Oculus Touch is just months away from finally launching, but UK-based VR devs will have the chance to try the kit early a little later this week.
Make Real, a VR production studio, teamed up with The Old Market Theatre to host an Oculus Touch 24hr VR Hackathon as part of the Brighton Digital Festival in the UK city this week. Kicking off on Thursday, September 15th, teams or three or four developers will be given a day to create small projects for the position tracked controllers, based around the theme of mini-games. Each entry will be judged by a panel with the winning team being announced on Friday and awarded an Oculus Rift.
Though a Rift is up for grabs, the real prize in the hackathon is the chance to work with Touch well ahead of its release in Q4 2016, Make Real Operations Lead, Sam Watts, told Upload. The competition will help developers “to better understand the capabilities of the hardware when they don’t have a specific game title/use in mind presently,” he revealed. The team hopes that, in getting some hands-on time with Touch, a fresh wave of ideas may come about.
The event is sponsored by both AMD and Unity, providing a VR Ready PC and catering respectively. Rifts and Touches are from Oculus itself, as is the prize headset. Teams must bring their own Windows PCs, however, which will need to be kitted out with the Unity 5 Personal Edition and all of the usual requirements for developing Rift content.
Brighton Digital Festival’s VR fun won’t end on the Friday; that weekend Make Real will co-host a VRLAB event featuring a range of VR developers and their respective projects.
A recent retailer listing suggested that Oculus Touch might come out in November for around $230. Oculus itself hasn’t confirmed that information, but we’re hoping to hear for at Oculus Connect 3 earlier next month. We already know that the kit will launch with over 30 titles, so hopefully this hackathon will help fuel the wave of games that comes after that.
