According to Facebook, when you’re inside Facebook Horizon you will not display your real name even though your Oculus account and Facebook account must be linked to use the app. Instead, all users will only see your Oculus ID.
You won’t have to wait much longer to try out Facebook Horizon, the upcoming collaborative world-building and game-creation social VR platform for Oculus Quest and Rift. The invite-only beta kicks off soon and we’ve already got impressions for you right here, but in the meantime privacy is a hot topic for any social VR application — especially from Facebook hot on the heels of the news that a Facebook account will soon be required to use hardware and software created under the Oculus umbrella.
During a video interview after our Horizon demo earlier this week, we discussed the differences between Oculus accounts and Facebook accounts as it pertains to the virtual world:
“So, when we announced Horizons last year, we did share that Horizons is a Facebook product, you log in with a Facebook account,” said Meaghan Fitzgerald, Head of Experiences and Product Marketing at Facebook Reality Labs. “But you still show up with your Oculus user ID to other people. So you’re not displaying your real name, you are displaying your Oculus user name. And we understand that people probably want some differentiation between the people they hang out with in VR and the people that they use their primary Facebook accounts with.
So that’s still going to be possible. You can actually add someone on an Oculus level. You can collaborate, you can build a world around a shared interest. And actually one of the things that we’ve been really excited about is that, collaboration of world-building, is one of the most engaging places where we’ve seen that innovation and creativity and people pushing the tools to the limit, and that all happens on the Oculus account-level.”
However, if a user violates community guidelines, is reported, gets banned, or some other sort of offense, their identity isn’t hidden to Facebook employees. Safety specialists can monitor interactions when reports are filed and likely have the power to ban your entire Facebook account altogether or at least ban it from accessing Facebook’s VR content.
“Safety is definitely a top priority for us,” said Fitzgerald. “We’re actually putting a number of things in place to make sure people feel safe. Trained safety specialists are one of those and they will react to a report. So if someone files a report of something going on, then a safety specialist will get involved and take a look.
But the tools actually go beyond just that one piece. And it’s about giving people control over their experience. So the safe mode, which I think you saw was an opportunity for people to create that report, but also take action themselves. If they want to mute someone in the space, if they want to block someone, they just want to pause and kind of like regroup and be in a zone where they’re not interacting with other people.
So we’re, we’re actually really focused on safety as something we want feedback on during the beta, so we can constantly improve and make that better.”
In the meantime, let us know what you think from what you’ve seen of Facebook Horizon. Is this a contender to overtake the likes of Rec Room and VRChat, or will it simply slot in alongside the rest? Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Facebook Horizon, the social VR app planned for Oculus Quest and Rift, is hitting its closed beta invite-only testing phase later this year. You can sign up now to be added to the waitlist as invites will begin rolling out “in the coming weeks” according to today’s Oculus blog post. Alpha testing began in March. You can find more information on the official Facebook Horizon website.
After spending a little bit of time inside Facebook Horizon earlier this week, I’d say the closest comparison would be Rec Room from indie studio Against Gravity. They both feature similarly whimsical art styles, a heavy focus on in-app game creation, and heavily incentivize being social with others in VR.
The big difference obviously is that Horizon is, naturally, backed by Facebook and is exclusive to Oculus devices like the Rift and Quest. Rec Room is made by a small studio, but is cross-platform on all PC VR headsets, Quest, PSVR, desktop non-VR, PS4 non-VR, and even non-VR mobile devices.
Like most user-generated content focused experiences, Facebook Horizon will live and die by the quality and quantity of good content. There seems to be a high ceiling for the types of games and worlds people can create, so it all comes down to whether or not creators will want to build for this platform instead of for others.
When using Horizon, you’re required to link your account to your Oculus actual Facebook account. However, in-game it will still only show your Oculus ID, not your real identity. There are plenty of safety and privacy tools as well, such as a personal safe space bubble, blocking and reporting features, as well as parties and friend invites to navigate. Accessing and playing content seemed simple, but the building tools will definitely take a lot of practice to master.
There isn’t a firm date yet for the invite-only Facebook Horizon beta, but they’ve at least said it will be here in the “coming weeks” so not much longer. Perhaps sometime near the Facebook Connect (formerly known as Oculus Connect) digital event on September 16th would make sense.
Facebook is soon to launch the invite-only beta of Horizon, on Quest and Rift, the company’s latest attempt at creating a first-party social VR experience. We previewed the beta and got to see several user-created mini-games and explored the built-in creation tools.
Horizon is designed as a place for Oculus users to hang out, play together, and create together. You can apply to join the beta here, which Facebook says will begin opening up “in the coming weeks.”
Rather than being one continuous space, Horizon is organized into discrete rooms called ‘Worlds’ which can support up to eight players at a time.
Everything in Horizon has been built with integrated creation tools which allow users to make their own rooms with hand-crafted 3D models and basic scripting, allowing for the creation of some surprisingly complex mini-games. Horizon also allows for real-time collaboration, enabling users to build and test Worlds together.
I had the chance to jump into Horizon, see some of the user-generated Worlds in action, and take a look at the integrated creation tools that make them possible.
