“We’ve helped a lot of studios and IP owners make experiences that were a good but fairly slight, and essentially functionally demos or adjacent to other experiences or movie,” said Colum Slevin, head of media at Oculus’s AR/VR Experiences Group. “And then for the ILMxLAB team to show up and say no, we want to make a canonical, integral three part narrative that exists in the universe but stands on its own, we were sold.”

It also helps that the ILMxLAB team has the full support of the entire Star Wars franchise, Finley says. The folks at Skywalker Sound can help them craft an experience that sounds and feels just like the movies. And most importantly, the Star Wars Story Group team helps them weave their storyline into the series’ canon. “Those guys have giant throbbing brains filled with all of the story of the world,” Finley said.

That’s how Vader Immortal gets into truly deep cut Star Wars territory. The first episode taps into moments from the prequel films, and you’ll end up encountering a mysterious artifact called the “Protoblade,” an early medieval-looking lightsaber, this time around. Of course, all of those geeky beats have to be balanced with telling a solid story.

“The Story Group particularly is against fan service for it’s own sake,” Snow said. “And I think we are too… I think it’s better for us as artists in xLAB to be creating this stuff that’s our story and, not just, this is sort of an advertisement for something else. That’s not what we want to do.”

While Finley and Snow couldn’t say much about what ILMxLAB is doing next, it’s clear that the company is learning from the success of Vader Immortal. Perhaps next time, we’ll have a full season’s worth of Star Wars VR to dive into.

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Carmack says he pushed for remote rendering on the Quest from the start. It’s something developers have been toying with since the Gear VR, but it was never fast enough to be viable. Colleagues at Oculus also thought it might require an additional accessory to work properly on the Quest, like a 60GHz Wi-Fi adapter or a Displayport over USB-C cable. Vut Carmack was confident they could it with the headset’s onboard hardware and a single cable. It turns out he was right.

“Internally, we have a lot of perfectionists at Oculus and I have a lot of arguments about value, where you could look at something and say this is terrible for X,Y and Z reasons,” Carmack said. “But if people find value in it, I tend to be of the position that you let people choose to do things, even if other people think it’s not a sufficiently high quality level. We have a lot of debates about minimum bars of quality and poisoning the well [of interest for VR with bad solutions].”

Due to the speed and latency variabilities of Wi-Fi, it made more sense to launch Link over a direct USB-C connection, where those issues don’t exist. The video encoder Oculus is using is also limited to 150Mbps, which is easily handled by the USB 3.0 standard (and technically should be fine with USB 2.0 ports too). Carmack says the company would still like to optimize Link to work well over Wi-Fi eventually.

And while Oculus might never officially support it, he said you could conceivably even connect to a remote computer over the cloud and stream a VR experience. There are ways developers could optimize their games for cloud rendering too, for example by handling some processes locally, but he’s found it’s hard to convince developers to adopt risky new architectures. (He’s still bitter devs aren’t widely adopting his “precious Timewarp layers” to make VR scenes render more clearly.)

Because Oculus controls both the hardware and desktop side of things, it’s also able to implement remote rendering more efficiently than earlier attempts. Carmack says its implementation peels away a few layers of complexity, allowing the remote renderer to talk directly the Quest’s Android OpenMAX driver. The big takeaway? There’s far less latency than you’d expect while playing a VR video feed on the Quest.

Down the line, Carmack hopes to work more closely with Qualcomm to get low-level access to its processors. That would let him craft custom microcode to essentially treat the Quest like a remote monitor. He’d be able to do things like compress the VR video feed one scanline at a time, instead of dumping the entire frame buffer all at once. Surprisingly enough, Carmack says that could even let the Link-equipped Quest offer lower latency than the Rift S. That’s mostly due to their display differences: the Rift S’s LCD screen has a global shutter, so it has to scan the entire image frame at once. The Quest’s OLED screen has a rolling shutter, which could allow it to offer up to a frame less latency.

As it stands, Carmack says you can expect the current implementation of Link on the Quest to feel like a mobile app when you’re moving your head around. But you’ll probably feel a bit of latency when you’re moving side to side, or using the controllers heavily. I didn’t notice too much of that during my demos, but then again, I didn’t really encounter anything truly fast-paced.

The rest of Carmack’s talk covered a wide variety of topics, here at some highlights:

• He held a sort of eulogy for the Gear VR, a device that sold well, but didn’t keep users interested for long. He blamed the friction of using a smartphone as the main reason, since it involved taking your phone out of a case, plugging it into the Gear, and then losing access to your most important computing device. The Quest almost completely reduces the friction of entering VR, which is likely a big reason why it’s so successful.
• Carmack is very happy about adding an Oculus Go compatibility layer to the Quest. He wants future VR users to be able to experience a “retro VR” scene, where they can easily play all of the first generation games. He wants to avoid something like Apple’s shift towards 64-bit iOS apps, which killed access to any older 32-bit apps.
• Eventually, Carmack wants to have access to every 3D film ever made on the Quest. Its two screens can mimic the stereoscopic effect of 3D glasses, a feature that could be incredibly useful as we move away from 3D TVs (most 4K TVs no longer support that).
• Now that Fandango is on the Oculus platform, you’ll also be able to watch any of your MoviesAnywhere purchases in VR. Carmack foresees VR headsets being among the best screens in your house for viewing films.
• Carmack admitted that the Quest’s OLED screen can actually run up to 90Hz, but the company stuck with 72Hz since that was a more achievable framerate for mobile games. He was considering unlocking the 90Hz refresh rate for Oculus Link content, but he was warned that would voice the Quest’s FCC certification. (I’m sure an intrepid hacker will figure out a way to make that happen.)

