Registrations for Facebook’s F8 annual conference are now open. The event is being held from April 30th – May 1st in San Jose, CA. The website for the event boasts “new features and updates” for Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Oculus.
The only VR-related session listed in the schedule is ‘Storytelling Across Pioneering Platforms’. In this talk VR film creators will give tips learned so far and thoughts on the future. However the biggest VR announcements are likely to be in the main keynote itself.
At last year’s F8 the company launched Oculus Go — their first standalone headset. It also used the conference to announce the launch software.
The upcoming Oculus Quest is slated to launch in “Spring 2019”. Given that F8 2019 will fall within Spring, it seems fairly likely this is when Quest will be launched too.
Go’s release was not preceded by any preorders or prior announcement. The headset simply had an “early 2018” release window, and was launched at F8. If Quest receives the same treatment, we likely won’t hear anything concrete until then either.
What we do expect before then however is more news on the launch lineup. When Quest was announced in September, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stressed that it would launch with other 50 titles. We haven’t seen the majority of those officially listed yet. We’ll be attending the March pre-GDC event with “not-yet-announced” games and should be able to garner some new information at that event in just a few weeks.
We’ll have to wait and see if any more VR or AR content is added to the F8 schedule as the event inches closer.