Starting in the Plaza
The Plaza is the area where you’ll first appear when you launch Horizon. In the Plaza you’ll find links to ‘featured’ Worlds, which are hand-picked by Facebook. You can also call up the Horizon menu from a button on your wrist and use it to browse and search for other Worlds.
Moving from the Plaza to another World is as simple as clicking a button and waiting a few moments while the new World loads. If you’re in a Party with other Horizon players (up to eight), you’ll all end up in the same instance of a World if you visit at the same time.
Worlds as Mini-games
While Worlds can be as simple as decorative spaces, they can also be fairly complex mini-games thanks to built-in scripting which allows creators to imbue their creations with game logic. In my preview I got to see several examples of mini-games built inside of Horizon.
One was ‘Balloon Bash’ a playful shooter game where each player picks up a water balloon gun and runs around the map shooting down targets worth various points. After a time limit expires, the total points are listed to determine the winner of the round.
Another World I visited, ‘Interdimensional’ was built as an escape-room like experience with multiple puzzles designed for two players. One of the puzzles was a chamber with a cube and symbols on each wall. The goal of the puzzle was to guide a cube into boxes inside the room by changing the direction of gravity and causing the cube to move in the direction of each box. The challenge is that only the player outside of the room has the gravity controls, which means the players need to work together to figure out which controls to activate in which order to achieve the goal.
Creating Worlds
One of the coolest parts of Horizon is that the tools for making new Worlds are built directly into the platform and are easy enough to use that you don’t need to be a 3D modeler or a game designer to figure out how to get started.
When in creator mode you can become a giant to work on large-scale structures, or scale yourself down to work on little details. The core of creating is Horizon is a set of light-weight modeling tools which allow you to combine and modify primitive shapes to build environments and props.
Many of the features you’d hope to see are there: grouping, painting, basic texturing, plane snapping, and axis sliding & rotation. There’s also arrays, which allow you to quickly and precisely duplicate objects or groups of objects, making it easy to make repeating structures like stairs, windows, or entire buildings.
Basic scripting is also possible in Horizon, allowing creators to add game logic to their Worlds. I haven’t had the chance to dive into the scripting tools yet, but from my experience as a player, it seems that they can enable some surprisingly complex behaviors.
For instance, in the water balloon launcher game I played, the launchers would shoot a water balloon with the pull of the trigger, but holding the trigger down allowed the launcher to charge up and shoot further upon release.
In the escape room puzzle game, there were buttons outside of the room which would change the direction of gravity acting on the cube (but not the rest of the world), causing it to fall in different directions.
I’ve also seen Worlds where one object could be used as a sort of ‘remote control’, meaning the movements of one object would be mirrored by a much larger object. This allowed players to ‘puppeteer’ a large robot at a distance.
Building Together on Both Headsets
Unlike some other VR creation tools, creating Worlds in Horizon is not limited only to those running the app on PC. Both Rift and Quest have full access to creation tools, and can even work together collaboratively.
In Horizon you can add friends as collaborators to your Worlds and work with them side-by-side in real-time. While you’re modeling a skyscraper, your friend can work on the colors, or take your completed skyscraper, duplicate it several times, and then arrange the buildings into a cityscape. Or you can both work on an entirely different part of the world while bouncing ideas off of each other.
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From my hands-on time with Horizon so far, it feels like a cross between the mini-games of Rec Room and the user-generated creations of VRChat. I expect that Horizon’s collaborative building tools will be nearly as popular as simply experiencing the Worlds on offer, thanks to the relative ease-of-use and collaboration capabilities.
Facebook says it expects that one day Horizon will support many people in one World, but for now there’s a limit of eight. And while its nice that Rift and Quest users can play and build together, unfortunately Facebook isn’t yet committing to supporting any other headsets—making Horizon more of a ‘social Oculus experience’ than a ‘social VR experience’.
There’s mystery on the horizon or, rather, within it.
Since its reveal last year, a shroud of uncertainty has engulfed Facebook Horizon, the company’s new creation-driven social VR experience. It’s been exacerbated by a prolonged silence brought about by COVID-19 and, more imminently, the upcoming switch to Facebook accounts on Oculus devices. But the veil’s about to be lifted somewhat, as the app opens its doors to the first beta testers in the coming weeks.
So, what exactly is Horizon?
If I were to shake a magic 8-ball to that question, the most appropriate answer would be: “Ask again later.” The bones of Horizon are instantly recognizable; it’s got the accessible VR creation software of Google Blocks paired with the content-sharing ecosystem of Sony’s Dreams. Add in its social element and it draws immediate comparisons to the user-generated content of Rec Room, swapping that app’s community tools with its own Facebook-driven offerings.
So, yes, you can meet up with friends and very quickly start tinkering away at new virtual worlds and objects together. Within a few moments of entering the platform’s creative mode, myself and Upload’s David Jagneaux are pulling virtual shapes out of floating menus to piece together hats. I can’t quite control my giddy laughter at the scaling feature, which allows you to instantly grow or shrink in a space with others, allowing me to turn David into an ant and appearing as a giant to him.
