The boundaries of virtual reality continue to push ahead with announcements today from Oculus, the VR developer and subsidiary of Facebook Inc., during the Oculus Connect 6 conference.

The news includes numerous updates to the Oculus Quest wireless VR headset that greatly expand its capabilities, the upcoming Facebook Horizon social virtual world, Oculus TV for entertainment, video games and more.

The Oculus Quest headset – a wireless, standalone VR headset with a price tag of $399 – will be getting Oculus Link. It’s a universal serial bus tether for the wireless headset that will enable it to connect to a personal computer and thus access content from the Oculus Rift platform, the high-end, tethered headset. The kit will first ship with USB 3 cables, but Oculus plans to supply premium optical fiber cables for maximum throughput in a later release.

That means that Quest users will be able to play high-fidelity games and apps on their Quest that the platform otherwise would not be capable of running by connecting to their gaming PCs.

This capability expands the usefulness of the Quest headset, especially for developers, who now can expect high-definition apps built for Rift can run on the Quest as well, which means a bigger potential audience.

“Oculus Link reaffirms that the Quest is the headset Facebook cares about most and will be pushing the hardest moving forward,” analyst Anshel Sag of Moor Insights & Strategy told SiliconANGLE. “I don’t see this as a Rift S killer as others may see, but split rendering is becoming a trend and I fully expect Quest users to use it heavily if they already have an existing Rift library.”

If adding the Rift capability to Quest headsets wasn’t enough, Oculus also announced that Oculus Go games and apps are now coming to Quest as well. The Oculus Go is the cheapest, wireless standalone headset shipped by Oculus, with a price tag of $199.

Beginning tomorrow, Quest users will gain access to a wide variety of apps developed for the Go. That will also open up potential new audiences for developers who produced apps specifically for the Go and ease portability between the two headsets as well.

Also announced for the Oculus Quest, the company revealed that hand tracking is coming to the device. That will enable natural gesture interaction in VR, allowing users to eschew the need for specialized controllers for certain tasks. It will work using the already built-in sensors and cameras in the Quest and track hand movements with extremely high fidelity.

“Hand tracking has always been a feature that I have advocated that is necessary for most VR headsets, especially standalone,” said Sag. “I am happy to see Oculus will be adding hand tracking to the Quest because I believe it will improve the experience.“

The technology uses the Quest monochrome cameras to approximate the shape of the user’s hands and creates a set of 3-D points to accurately represent the hand and finger movements in VR.

As a social media company, Facebook wants to bring the social experience to VR, so the introduction of VR worlds within Facebook Horizon is no surprise.

With Horizon, users will be able to build and enter their own VR worlds filled with virtual spaces and populated with virtual communities. The idea is to provide an end-to-end virtual experience for users that can sustain the VR social experience.

“In Horizon you will be able to build your own world and experiences, hang out with friends, play games, meet new people,” said Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook. “[It will] grow over time as we focus on building it out over years.”

Players will design their own VR avatars from an array of style and body options and express their own individuality before being thrust into Horizon. From there, users will find themselves in a bustling town square filled with other people with whom they can interact. They can stay or they can whisk themselves away to explore new places, which can be pre-built locations, player-made content and social games.

“Facebook Horizon is the company understanding how social VR interactions work and how to join the community together to create a common social interaction and fabric,” said Sag.

To make room for Horizon, which is planned to launch in 2020, Facebook will close down its virtual reality social meeting app Facebook Spaces and Oculus Rooms on Oct. 25. The beta will open early next year and sign-ups are currently available on Oculus.com.

The new Oculus TV will give VR viewers a 180-inch virtual television in a digital space where users can join family and friends in a social viewing experience. The virtual TV can connect to popular streaming services such as Amazon Prime VR, or Fandango’s streaming service, FandangoNOW. It’s available today for the Oculus Quest and Go.

Oculus also announced a slew of new video games across its platforms, including “Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond,” which promises to bring the World War II into virtual reality; “Vader Immortal II,” the sequel to a previous title that puts a Star Wars lightsaber in the hands of players; and “Stormland” and “Asgard’s Wrath,” two more Oculus Studios titles on pre-order.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Image: Facebook