Oculus VR announced they would be opening up a software division to make their own oculus Rift games late last year. We took a look at their job openings today to get some clues on what directions this division is going into.
Off the bat, it’s fairly obvious that Oculus is looking for devs experienced in Android, Unity and Unreal Engine. Unity appears to be the priority among the three, with the promise that when they go in they would be immediately working on acquiring a deep understanding of Oculus Unity integration, developing VR prototypes mechanics and samples in Unity, and maintaining multiple projects, including document research and findings.
For Android and Unreal, they are looking for senior engineers, implying they have sufficient rank and file staff for these divisions. Oculus VR may simply be looking for people to oversee their efforts here so they can start iterating immediately.
Moving on to more esoteric needs, Oculus VR also has openings for Windows camera driver developers and Kinematics software engineers. Their Windows camera opening is apparently for all camera driver development, with Windows the clear priority. This dev will implement a custom kernel-mode driver, with minimum latency and usable on USB 2.0, for Windows XP through 8.1. Kinematics, on the other hand, involves the motion of bodies, and includes work on skeletal pose tracking and multiview reconstruction, technologies already present in Kinect for Xbox One. These are very particular needs that don’t necessarily relate directly to the production of games.
Lastly, there are two openings mysteriously titled Computer Vision Engineers, in charge of pose estimation and object tracking respectively. Both of these openings directly describe making software for their respective applications, so we may see some games that use only part of the Oculus Rift’s capabilities.
In these early stages, Oculus VR is going through the motions, but it seems that they are prioritizing Unity to immediately gain traction with the broad numbers of developers who depend on the game engine. Unity games may not necessarily push the boundaries with graphics, but there are many of them, and this could mean a large initial batch of games for Oculus Rift. Some of the notably games built on it which I think could find a quick home in the Oculus Rift include Thomas Was Alone, Temple Run 1 and 2, Shadowgun, Dead Trigger 1 and 2, Gone Home, and Kerbal Space Program.
For this year, at least, don’t expect to hear much in terms of confirmed software titles, as a lot of Oculus Rift’s initial work is purely exploratory. Still, it’s interesting to see which directions they’ve decided to take, and what they’re not interested in in the interim (which is clearly, any of the game consoles).
