Oculus confab features Gear VR, Minecraft, Netflix

Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe takes the stage at Oculus Connect 2.
Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe takes the stage at Oculus Connect 2.

Three virtual reality hardware products were the focus of attention at the Oculus Connect 2 conference in Hollywood last week.

The products included the Gear VR headset, produced in partnership with Samsung, a new Touch control device, and the consumer version of the Oculus Rift headset itself, scheduled for 2016 product release.

And, on the software side, Neflix, Hulu, Twitch and Minecraft are all headed for virtual reality, and a new drawing program, Medium, was showcased at the conference.

The big news was that Samsung will release the consumer version of the Gear VR headset on Black Friday for $99 — half the price of the current headset. The headset will also be lighter, and will work with all of Samsung’s 2015 flagship smartphones, not just one of them.

Oculus also released the required specifications for computers that connect to the Oculus Rift headset, and showed off their new Touch controllers.

You can watch all the keynote presentations in the video below.

Learn more about the Touch controllers in the video below.

The company also showed off several new applications for the Oculus Rift, the most impressive of which was Medium, a virtual reality painting program.

Watch a demo of Medium below.

Meanwhile, the Netflix app is already available for Gear VR, with Hulu and Twitch coming soon.

And Minecraft is coming to the Oculus Rift. Previously, Minecraft founder Markus Persson said that he was disappointed by Facebook’s purchase of Oculus, and that he would be avoiding the platform.

“Minecraft was my quest for a year and a half,” said Oculus Rift CTO and legendary video game developer John Carmack in his keynote presentation. “It was my Holy Grail. I think it’s the single most important application that we can do for virtual reality.

The conference also featured many other games, but, in his presentation,  Carmack did add that “gaming is going to be somewhat less than half of the time that people will spend in virtual reality.”

miriam.pia@hypergridbusiness.com'