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Facebook is a company that has faced numerous lawsuits and Congressional inquiries over its handling of sensitive user information. It stands accused of having undue, unchecked influence over politics, social issues and facts. It has routinely failed to stop bad actors from using its systems to lie, cheat and steal.

And yet, more than 2 billion people log into Facebook every month. The only reason developers can even attempt a feat as ambitious as LiveMaps is because Facebook generates enough data points to sustain the creation of a second, digital, planet. Even with the cold knowledge of the company’s security and privacy shortcomings, we’re still using Facebook.

By this math, we’re going to use LiveMaps, too. Though the concerns behind Facebook building a planet are more extreme than anything lodged at the company today, the benefits of a working AR system are also more obvious. Today, Facebook users are willing to give up at least some privacy in order to connect with people, follow sites they like and scroll endlessly through the ramblings of former friends and colleagues. If AR works the way Facebook envisions, we’ll use it to navigate our daily lives and turn to it at every step for information, connection, entertainment and employment. How much intrusion and subterfuge will we be willing to endure, to experience the comforts of Reality 2.0?

Facebook is one of a handful of companies with enough data and resources to make AR happen on a massive scale. Google could easily take another crack at it, or Microsoft, or maybe even Amazon. However, planet-scale AR is never going to happen without the cooperation or complete direction of a tech giant. With the emergence of mainstream AR, our reality will be distorted by a for-profit organization, guaranteed.

Things aren’t so different today. Major technology corporations already influence our everyday decisions through large-scale data collection, advertising deals and subtle online nudges, but AR will push these ideas to the extreme. It’s easy enough to delete the Facebook app from your phone; it’s much harder to opt out of reality. Especially when that world has more information, job opportunities, communication tools, entertainment options and silent data-collection nodes than the one you’re currently inhabiting.

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The Rift S had a rocky start. It launched alongside the Quest, but while that headset gave us a glimpse at the power of truly portable VR, the Rift S just felt like a minor step up from the original Rift. Sure, the resolution was higher and had built-in sensors, but it wasn’t the true sequel I was hoping for. Instead, it felt like yet another PC VR headset, one that was practically indistinguishable from the slew of Windows Mixed Reality devices.

With Oculus Link and all of those updates coming to the Quest, the Rift S now seems practically irrelevant. My main issue with the Quest originally was that it was limited to simpler mobile VR experiences, but Oculus Link completely fixes that problem. If it works as advertised, you just have to plug it into a gaming PC to play higher quality Rift titles, like the upcoming Asgard’s Wrath. That’s not only incredibly convenient, it’s something we haven’t yet seen from a major VR company. Finally, there’s a headset that you can use wirelessly on the go, and together with a PC when you need more power.

The Quest also has higher resolution OLED displays (1,440 by 1,600 pixels per eye) than the Rift S (1,280 by 1,440 pixels per eye), which relies on fast-switching LCDs. The Rift S does have the advantage of a slightly faster 80Hz refresh rate, but the Quest isn’t much slower at 72Hz. I’d argue the benefits of OLED outweigh that deficiency: You’ll see deeper black levels and better overall contrast on the Quest.

And if you’re not sold on the benefits of the Quest yet, there’s also hand tracking coming next year. We only saw a brief demo at Oculus Connect, but it looks like it does a decent job of sensing your individual finger movements using the Quest’s built-in cameras and computer vision algorithms. There’s no additional accessory required. It’s unclear if the Rift S will ever get this feature — though it technically could. While hand tracking might not replace the Quest’s motion controllers altogether, it adds another immersive interaction option for developers. It also gives Oculus one way to compete with the Valve Index, which has excellent finger tracking controllers.

As if to rub salt in the wound, Oculus is also bringing Passthrough+, one of the Rift S’s unique capabilities, over to the Quest. It gives you a stereoscopic view of the real world using the headset’s cameras, and it’s vastly superior to the flat 2D version of Passthrough currently on the Quest. This isn’t necessarily an essential feature, but being able to sense the actual distance between you and your coffee table will likely help avoid potential VR accidents.

With both the Oculus Quest and Rift S selling for $399, the choice for most consumers is obvious: Go for the more flexible and capable headset, instead of the one that’s stuck in the past. I wouldn’t be surprised if Oculus ends up making the Rift S cheaper for the holidays, but it would have to be a truly steep discount to make it worthwhile.

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Oculus Quest owners will soon have access to the entire library of Rift games, but not in the way you’d expect. Today at the Oculus Connect 6 conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Oculus Link, a new feature that’ll let Quest owners connect their headsets to gaming PCs with a USB-C cable. Basically, it turns that standalone headset into a fully functional Oculus Rift.

Notably, Facebook just bought CTRL Labs, a startup that enabled finger tracking with an armband that reads electrical signals. The social giant filed a patent for its own finger-tracking armband earlier this year. Meanwhile, as Upload VR notes, Oculus software developers, including one who formerly worked on hand-tracking at Leap Motion, have teased something “game changing” for OC6.

So, there are plenty of indicators pointing (sorry) to Facebook having some sort of finger-tracking news up its sleeve. We may find out when Oculus Connect gets underway at 1PM ET. You’ll be able to watch Zuckerberg’s keynote right here.

Oculus wouldn’t be the first to adopt such tech for a VR setup, though. Valve’s Index headset has finger-tracking controllers.

Follow all the latest news from Oculus Connect 6 here!