Category: Social VR

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The Vive Is Getting Its Own Social VR Experience Through WeChat Integration

The Vive Is Getting Its Own Social VR Experience Through WeChat Integration

Facebook released Spaces last week — a virtual reality social experience that lets you meet up with friends, make video calls and take selfies in VR. The app is exclusive to the Oculus Rift but the HTC Vive is about to get a similar experience of its own.

Today, Vive is announcing that it will be launching an integration that allows users to communicate with friends both in and out of VR through WeChat.

Through the integration, users will be able to create an avatar using selfies, receive WeChat messages in VR and respond to their friends without ever taking off the headset. You can also invite friends to join you in VR environments where you’ll have a digital selfie stick for taking and publishing pictures directly to your WeChat account. Sound familiar?

This functionality is very similar to that of Facebook Spaces. We now have two social VR experiences restricted to two separate social networks on two different platforms. Facebook has stated that it will “ideally” be bringing spaces to other headsets like the Vive in the future. The Vive WeChat integration was created by a third party company called ObEN which has not yet given word on any such compatibility updates.

ObEN was a member of the first Vive X class. Vive X is HTC’s in-house startup incubator that has given rise to notable VR companies such as TPCast. ObEN’s focus is on creating the avatars and interactions seen in the WeChat integration. For example, it created a custom voice-to-text program that allows in-VR users to reply to outside text messages by holding a Vive controller to their mouth. ObEN also built the avatar creation system.

WeChat doesn’t have the most notable reputation here in the west, but its popularity overseas is massive. At last count, WeChat had over 1 billion registered accounts with around 800 million daily active users. Most of this activity is happening in China where the app is known as Weixin. By integrating directly with WeChat, Vive aims to further cement a significant presence in the Chinese market.

According to HTC, ObEN’s WeChat integration for Vive will be available “later this year” via Viveport.

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Live Comedy Show ‘Comedy Living Room’ Coming to Altspace Thursday

Comedy Living Room, the stand-up comedy show created by Matt Lottman and Frank Chad Muniz (and literally held in a living room), is hosting its first show in VR on Thursday, April 27th at 5pm PT. The collaboration between Comedy Living Room, comedy group JASH, and social VR app AltspaceVR will feature six comedians and a “house party complete with pool, BBQ and endless Frisbee”.

Starting in Lottman and Muniz’ living room in 2012 as an open mic with friends, the show became a recognised venue in the LA comedy scene, and has since expanded to different locations, such as the RIOT LA festival, SXSW in Austin, and a monthly residency at The Hollywood Improv.

But now that the landlady has sold the house where it all started, CLR has turned to VR, or specifically, AltspaceVR, a social VR platform which established itself on early Samsung, Oculus, and HTC headsets back in 2015, and now supports all major VR hardware including Daydream.

JASH, the comedy community founded by Michael Cera, Tim & Eric, Sarah Silverman, and Reggie Watts, has collaborated with AltspaceVR to bring stand-up comedy to VR since 2015, and The Comedy Living Room in VR (CLRVR) is its latest event.

Six performers hitting the virtual stage are:

  • Paul Scheer – star of FX’s The League, regular on ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat
  • Drennon Davis – Seeso regular and one of LA Weekly’s Top 10 Comedians to Watch
  • Jay Larson – The Late Late Show performer and co-host of Best Bars in America by Esquire Network
  • Justin Martindale – Laugh Factory regular and co-creator of Funny or Die’s “Not Looking”
  • Daniel Van Kirk – Funny man and Upright Citizens Brigade regular
  • Paige Weldon – Stand up pro and co-founder of online comedy magazine The Higgs Weldon

The use official CLRVR show page to join the event on Thursday, April 27th at 5pm PT. Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Gear VR, Daydream, and PC are supported.

The post Live Comedy Show ‘Comedy Living Room’ Coming to Altspace Thursday appeared first on Road to VR.

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Vive Users Can Join Rift Friends in ‘Facebook Spaces’ With Revive Hack

It appears that Revive is already compatible with the Facebook’s new social VR app, Facebook Spaces. Revive is a popular free hack that allows Oculus content to be played on HTC Vive system.

Launched today at Facebook’s F8 opening conference, the social network’s first social VR app is available on the Early Access section of the Oculus Store. While the interface is clearly intended for Oculus Touch controllers, it is possible to launch and operate the app with an HTC Vive headset and its motion controllers.

Facebook Spaces allows you to connect with friends inside and outside of VR with Messenger video calling, draw freeform objects in 3D, share media together, and more. Check out some of these features in action.

With Revive installed, the SteamVR launcher will show Facebook Spaces in the list of Oculus apps. Once loaded, it appears mostly functional, but the virtual hands feel a bit ‘detached’ as they were designed for use with Touch controllers; some of the virtual buttons placed on the back of the wrists can be a little awkward to press without accidentally knocking your Vive controllers together. Plus, the whole grab-and-drag interface doesn’t work as intuitively due to the somewhat compromised emulation of Touch controller functionality on the Vive inputs. I had some issues with the tutorial section of the app bugging out, but it wasn’t clear if this was cause by the Revive hack or the beta status of Facebook Spaces.

