Last year, Oculus announced Oculus Rooms and Parties, to make VR a fuller social experience. Now, the company is updating its Gear VR with more social features, including VR Livestreaming.
It’s not hard to imagine why VR has to become more “social.” Social VR is the future. And Facebook has been doing a lot in the last year, to make the experience as social as possible – especially with features like Oculus Rooms and Parties which allow you to hang out with your friends in VR. Now, with the launch of Oculus Rooms 1.2, things go one step further.
As Oculus explains in a recent blog post,
[quote]Now there’s even more new content you can watch for free in Rooms, like music videos from Vimeo. And in addition to the expanded video selection, you can watch 360 videos in Rooms for the first time! [/quote]
For the best viewing experience, there is a new “viewing dome,” while others in other parts of the Room “can get a glimpse of the fun.” Oculus has also added voice search to Rooms to make it a lot easier to find what you’re looking for. Just select “Search,” tap the mic button, and tell Oculus what you’re looking for.
In the same blog post, Oculus also announced Oculus Events, a feature that makes it easier to “find friends and jump into an experience together in VR.” The feature has already been rolling out to English speakers.
In the announcement, Oculus gives us a little more information about Events:
[quote]This new feature lets you find public events and interact with others in Gear VR. You’ll find highlighted events showcased in Oculus Home, and you can check out a full roster of Oculus Events in the dedicated Events tab. [/quote]
The feature also allows you to set reminders for events, show that you’re interested in one, and even go straight to an event when it goes live.
Now you can also start Facebook Livestreaming directly from within Gear VR. All you have to do is select the “Livestream to Facebook” button that appears within the Universal Menu in VR. It’s that simple! The feature, currently available to users outside the US will be coming to everyone with the latest version of Android on their Gear VR-compatible devices, in the next few weeks.
Finally, Oculus Voice is also here – a feature allowing users to easily navigate VR with their voice. Also available only to English speakers on Rift and Gear VR so far, Oculus Voice Speech Recognition “lets you perform voice searches from Oculus Home to intuitively navigate games, apps, and experiences.”
At the moment its quite simple, but surely these features will be getting a lot more complex and useful in the near future.
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