That said, without the proper onboarding tutorials, it’s difficult to speak to exactly how intuitive creative mode is. Flicks of the Touch’s sticks cycle through tools like grabbing and grouping, but I am getting muddled up and keep needing a Facebook tour guide (visibly labeled as a community guide) to come over and help me like I’m in art and craft session in kindergarten. The basics are all there; I’d just need more time to discover how deep it goes.
Currently, though, Horizon is more single-minded on this approach than Rec Room, seemingly less concerned with cosmetic unlocks and other social VR staples (at least from what we see). Your first steps into the app will be in the Plaza, a general hub world where you’ll see users running from door-to-door, each leading to new user-made worlds. Every creation we see here, we’re told, was made in-app using the same tools everyone else will have access to, right down to the Plaza itself.
The Facebook In Facebook Horizon
Last week’s news that Oculus headsets will soon require Facebook sign-ins for new accounts, paired with this week’s announcement of Facebook Connect sends a clear signal that Horizon — and future services — will be fully entrenched in the social platform. We didn’t have enough time in our tour and interview to fully explore the extent of Facebook integration, but here’s a few things we do know.
– Facebook Horizon’s friend system operates through Oculus IDs, not your Facebook friends. – Pictures taken inside the app can be shared to Facebook with the press of a button. – Facebook will pre-approve ‘Community Guides’ that will be visibly labeled on on-hand. – You can instantly press a shield button on your wrist to go into a virtual ‘Safe Zone’ that mutes people around you and blurs them from view. – If you report an account, they’ll instantly be invisible to you and their activity will be monitored though the barometers of how and when remain unclear. – Horizon will also send the last few minutes of footage before your report to Facebook for review, but the company says it will only send that footage if you make the report and will delete it after.
We visit two worlds. One is a multiplayer shooter in which players race to hit targets with water balloons fired out of handheld canons. The other is a collaborative puzzle challenge in which two players feed each other information to guide a block into a goal zone while others look on from an audience area.
This is all undeniably impressive. The puzzle game features a floating cube barking instructions at us, and multiple areas to transition to as you move on to new challenges. And, even with just a few minutes in the creator mode, I can begin to see the foundations upon which these games were built. You can immortalize any moments with selfies and send them off to Facebook pages and walls, as you’d expect, too.
What it isn’t, however, is especially new. Software that allows those with little coding experience to make their own games — both in and out of VR — is rapidly progressing and, in its current form, Horizon strikes me as a rather uniform entry into that genre.
Facebook Reality Labs’ Head of Experiences for Product Marketing, Meaghan Fitzgerald, however, is keen to stress Horizon’s social element as a differentiating factor. “We learned early on as we started working with some creators over the last year that there’s kind of this ‘aha’ moment when you realize the world was built by someone else that you then can go meet and interact with,” she says, “And at its core Horizon is a social product, we want it to be that place where communities form not necessarily a AAA game, that’s not what we’re building here.”
Personally, I’m not convinced that’s where Horizon can truly set itself apart. It’s more telling that, in a 20-minute interview with Fitzgerald and Horizon Product Management Director, Ari Grant, myself and David suggest a range of possible avenues that are largely all met with the same answer: “We’ll see.”
Will Horizon support hand-tracking? Will it come to Steam and PSVR? Can we import Unity creations? Will you be able to seamlessly travel between it and Facebook’s other social VR services? Are the avatars going to replace the original Oculus designs? Will Facebook-owned studios like Beat Games and Ready At Dawn create unique Horizon content?
Each of these questions is met with an array of well-rehearsed evasions and vague possibilities. Some are clearly deliberate; when booting the app on Rift, I seemingly launch a desktop version in which I can walk and look around with a mouse and keyboard. It might be a development tool, but Grant’s surprised “Oh” when I tell him suggests there’s more at play.
But, whatever the reasons for this selection of half-answers, all contribute to one wider conclusion: even Facebook, by its own admission, doesn’t really seem to completely understand what Horizon is yet.
And that’s perfectly okay. It’s to be expected, even, when you’re still waiting to open the floodgates and see what people actually start making. Horizon has to prove itself; it’s one thing showing us a suite of Facebook-approved creations from pre-approved makers, it’ll be another thing entirely to moderate and curate a growing pool of user-made VR worlds.
I can see a version of Horizon that is distinct and dynamic, one with user-made games and experiences that are genuinely engaging rather than cute novelties, perhaps paired with abridged visits to the worlds of Beat Saber, Lone Echo or Asgard’s Wrath and available across a broad range of platforms. I might even be able to instantly hop from, say, Oculus Venues, into this toolset with my friends following along. But that’s not what will be there as Facebook gradually starts introducing new people to the invite-only beta. It still has to be built. It still has to be proven.
Perhaps most importantly, though, Horizon seems increasingly like a piece of Facebook’s social VR puzzle, not the full picture itself. What about other social VR activities like hanging out to watch concerts and other live events? Those will still be served in Oculus Venues, which is getting revamped to support the same avatars as seen in Horizon. You have to imagine that other ideas, too, are getting their own dedicated apps further down the line, each adding to the story.
It’s that wider picture I’m most curious about right now. Horizon fills in another blank for Facebook’s social VR endgame, but the shroud is far from lifted. As Facebook doubles down on Facebook and Horizon leaves its door ajar, I feel like I’m still waiting on its true vision of a social VR future.
