The news has been coming think and fast at today’s Oculus Connect 3 conference keynote, with the company unveiling lots of new little innovations to make virtual reality (VR) more immersive and social. The social aspect has always been a go to topic for detractors but today the company has detailed its plans, with Oculus Rooms and Avatars.
Oculus Avatars are all about personal identity in the VR world. With the new feature users will be able to customise their identities with more than a billion permutations, from unique textures and clothing, to accessories and more, creating a style that’s entirely your own. The feature will be available for the head-mounted display (HMD) at the launch of Oculus Touch in December, and for Samsung Gear VR in early 2017.
Along with Avatars users will also see two more social features coming soon, Oculus Parties and Oculus Rooms. In Parties up to eight people can get together and start a voice call wherever they are, whatever they are doing in VR, accessed right through Oculus Home or in the menu.
But just talking to people in VR isn’t as good as interacting with them in VR, so Oculus created Rooms. When users start a Party they can then head into a virtual room to hangout, watch TV, listen to music and play mini-games with up to eight people. Another feature of Rooms is that users can gather round the app launcher and jump into another social app together. As long as developers integrate the feature into their API users can then enjoy more title together. These currently include: Dragon Front, Casino VR Poker, Ascension VR, Wands, Fusion Wars and many more.
Parties will be available for Samsung Gear VR in a few weeks, while Oculus Rift users will need to wait until 2017. For all the latest Oculus news, keep reading VRFocus.
