Oculus just made Gear VR way more social with voice talk and virtual living rooms – The Edge
Oculus just made Gear VR way more social with voice talk and virtual living rooms
Oculus wants people to think of virtual reality as more than a solitary, gaming-centric practice. To that effect, the company today is launching two fresh features for the Samsung Gear VR headset that it hopes will encourage users to interact with one another in a virtual hangout. The very first is called Parties, and it’s a ordinary talk system — much like game talk for PlayStation or Xbox — that lets you hop into a voice call and talk with others while wearing the headset. The 2nd feature is called Rooms, and it’s an entirely fresh way of interacting with others in VR.
Rooms are essentially virtual living spaces where you and friends can spend time, talk, and interact with the objects around you. You can sit around a large virtual television screen and queue up movies from Facebook, or you can other gather around a table and play elementary games with one another. By joining a Room with your friend, you’ll also be able to launch multiplayer Gear VR practices together. Oculus wants this to be a way people can replicate the practice of being in the same physical area, even when separated by a long distance. In the event you want to share your screen, Oculus is also launching Facebook live streaming today in conjunction with Parties and Rooms, so you can share what you’re eyeing in VR with those simply browsing the Facebook mobile app.
To give you a physical presence in VR, Oculus is using a stripped-down version of its Avatars feature, very first announced back at Oculus Connect in October, that displays Parties participants as colored, semi-translucent goes. The goes have circular photos underneath them, pulled from a synced Facebook account, to help denote who is who, while software simulates lip movements to bump up the realism. Using the Gear VR’s sensors, the avatars will also replicate head movements you make in the real world as you stare around.
In my practice using Rooms this week, I was able to join a voice talk with an Oculus employee located down the hall from me, who then invited another person from London. All three of us were able to customize our avatars and then tour the virtual living room. Movement is conducted by warping around. So to go from one place in a Room to another, you hover your stare over the destination and tap the Gear VR. All of the interactions with objects in a Room can be done with elementary taps on the side of the headset, which is helpful considering Gear VR does not use mitt tracking, mobility controllers, or any type of remote to receive input. The avatars and activities aren’t anywhere as sophisticated as the Toybox mixed reality demo Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg displayed off at Connect, but Rooms does capture the same spirit.
Overall, it was a slick practice, tho’ there are clear hurdles to Rooms catching on. It’s hard to imagine many people using these kinds of social practices with VR for long durations of time. That’s both because using mobile VR for more than brief gaming or 360-video experiments can be awkward and the lack of widespread adoption of Gear VR means you won’t have too many friends who own it and use it regularly. Still, it’s a strong very first step toward the kinds of social practices — the ones that could take VR truly mainstream — that Oculus and Facebook are working to supply.