Facebook dropped the Oculus prefix for its social VR event viewing platform, rebranding it to simply Venues—another ostensible move to minimize the Oculus name (eg: Facebook Connect now, not Oculus Connect). Now the company is widening access to Venues in preparation for their upcoming flagship social VR offering, Facebook Horizon, which will likely have a bigger reveal at Connect this year.
Update (September 11th, 2020): Facebook is talking up its Venues (Beta Early Access) app in a recent blog post, releasing more information on what to expect from the social platform.
“There’s a new lobby where you can socialize before, during, and after the show—because we all know that one of the best parts of an event is chatting about the experiences with others who were there,” the company says.
Facebook says Venues will also include interactive emoji expressions, confetti rain, fist bumps, high fives, and the ability to take photos and selfies.
Access to Venues is being expanded to more people, Facebook says, and will continue “in the coming weeks.”
Original Article (August 14th, 2020): Now simply named Venues, an early access beta version of the social VR app is currently rolling out. The app is being released to only a few users at this time though, so you may not find that big blue ‘Download’ button on Venue’s new Oculus Store page.
Although likely still a work in progress, many of the avatars appear to be very similar, if not identical, to the ones seen in Facebook Horizon promo material.
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Image courtesy Facebook
Image courtesy Facebook
Image courtesy Facebook
Image courtesy Facebook
Facelift notwithstanding, Facebook is still using Venues for social live event viewing, including sports, concerts, and standup comedy. Although we haven’t had a chance to go hands-on yet, the Beta Early Access version seems to include a more robust avatar creator and multiple environments, including lobbies for informal chats and more intimate viewing areas for groups.
Notably, Venues still requires a Facebook login, something that seems to have created a backlash from users on the original app, which may explain its nearly a [2/5] star rating. That’s unlikely to change, as Facebook Horizon inevitably brings Oculus users ever closer to the mothership.
Neither Facebook Horizon nor the new Venues have general release dates yet, so there’s no telling how the two will hook into each other. We’re hoping to learn more at Oculus Connect 7, which will be held digitally this year.
Last week, Facebook began inviting users to participate in a closed alpha for Facebook Horizon. The social VR app was announced last year at OC6 and will see users participate in creating customizable worlds, expressive avatars and experiences.
The announcement in September came with the promise of a 2020 launch and a closed beta early this year. A screenshot on Reddit revealed that Facebook is now sending out invites to a private alpha for Facebook Horizon, with the closed beta presumably still to come in the following weeks or months.
A Reddit user posted a screenshot of an email they received from Facebook inviting them to an alpha for Facebook Horizon. The cut off period to accept the invitation was last Friday, with the alpha beginning later this month.
Facebook also noted that that participation in the alpha will require users to sign an NDA, as the alpha version of Horizon “is an early form and [Facebook] will keep making product improvements over the course of the month.”
We reached out to Facebook to confirm the alpha invitations and a Facebook spokesperson responded that Facebook is “conducting some early tests for Horizon, with more tests on the… horizon.”
The wording of the alpha email invite suggests a month-long testing period. Combined with the Facebook statement suggesting tests ‘on the horizon’, the closed beta promised at OC6 could begin sometime in April or soon after that.
After a slow start, 2019 rounded out to be an undeniably strong year for consumer VR, setting up a springboard into a big 2020. Here’s an overview of the major happenings in VR over the last year, and a glimpse of what will come in 2020.
5 Major New Headsets and What They Mean for the Market
2019 started out slow as the industry waited with baited breath for the launch of the latest wave of headsets, but things started heating up once they finally hit the market. Here’s a look at the biggest headset launches of 2019 and what they’ve meant to the industry so far.
Oculus Quest
Image courtesy Oculus
Oculus Quest is surely the most important headset to launch in 2019. We called it the “first great standalone VR headset” in our review, thanks to a reasonable $400 price point, full 6DOF tracking (which allows it to play games functionally on par with high-end VR headsets) and no PC required.
As a standalone VR headset built on smartphone hardware, Quest can’t compete in the graphics department against high-end PC VR headsets, but there’s no question that it’s the class leader in ease-of-use (a place where tethered headsets are still struggling). And if you happen to have a gaming PC anyway, Quest also doubles as a PC VR headset.
On those fronts, Rift S seems to have largely succeeded; its $400 launch price was half of the launch price of the original Rift with Touch controllers, and we certainly haven’t been missing the external sensors of the original since getting our hands on Rift S. Thanks to the backing of a strong content library, Rift S packs a lot of value, making it easy to recommend as the best entry-level headset for PC VR.
Valve Index
Image courtesy Valve
After tons of speculation, Valve finally jumped into the VR headset space with its own first-party hardware in 2019. While the company had originally collaborated with HTC to create the Vive, this time around Valve opted to handle everything on their own.
In our review we called Index “the enthusiast’s choice” thanks to category-leading visuals, ergonomics, and audio, as well as solid controllers. And while it’s a lovely headset once you’re inside, there’s no denying the significant $1,000 price tag and sub-par ease-of-use due to external tracking sensors and last-gen boundary setup.
