See you for the first time at Meta Connect!

I’m super excited to say, for the first time in my life, “See you at Meta Connect!”.

You know, I started working in VR(/AR/MR/XR/WhateveR) in 2014, and I started getting into development for the Oculus Rift DK2 in Unity around September of that year. 2014 is the year that Facebook acquired Oculus, and the same year, in September, Oculus organized its first developer conference: the Oculus Connect, with the intention of expanding the VR community. I have some memories of the first couple of Oculus Connects: I was still too broke to travel, and I watched the videos online. I remember dreaming about going there and meeting my idols of the time, Palmer Luckey, Brendan Iribe, John Carmack, and Michael Abrash. It looked like a very cozy conference, and some people reported on Reddit that it was easy to catch up with John Carmack or Palmer Luckey in the corridors and have some nerdy conversations with them.

11 years have passed by, and many things have changed. Oculus is no more (even if its name sometimes still appears somewhere), and there is only Meta. Palmer Luckey has a successful defense company, while Iribe and Carmack are all-in on AI. Now the big protagonists are Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Bosworth, with Abrash still appearing to say something cool about the future of technology. The event is no longer called Oculus Connect, but it is Meta Connect, and it is not only about VR anymore… actually, VR is not even central to it now, with more attention being given to smartglasses, AI, and mixed reality. But still, even if it looks colder than in the past, I would still love to go here, and still, in the past 10 years, I never managed to go there: either I could not travel when the even was more open, or there was COVID, or I did not got an invite when the event got closed. So I had every time to watch the live stream from home and suffer from FOMO.

I guess the reason for that is just that I’m not very into Meta circles. I do not have a company in the Start program, I’m not registered as a Meta ambassador, and so on. Plus, I think the memes I’ve made sometimes on the Zuck have not helped much in gaining the sympathy of the company. As didn’t help the fact that I’ve trolled the whole Meta Store releasing an app with just a gray cube…

Anyway, this year I really wanted to go there. It’s been my first year at CES (also thanks to Tyriel Wood), so I thought it would be great to make it also my first year at Connect! I asked so to a few friends at Meta how I could sneak into it. Since I’m Italian, I also sent a few horse heads here and there just to be more convincing. And surprisingly, a few days ago, I got the email I have been waiting for 11 years:

Receiving this felt a bit magical. And it felt even better because it was not sent by an automatic system, but was my friend Dilmer Valecillos personally forwarding it to me. I was incredibly happy: my first time at Connect could become a reality! I have to say a gigantic thank you to Shadi Nayyer for having got me the invite, and also to Dilmer for supporting my cause. I love you two, thanks a lot for making a VR guy happy!

This year, I’m excited about three things for Connect: one is the announcement of the new smartglasses, which I absolutely want to try. The second is something as a dev, I’m very interested in: the rumored SDK for smartglasses. I think smartglasses are a great opportunity, because it is a fast-growing field, and so I would like to evaluate the development of applications for glasses. An SDK released by Meta could be very interesting in this sense, especially if it could target the 2+ million Ray-Ban Meta already sold. I wonder if Meta will also have initiatives to support developers in this sense. I will try asking.

Orion glasses… will I manage to put my hands on them? (Image by Reuters)

The third thing is Meta Orion: I would really love to try these glasses, because they are the best AR glasses that could be tried today. I have no idea how to book an appointment to try them… so if any of you know a way, please let me know. You just need to tell me who I should send a horse head, and I’ll start from there…

It will also be my first time seeing Zuck and Boz in person. But I don’t think I’ll have a selfie with them. I mean, last time Zuck shot a selfie, it didn’t end very well…

This is the kind of joke that will not get me invited for the next 11 years of Connect (Image by Mark Zuckerberg)

Anyway, if you have something to recommend to me for Connect, please let me know. If you are going there, let me know, too, so we can meet and do some nerdy talks about XR!

And talking about first times… after Connect, I’ll briefly go to LA, and then I’ll spend some days in New York for the first time!! I’ve never been to the Big Apple, if we exclude one night I spent in a hotel there because I missed the flight to Austin. I will go there to meet some interesting XR people, and maybe also be a tourist for a day. So, if you are from NY and you love tech, let’s meet, too! We can be friends as long as you don’t say that “NY pizza is better than Italian pizza”. If you say that sentence, I will not only remove you from my friendships, but also personally scratch your face from all the photos where you appear.

This 2025 is being very exciting… a year of many “first times”! I’ve also eaten fresh durian for the first time this year, but I’m not very proud of it, lol. 3 months are missing, so let’s see what amazing things will happen. But for now, let’s focus on the Meta Connect that is coming next month. I’ve just come back to China, and in a week I’m going to the other side of the world… the jet lag is going to be fun. And I think that if I don’t fall asleep while there, also Meta Connect will be fun! Let’s meet there and let’s enjoy it together! And if you won’t be there, don’t worry, I’ll get you covered, so you won’t lose the most relevant info from there!

(Header image by Meta)

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This article was originally published on skarredghost.com