Considering Facebook’s software is in beta, and Revive hasn’t been optimised for this particular app, this is a promising start and should only improve from here. And one day, if Facebook plans to make VR truly social, we expect to see official support for the HTC Vive on Facebook Spaces.

The post Vive Users Can Join Rift Friends in ‘Facebook Spaces’ With Revive Hack appeared first on Road to VR.

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Facebook Launches Social VR App ‘Facebook Spaces’ in Beta for Rift

On stage at Facebook’s F8 conference this morning, CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the company will today launch their first social VR application.

Back in October, Facebook Social VR Product Manager Mike Booth said that the company intended to launch their social VR application “as soon as possible” and it seems he wasn’t joking.

On stage at F8 today, the company announced the launch of Facebook Spaces in beta for Oculus Rift and Touch. The app is available now on the Oculus store.

Facebook has given a glimpse at their work on their social VR application over the last year. When the company first introduced the application, they showed things like avatar customization and virtual selfie uploading. More recently the company showed further development which completely overhauled their approach to avatars in social VR, and showed an impressive ability to make video calls from within VR to the outside world.

Now the company has launched their latest build of the social VR app in beta for the Oculus Rift.

This new VR app takes some of the best features of Facebook and brings them into your VR space. Spend time with friends and family like you’re really there, step inside 360 videos, draw and play with Touch, and more. The beta launches today for Rift—don’t miss it on the Oculus Store.

The app also launches with the Messenger video chat option, to make video calls to people between Facebook Spaces in VR and the real world.

Facebook says that when it comes to building your avatar, the company is using computer vision to suggest customization potions based on your Facebook profile picture.

The post Facebook Launches Social VR App ‘Facebook Spaces’ in Beta for Rift appeared first on Road to VR.

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Why Social VR Probably Won’t Work the Way Social VR Developers Think

Why Social VR Probably Won’t Work the Way Social VR Developers Think

“Social VR” is rapidly building buzzword momentum in our industry, fueled by the many multi-user VR platforms recently launched or soon to go into open beta. To name just a few, there’s Valve’s Destinations, AltSpaceVR, Sansar from Second Life creator Linden Lab, and High Fidelity from Second Life founder Philip Rosedale. Hovering above them all, of course, is Facebook’s own upcoming social VR platform.

All of them, however, labor under a couple mistaken assumptions which are likely to limit their appeal. We saw similar mistakes occur a decade ago, when Second Life and other virtual worlds were all the rage in Silicon Valley and the mainstream media, but quickly lost their appeal when users failed to show up. This time, however, it’s not too late for us to make some quick course corrections.

High Excitement, Few Users

Implicit in most social VR platforms is the assumption that a mass market for virtual reality headsets is coming soon. As regular UploadVR readers know, however, expectations have fallen far short: Real-Time VR in a Time-Shifting, Cross-Platform Ecosystem

Social VR arrives in the market at a time when broadband and mobile devices have totally remade our model of media consumption. Where it was once appointment-based, in which families and friends would regularly meet in person whenever their favorite TV show was on, we largely use DVRs and streaming services to time shift. Where content consumption was once built around passive, location-dependent contexts — think movie theaters, living room televisions — we now place-shift, carrying our content wherever our smartphones and tablets can accompany us. As this change took root, social media took the place of TV viewing parties. Instead of taking the time to watch our favorite show together with friends, we now share our viewing experience on Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat.

Combine these two trends — slow growth of VR, plus time/place-shifting of content consumption — and you can see that social VR as it is typically conceived confronts a near-insurmountable adoption hurdle. Facebook and other VR developers are asking consumers to invest a fair amount of money and quite a lot of time on a platform most of their friends still don’t use (since most of them don’t even own a virtual reality device) which also runs counter to every content consumption convenience they’ve enjoyed for the last 7-10 years.

This will be a key challenge for VR apps I don’t mean to suggest that social VR is doomed, however — just that developers should reimagine what it means to be both social and VR at the same time.

Social VR Must Be Truly Social

I believe the way forward is thinking about social VR embedded in a larger social experience that transcends VR. Or to put it another way: Once one of your friends puts on a VR headset, what do the rest of you do? We’ve all seen YouTube videos of people at parties laughing their heads off while one friend in VR flails around, trying to hit unseen zombies. Enjoyable to be sure, but the novelty of one person in VR while everyone else watches soon wears off. This highlights the greater challenge: Creating social experiences for virtual reality when the vast majority of consumers still devote most of their online screentime to the devices in their hands or on their lap — not strapped to their face.

Some enthusiasts have predicted that VR will soon be embraced by consumers with as much fervor as smartphones. This may one day be true, but the analogy misses an important distinction: Smartphones were and are still phones, capable of connecting with feature phones of a previous era, and the landline phones of an even earlier era. Smartphones have succeeded because for all their powerful features, they also maintain a direct connection to the platforms which came before them. To have any chance at succeeding in a similar fashion, virtual reality developers must devote themselves not just to creating powerful 3D experiences, but also powerful bridges to decades of 2D content, the devices they were built for — and just as key, the people still connected to them.

This is a guest post on UploadVR not produced by the core editorial team.

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