Still, Index is a hugely important headset because it acts as a high bar that future headsets can strive toward and demonstrates the continued existence of an enthusiast class of VR consumers who are willing to pay for a high-end VR experience. But it’s also made for an awkward relationship between Valve and HTC who are now positioned more as competitors than partners.
Vive Cosmos
Image courtesy HTC
In 2019 HTC launched Vive Cosmos, its first true successor to the original Vive headset. Like Facebook with Rift S, HTC opted to make its latest headset easier to use by ditching external tracking sensors for inside-out tracking.
In our review we called Cosmos “a decent headset up against stiff competition.” Indeed, worst-in-class tracking and iffy ergonomics has left Cosmos overshadowed by the considerably less expensive Rift S and the more expensive but higher-fidelity Index. And while HTC had positioned Cosmos as a move toward a more user-friendly headset, the device’s awkward reliance on Steam (despite a Viveport front-end) arguably takes it a step back in user-experience compared to the original Vive.
While Microsoft and its other VR partners seem to have largely abandoned the Windows VR platform, HP surprised us in 2019 with the launch of Reverb, its second VR headset. While it’s still stuck with Windows VR (and the worst-in-class controllers that come standard with such headsets), Reverb leads in pixel density, making it a compelling choice for simulator enthusiasts who tend to value resolution above other specs.
While Reverb’s launch in 2019 shows that HP is seriously committed to PC VR, it hasn’t done much to alleviate the feeling that Microsoft is knowingly allowing the Windows VR platform to wither away.
Big VR Game Launches and Growing Developer Success
Since the first consumer VR headsets hit the market in 2016, developers have been steadily honing in on what makes a great (and successful) VR game. While it’s been a painfully slow process for developers and consumers alike, 2019 saw the launch of games which have objectively moved the needle forward in VR game design and set new records for developer success. Here’s a look at the most important moments in VR gaming in 2019.
Beat Saber’s Full Release and Developer Acquisition by Facebook
Image courtesy Beat Games
It wasn’t long after Beat Saber’s early access launch in 2018 that it was a clear success for its small indie developer Beat Games. Later that year the game launched on PSVR where it remains one of the best rated games on the platform. In 2019, Beat Games added new music & features and brought feature-parity to all versions of the game, culminating in a full launch out of early access alongside the launch of Quest on May 21st, 2019.
Even before the game launched on Quest, it reached a huge milestone as the first VR title—as far as we know—to have sold 1 million copies. This staggering success caught the attention of Facebook, leading to the surprise acquisition of Beat Games. This was likely primarily a defensive move in order to keep platform competitors from getting their hands on what is surely Quest’s most important game. But there’s an offensive element too: Facebook seems keen to accelerate the game’s adoption of new Oculus platform technologies aimed at driving user engagement.
Asgard’s Wrath Delivers the First Great VR RPG
Image courtesy Oculus
Purportedly VR’s largest game production yet released, Asgard’s Wrath capitalized on the longstanding desire for a meaty VR-native RPG. Players were treated to some 30 hours of content and a game which has been called a “must buy” by many. We thought enough of the title that we gave it our 2019 Game of the Year Award for the Oculus Rift.
The Oculus Studios-backed title appears to have been a success, but it also sets a very high bar for third-party (and mostly indie) developers to follow.
Stormland’s Innovative Open World and Developer Acquisition by Sony
Image courtesy Insomniac Games
Developed by veteran game and VR studio Insomniac Games, Stormland raised the bar in VR open-world game design with an innovative take on locomotion which offers players a sense of large scale freedom rarely seen elsewhere in VR. The game successfully combines a handful of different locomotion schemes and integrates them with satisfying combat for a core gameplay loop that’s easy to love.
We expect VR game design concepts from Stormland to proliferate into VR titles in 2020 and beyond. For its contributions we gave the title our 2019 Design Award for Excellence in Locomotion.
While Facebook scooped up Beat Saber’s Beat Games, Sony acquired Stormland’s Insomniac Games in 2019. Though the company probably bought the studio primarily for its success in the non-VR space, it was a strategic blow to Oculus nonetheless.
Blood & Truth Proves PSVR is Still Going Strong
Image courtesy SIE London Studio
Blood & Truth was PSVR’s biggest game to launch in 2019 and managed to delight players with an action-packed narrative full of interesting moments. Blood & Truth is an impressively crafted experience that is not only expertly designed around the limitations of the aging PSVR, but even manages to raise the technical bar for character rendering and performances on any VR platform, even against much more powerful PC hardware.
By making nearly everything in the game physical and interactive, Boneworks delivers on player’s expectations of agency in a way that often goes far beyond its contemporaries. In the game, just about every object, enemy, and weapon is physically interactive, leading to moments where novel ideas—like, say, using a coffee mug as a melee weapon—actually work. While the heavy emphasis on physics can be frustrating and wonky at times, it’s hard not to feel a sense of added embodiment when your ideas about what’s possible in the game world are satisfied in a realistic fashion.
For its part, Boneworks is a flag in the ground which represents perhaps the most interactive physics sandbox seen in VR to date, and a proof point that glimpses the immersive benefits which come from more realistic virtual interactions—something we expect to see developers expand on into 2020 and beyond.
