Remember that friends list you made back when you got your Samsung Gear VR or Oculus Rift? Yeah. It’s been pretty useless. Today Oculus announced that they’ll soon be turning on social with the help of two new social app functions.
Lauren Vegter, Oculus platform product manager, took the stage today at Oculus Connect to introduce Parties—allowing you to chat with friends on your friend’s list, and Rooms—a social VR hangout for up to 8 people.
While Parties allows you to message and connect up to 8 people for a voice chat, the real feature is Rooms which allows those 8 friends to watch video together (provided by Facebook), listen to music, and and play social mini-games.
playing mini-games in Oculus Rooms
From there, you can gather around an app launcher in Oculus Rooms so everyone can get into the same game or experience at the same time. Oculus is offering developers the coordinated app launch API so they can integrate it into their multiplayer games and experiences.
Vegter reports that both Parties and Rooms will be coming to Gear VR in a few weeks, and to Oculus Rift in early 2017. It’s unsure at this time what will become of Oculus Social beta.
Facebook is plugging away on creating their perfect VR app that promises to integrate the social platform into 3D virtual worlds. Last we saw of the prototype in April that introduced a number of features, all of which hinge on Touch, the natural input controller from Oculus.
Demoed on stage by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, he and a pair of colleagues went through a number of virtual worlds, some with static 360 images including an undersea environment, the Connect stage itself and even Mars.
Avatars in the updated build are more lifelike, and emote more based on audio cues from the user. Zuckerberg joked to the crowd: “why did you make me look like a young Justin Timberlake?”
Receiving a call, Zuckerberg then showed off the newest function added to the budding social VR app, a live call feature over Facebook messenger that lets you take video calls while inside VR.
Taking a selfie using a VR selfie stick, the group then thumbed through photos, deciding which one to post to Zuckerberg’s Facebook timeline. Showing off the tactility of Touch, which allows for finer hand presence, the three played cards, chess and fought with swords.
There’s no definite release date for the Facebook-enabled social app, but with Oculus turning on social to their platform soon, you can bet it will be sooner rather than later.
Mark Zuckerberg promised something new for today’s Oculus Connect 3 keynote and he didn’t disappoint; Facebook revealed new social features for the Oculus Rift.
The CEO of the social networking company took to the stage at the start of the highlight of the annual developer conference in San Jose to reveal the software. Revealed was what looks like a pretty impressive update to the social VR features demonstrated at the company’s F8 conference earlier this year. He demoed it with two colleagues, all of whom were using the Rift and pairs of Oculus Touch controllers.
Impressively detailed avatars met in 360 degree environments, their facial animations would change based on the expression in their voice and they could travel to other destinations. Riffing somewhat on the Oculus Toybox demo, they’d play with cards and even used magic marker-style pens to draw swords which they could then hold and pretend to fight with.
Facebook messenger was also accessible in the software with live video calls.
VRChat, a social VR platform that allows users to create, publish, and explore VR worlds, have announced a $1.2 million seed investment round. Investors include HTC, Rothenberg Ventures, GREE VR Capital, and Brightstone Venture Capital.
Supporting Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, VRChat currently offers over 200 user-created worlds, everything from simple environments to some of the most complex creations currently in social VR. Unlike ready-made social platforms though that feature limited avatar selections and only a few virtual spaces, VRChat maintains a DIY vibe that tends to attract more of a Maker crowd. In fact, if you know your way around the Unity game engine, you can even design your own custom avatar and virtual environment from the ground up and share it with everyone.
VRChat most notably features a weekly round table discussion called Gunter’s Universe—something of a live podcast which regularly hosts devs, industry professionals, and fellow VR enthusiasts.
Gunter’s Universe
“We offer users one application with infinite social VR experiences. We empower users to create their own social VR experience, where users have the freedom to easily create their own avatars, worlds, hangouts and games, and then explore that content with their friends. We’re working hard to build that platform, and this capital helps us get there faster,” said Graham Gaylor, Founder/CEO of VRChat. “We’re excited to have a syndicate of partners on board that provide us with not only capital, but also vast strategic experience in the VR ecosystem.”
VRChat says financing will be used to fund the platform’s continued expansion and for further investment in product development, with more hardware integrations planned throughout 2017.
Connect, Oculus’s annual developer conference, is already in full swing, but if you didn’t manage to book the flight and hotel to San Jose, CA, you can still pop your head in to see what this year’s hubbub is about.
Oculus Touch, the company’s unreleased natural input controller, still doesn’t have an official release date, and we’re expecting a data dump of games, features, and everything else Touch-related at this year’s opening keynote. While you can technically watch it live on the Oculus Twitch Channel, there’s no better way to feel like you’re in the future than by watching a presentation about new VR tech while in VR. Below the steaming schedule are a few ways you can go about it:
Opening Keynote
Thursday, October 6th 10am PT (your local time)
Closing Keynote with John Carmack
Friday, October 7th from 1:30pm PT (your local time)
NextVR – