Oculus Connect 4 – Good news for DJs

This week the Oculus Connect 4 took place in the Valley. This is where Oculus make all their announcements.

It has felt like an uncertain time for virtual reality. On the one hand it’s been positive with a flood of new headsets on the way. But meanwhile the incumbents like Oculus and HTC Vive have been the subject of negative press with reports that sales figures are massively under performing. So it was an important week to see how Oculus would respond.

The message from OC4 was loud and clear. Zuckerberg is 100% committed to VR and has set Oculus and Facebook a goal of getting 1 billion people into VR.

They announced a new lower end self contained headset, the Oculus Go and gave more information about the Santa Cruz project which is a completely standalone high-end headset. This means for both devices you won’t need a PC, just charge it, connect to WiFi and use VR anywhere.

These are exciting developments. The lower end headset priced at a relatively reasonable $199 (£199 in the UK) is likely to address much of the fumbling about you encounter when trying to use your phone for VR (e.g. Gear VR and variants). John Carmack (Oculus CTO) calls this reducing the friction of VR which I think is a good way of looking at it. A device like this may well have a similar effect to the iPad making it quick and easy to do tasks that feel overkill or awkward on a PC, phone or laptop.

The higher end device is extremely exciting, especially for Reality Decks. They have announced some fantastic looking controllers which look like they’ll work really well for DJing.

I’m really excited about running Reality Decks on a device like this. This means us DJs will be able to take our turntables, mixer, entire music collection and personal nightclub anywhere in the world with us.

It’s a great time to be alive!