Star Wars: Vader Immortal Successfully Brings Big IP Into VR
Image courtesy ILMxLAB
While the number of great VR games is steadily growing, only a small handful of titles so far have been based on major franchises, and of those that are, even fewer still have actually been made from the ground-up for VR.
Star Wars: Vader Immortal is shining example of bringing a massively popular intellectual property into VR in a way that feels authentic and enjoyable. It’s key to have major franchises jumping into the VR landscape to pique the interest of mainstream consumers who may not be interested in VR as a technology unto itself; it’s even more important that the execution of big IP in VR is done well so that new users don’t get a bad taste from their first experience.
On that note, Vader Immortal—which was released in three parts over the course of 2019—hits all the right notes. It’s engaging and easy to play, thanks to a focus on narrative and immersion, rather than raw gameplay, making it a great first-time VR experience; it’s also one of the most visually impressive games available on Quest. So it’s no wonder why we gave the game our 2019 Game of the Year Award for Quest.
While only a small handful of indie VR studios so far have found this sort of ongoing success, Superhot VR shows that, for projects of the right scope, there’s considerable (and growing) developer opportunity in VR.
Peering Into 2020
So, 2019 was a big year for VR in many ways, but what does 2020 hold? Here’s a few reason why we think 2020 will be VR’s biggest year yet.
Oculus Quest 2
Image courtesy Oculus
There’s no doubt that Facebook has been happy with the traction of its latest standalone VR headset, Oculus Quest. The company is moving quickly to build out the headset’s software features—like adding hand-tracking and PC support with Oculus Link—and it’s all but certain that Quest 2 is already in the works. The big question is when.
While Oculus’ history with the Rift would suggest that it would be several years from one headset to the next, VR as a market is much more defined today than it was back in 2016 when the first headsets hit the market. With the resources Facebook is pouring into Quest, we doubt there will be a similar three year span (like with Rift to Rift S) until the next Quest headset.
There’s reason to believe that Quest 2 will be announced in 2020. The biggest, perhaps, is that the current headset is based on a fairly old Snapdragon 835 processor which puts a pretty hard limit on what can be done with the headset by both Facebook and third-party developers. Moving to a more advanced hardware platform like, say, Qualcomm’s recently announced Snapdragon XR2, would open the door to substantial improvements. Of course, that’ll only happen if the price is right; Quest’s reasonable $400 price point is a big part of its appeal.
And then there’s Oculus Rift 2. Facebook launched its second PC headset, Rift S in early 2019, but it was a bit of a side-grade and cost-down to the original Rift rather than a true successor. In 2019 Facebook showed some very impressive prototype VR headsets with major advances in optics and form-factor, but has yet to announce Rift 2.
The prototype tech seems like it will form the foundation of Rift 2, but there’s a bigger question on our mind: will Quest 2 and Rift 2 be the same headset? This would be an ambitious move, but there’s already some hints that it’s the direction Facebook is headed.
Along with cross-buy between many Quest and Rift apps, Facebook is trying to unify its VR userbase to make a broader audience for developers. If every customer that owned an Oculus headset could play both standalone Quest content and PC-powered Rift content, that’s a huge win for the ecosystem.
Alternatively, rather than combining Quest 2 and Rift 2, Oculus could keep Quest as its lower-end product line while positioning Rift 2 as a piercer but higher-fidelity headset to compete for against Valve’s Index in the VR enthusiast space.
All Eyes on Half-Life: Alyx
Image courtesy Valve
There’s no doubt that the Half-Life: Alyx, the upcoming made-for-VR game from legendary developer Valve, is the most anticipated VR title of 2020. And it will have ramifications beyond the existing VR market; many mainstream gaming and tech publications which rarely (or effectively never) cover VR will be picking up the requisite headsets and hardware to take a good close look at the game when it launches. Half-Life: Alyx will be the biggest opportunity to date for VR to show mainstream gamers why it’s worthy of their attention.
Big Oculus Games on the Horizon
Image courtesy Ready at Dawn
After a string of not-so-great titles from Oculus Studios, Facebook’s first-party VR publisher, between 2017 and mid-2019, Asgard’s Wrath and Stormland ended the year as wins for the Oculus content library.
Oculus Studios also has placed big bets on several highly anticipated games set to launch in 2020: Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, Lone Echo II, and Phantom: Covert Ops. It remains to be seen whether these games will become key additions to the Oculus content lineup or go down in history as flops, but the outcome is important because Facebook is effectively the only company in town that’s funding big VR titles from third-party studios.
Beyond games, Facebook is also set to launch its brand new social VR platform, Facebook Horizon in 2020. Despite being one of the world’s leading social media companies, Facebook’s social VR strategy has been chaotic at best, but it looks like the company is finally trying to consolidate its efforts into a platform that’s more universally available across its biggest headsets in 2020.
Facebook Horizon | Image courtesy Facebook
Facebook Horizon will be the only first-party social VR application of its kind, and it has the potential to seriously shake up the social VR space which is currently dominated by third-party VR apps.
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What were your personal ‘most important moments’ in VR for 2019 and what are you looking forward to most in 2020? Drop us a line below!
Although Facebook Spaces was shut down in October, making way for the company’s next social VR platform, Horizon, Facebook is rolling out some big social changes that promise to make meeting, talking, and playing together on the Oculus platform a lot easier.
The catch? To benefit from these sweeping changes, you’ll have to sign into Oculus with a Facebook login, something the company says will keep Oculus VR users “safer at scale by backing social interactions with their Facebook identity.”
Not only that, but Facebook says it will eventually also require you to sign in to use existing social features such as joining parties, adding friends, and visiting other people’s Oculus Homes—things you can already do now with basic set of Oculus login credentials, which are critically not tied to your personal identity.
Image captured by Road to VR
Facebook first announced some of this back at OC6 in September, but here’s a quick breakdown for what’s happening to the Oculus platform now. Although you can still choose not to log in with Facebook on the Oculus platform, if you do, you’ll be able to:
Chat – message Oculus friends in or out of the headset with quick responses to hop into games together.
Join friends in VR with links – following a link, you can join friends from any device with links that open to where your friends are within an app, and see the most popular destinations where people are playing in VR (including Oculus and Facebook Messenger friends).
User-created Events – organize meetups or multiplayer games with friends.
Share photos, videos, and livestream to Facebook – share your favorite moments to Facebook Groups from VR.
Open Parties – no longer invite-only, you can now create open chats with all friends on your Oculus friends list.
The company’s basic reasoning behind all of this rests both on its ownership of the Oculus platform, and its integration of Facebook technology therein. It actually has more to do with privacy than you may think though.
Privacy Changes to Oculus
The company says that by logging in with your Facebook credentials that you’ll still be able to keep a separate Oculus username, profile, and your existing Oculus friends. You’ll also be able to choose whether you want to automatically add your Facebook friends to your Oculus friends list, and control who can see your real name on the platform. In addition, the company says you can choose what information you post to your Facebook profile or timeline, either by giving permission to post or by updating your privacy settings.
That’s a fair bit of control to keep you safe from other Oculus platform users, although it decidedly gives more power to Facebook to keep tabs on your activity—making for a bit of a ‘carrot and stick’ method that not only ties Oculus users to their physical identities, which is couched as a method to help combat online trolls and maintain platform-sanctioned decorum, but also makes sure Oculus users fully encapsulated by Facebook’s privacy policy, which in the age of VR is well… it’s getting pretty weird (we haven’t even begun to talk about user privacy when it comes to face or eye-tracking).
As it goes, Facebook is going to be using Oculus data to improve ad recommendations for users logged in with Facebook credentials. The company says it will use Oculus activity, including apps you use, to make this happen. Recommendations are said to range from suggesting Oculus Events, to adverts for VR apps sold on the Oculus Store. Facebook says these changes won’t affect third-party apps and games, and they won’t affect your on-device data.
Critically, Facebook maintains they won’t share data to “allow third parties to target advertisements to you based on your use of the Oculus Platform.” That doesn’t sound like Facebook is shutting off the avenue to third parties entirely though, but we haven’t had an opportunity to look at the updated privacy policy yet to confirm. We’ll update once we do.
Image courtesy Oculus
Of course, you don’t necessarily have to log in with a Facebook account to use an Oculus headset and play games on Rift or Quest, but the company has essentially made sure you’ll be missing out on these fairly basic (and long-promised) social tools if you don’t.
By condensing all of its first-party services together under a Facebook login, the company is ostensibly paving the way for more Facebook-built apps and social integrations, which ought to make for a much more attractive offering than simply putting up a Facebook account login wall on an app-by-app basis like it did prior to today for things like Oculus Venues and Facebook Spaces. This is poised to force new and old users alike to login with Facebook in order to have the ‘full Oculus experience’, and will likely put a greater emphasis on the company’s own social spaces, services, and whatever app Facebook wants to integrate next with much greater ease.
This generally comes as no surprise, as Facebook has continued to shuffle its remaining Oculus executives to positions deeper into the Facebook mothership, whilst at the same time promoting long-time Facebook execs into Oculus leadership positions. As it were, Oculus is no longer a company, but rather a division of Facebook; all five of the original Oculus co-founders have left Facebook entirely at this point, leaving little question as to where its ambitions lie when it comes to integrating the Oculus brand and further tying its users to the company’s social network.
As of October 25th, Facebook Spaces has been shut down to “make way” for the company’s next try at a social VR platform, Horizon. While Spaces didn’t catch on, it represented some of the company’s finest VR design work to date. Facebook would do well not to forget its lessons.
Spotted by UploadVR, this week marked the end for Facebook Spaces, the company’s attempt to bring the Facebook experience into social VR. A message on the official website makes clear that Horizon, which Facebook showed off last month, is the new social VR priority for the company.
While the platform didn’t achieve traction, it was one of the most thoughtfully designed VR projects to come from Facebook. Not to say that it did everything right; Facebook Spaces was in equal parts a great example of what to do and what not to do in social VR.
