Rift release date set for 14 November 2019, with co-op play; pre-orders opened
Beat Saber	The game's developers announced a Panic! At The Disco music pack, due on Quest and the Rift platform the following week

Enterprise and developer tools

Oculus for Business entered closed beta at the conference, with a launch planned for November 2019. The enterprise package included a Device Setup app for configuring several headsets, a redesigned interface, data-handling protocols and dedicated support.

For developers, Oculus announced Vulkan Multiview and fixed foveated rendering support in its platform and in Unreal Engine, GPU profiling in Unity for Quest and Go, contributions to the RenderDoc frame debugger, more in-headset metrics in OVRMetricsTool, Quest purchase funnel analytics, native mixed reality capture support planned for later in the fall, and remote rendering over Oculus Link so that developers could preview apps streamed from a PC without first building and copying an APK. It also open-sourced FacebookDEP, a software stack for six degrees of freedom video that reconstructs depth from spherical and planar camera arrays, including Manifold, a camera with 16 RED HELIUM 8K sensors built in partnership with RED Digital Cinema.

Research and augmented reality

Abrash showed two new versions of the Half Dome varifocal prototype. Half Dome 2 replaced the original's mechanical actuators with a voice coil actuator and folded the optical path into a smaller module. UploadVR reported that it was 200 grams lighter than the original Half Dome and that, according to Abrash, its field of view was about 20% wider than Quest's, narrower than the original prototype's 140 degrees. Half Dome 3 replaced all of the moving mechanical parts with liquid crystal lenses, built as a thin alternating stack of flat optical elements whose focal length is switched by changing a voltage. Road to VR reported that this electronically controlled lens array could cycle through 64 discrete focus planes. Abrash also addressed the future headset he had outlined in earlier keynotes; at Oculus Connect 3 in 2016 he had predicted a headset with 4K resolution per eye, varifocal optics, eye tracking, wireless operation and a 140-degree field of view by 2021. At OC6 he said: "I don't know when you're going to be able to buy the magical headset I described last year," adding, "Let's just say not any time soon."

Facebook Reality Labs also presented full-body Codec Avatars, extending its earlier head-only work, and a Shared Spaces demo in which two people met as avatars in 3D reconstructions of real-world spaces.

Bosworth, then head of Facebook's AR and VR efforts, told the keynote audience: "To get to this future, we are building AR glasses." He showed no prototype hardware, and UploadVR described the glasses as "a few years out". He also introduced LiveMaps, described as "a shared virtual map of the world". According to the official recap, AR glasses would tap into 3D spaces previously saved to the cloud instead of reconstructing their surroundings in real time, which would reduce the computing they need. No date was given for public access.

John Carmack's keynote

Carmack's second-day talk included what he called a "eulogy for Gear VR". He said retention on Samsung Gear VR had been "way lower" than on the Rift, Rift S, Quest and Go, and blamed the friction of taking a phone out, removing its case and docking it more than battery drain. He called Quest "by far" Facebook's most retentive hardware and said the Rift S retained users better than the original Rift.

Aftermath

OC6 announcement	What followed
Hand tracking on Quest (early 2020)	Released earlier than announced: the experimental feature began rolling out with the v12 Quest software in the week of 9 December 2019, and Oculus planned to release the developer SDK on 16 December 2019.
Oculus Link beta (November 2019)	Beta released on 18 November 2019, initially without support for AMD GPUs; Oculus said the premium five-meter cable would initially roll out in limited quantities in select regions that year, with more regions in 2020.
Facebook Spaces closure (25 October 2019)	Facebook Spaces went offline on 25 October 2019.
Facebook Horizon beta (early 2020)	In late August 2020 Facebook said it would begin moving people from the waitlist into an invite-only beta on Quest and the Rift platform in the US and Canada. On 7 October 2021 Facebook announced that the service was being renamed Horizon Worlds, and on 9 December 2021 Meta opened it free to everyone 18 or older in the US and Canada.
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond	Released on 11 December 2020 for the Oculus Rift through the Oculus Store and on Steam.

In August 2020 Facebook announced that its next conference would be called Facebook Connect and would take place entirely online on 16 September 2020.

See also

• Meta Connect
• Oculus Connect 1
• Oculus Connect 2
• Oculus Connect 3
• Oculus Connect 4
• Oculus Connect 5