Coding toolset for Oculus Rift and Facebook combo

Question

I want to code for Oculus Rift and have full access to Facebook API from my program. It's a bit of a jump in the deep for me but that doesn't matter. I have some programming knowledge and will learn whatever I need to learn.
Right now for the above mentioned combination I'm thinking:

• C++ with maybe OGRE plus the Oculus API (0.3.1 preview)
• Use the Facebook PHP SDK (can be called from C++ from what I've read)

Please advise me on a sensible combination of languages/libraries.
Yes there is probably more than one way to skin this cat, but I have a feeling there is a more obvious way to a seasoned programmer: that's what I'm looking for.

Additional notes:

• I'm not going to be making a 3D game, so I'm ruling out Unity.
• I don't know what I'll be making yet (!) but I hope that it will be fun and that it will make use of the Rift together with FB to create something innovative.
• I've pre-ordered the DK2

Answer 1

This question largely depends on what you or any particular person faced with the problem finds it easiest to work with. If I were working on this I would probably start with the Spring Social framework and the JOVR Java bindings for the Oculus SDK, for the simple reason that my familiarity with the toolset (I've worked with Spring extensively in the past and I wrote the JOVR bindings and examples) would let me get a prototype on which I could iterate up and running, probably in a matter of hours. On the other hand if you're not familiar with Java, Maven, Spring, or the Oculus SDK, it could take days or weeks of fighting code and figuring out the basic workflow just to get started on either the Facebook or Oculus integration sides.

I would suggest that you evaluate working with tools for Oculus tools for working with Facebook independently before you settle on your combination. Write a simple example to access the Facebook graph API in a language and then try to write a example of a simple VR scene in the same language. You may find that just because Language X makes one easy, it might make the other 10 times harder than it should be. Once you've tried that out in a number of languages / with a number of libraries, you'll be in a much better position to decide for yourself which combination will present the path of least resistance given your own skills.

Bear in mind that Oculus integration is probably the more limited of the two. There are bindings that I know of for C, C++, Python, Java and I believe C#. You can even use Javascript if you want to navigate the currently turbulent waters of WebVR. This may sound like an abundance of choices, but if you have zero experience and zero desire to gain experience in some of these, then you can probably strike them off your list pretty quickly.

Facebook on the other hand has far too many possible bindings to list them all here, and ultimately if you need to you can always work directly with the REST API, since in the end all of the SDKs are basically wrappers around network requests anyway.