A Deeply Spatial Interface
While many VR applications are still struggling to get away from the dreaded laser-pointer interface, Facebook Spaces was built from the ground up for spatial interactions. Just about everything you do in the application happens with a combination of touching and grabbing things within arms reach. This is a great place to start for any social VR application because spatial interaction naturally lends itself to social interaction, in the form of exchanging and collaboratively interacting with meaningful objects.
Image courtesy Facebook
A spatial interface is that much richer when virtual objects are persistent and everyone can participate. Spaces encouraged this sort of interaction from the get-go by allowing anyone in the room to interact with the objects around them. Not only does this create a strong sense of social embodiment, but it’s also conducive to deeper emergent behaviors, like users drawing their own board games for everyone in the room to play.
A Meeting Place, Not a World
Photo courtesy Facebook
Many social VR applications try to do too much at once and lose focus on the value of simply communicating with someone you care about. Games like Rec Room are plenty of fun in their own right, but their complexity means they aren’t a great place to simply be face to face with another person—in the same way that a theme park is a much worse place for catching up with an old friend than a pub.
Facebook Spaces had the excellent idea of not building a world for people to explore, but instead focusing on discrete rooms with features built to facilitate genuine human communication. It did this by using the concept of a ‘table’; a table is a thing which people who know each other gather around, and atop which they share things that are meaningful to them.
The table concept wasn’t just a good social metaphor, it was also a useful design principle. Rather than popping into a big virtual world with miles to roam, Facebook Spaces puts you directly in a seat at the table. This achieves a few things, notably: automatically spacing users at a comfortable ‘social proximity’ while preventing them from accidentally getting uncomfortably close.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in other social VR applications and been engaged in a meaningful conversation only to have it interrupted by one of the participants accidentally teleporting 20 feet away (or worse, into my body). If the goal isn’t to explore a virtual world, but simply to facilitate meaningful communication between people, open-ended locomotion is nothing but a distraction and an invitation for immersion-breaking accidents which kill social momentum.
A Direct Line to the Outside World
Image courtesy Facebook
One of the absolute coolest parts of Facebook Spaces, and one which still has no equal, was the ability to initiate a Messenger video call to friends in the real world. You’d start a video call in VR and your friend would get a ring on their phone in. When they answered, they’d see your avatar and everything in your Facebook Spaces room, while you’d see them in RL through their camera. You could even pull the video window up to the virtual table and your friend could see everything and participate in the conversation.
It was an incredibly novel and interesting way to share VR and avoid a feeling of isolation; after all, if Facebook Spaces only allowed you to communicate with friends who owned a VR headset, it wouldn’t be very inclusive….
If It Isn’t Inclusive, It Isn’t Social
Photo courtesy Facebook
While the ability to video call friends in real life was a great way to make social VR feel open to everyone, this was betrayed by other choices which hampered the adoption of Spaces. One of the key lessons that Facebook needs to learn if it wants to build a genuine social VR platform, is that it needs to be inclusive of the entire VR sphere.
Facebook.com (the website/app) wouldn’t be any good if it was only available on Android phones or only available on Mac. No matter what phone, operating system, or browser you use, you can be part of Facebook.com; as more of your friends join a given social network, the more valuable it becomes to you (this is the ‘network effect’, and it’s a major reason why Facebook.com dominates the social network world.
If any company in the tech space should understand this, you’d think it would be Facebook. Yet Facebook Spaces was only available on Rift and Vive. That meant the platform excluded PlayStation VR and all of Facebook’s other headsets: Oculus Go, Quest, and Gear VR. This is part of a broader issue of social VR fragmentation which has plagued the company.
What’s more, the need to be ‘Facebook friends’ before interacting with anyone in Facebook Spaces stymied use-cases beyond communicating with those you were already connected to. If you wanted to have a meeting with a business acquaintance or a tutoring session with a teacher, both parties would need to be ok with friending each other on Facebook, and then use some other communication channel to facilitate the friending of participants. It was a clunky hassle and an unnecessary barrier to getting people together inside of what was otherwise a very thoughtfully designed space for social interaction.
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It’s my hope that whoever ultimately pulled the plug on Facebook Spaces didn’t just look at the lack of traction and say ‘this was a failure, let’s start from scratch’; there’s a ton of smart design here which would be an absolute shame to leave on the table. From what I’ve seen of Horizon—Facebook’s next attempt at a social VR platform—I don’t have much confidence that the learnings of Spaces will be put to much use, but I’ve certainly got my fingers crossed.
Late last week, Facebook Spaces officially shut down ahead of the launch of Facebook’s new social experience, Facebook Horizon, in 2020.
A statement now occupies the Facebook Spaces site, which informs users the app is no longer available as of October 25, 2019. The statement also notes that Facebook is “grateful to each and every one of you who joined us in the experience” and that they look forward to users joining them in Horizon next year.
Facebook Spaces was announced in 2017 and available on the Rift and the HTC Vive. However, it never made its way to the Oculus Quest, much like other Oculus services like Home and Rooms.
Horizon will be available on the Rift and the Quest, presumably with crossplay, in 2020, with a closed beta early in the year. Despite Horizon acting as Spaces’ replacement and successor, there is no word on HTC Vive support for Horizon and it seems unlikely that Horizon will support platforms outside of the Oculus ecosystem, at least for now.
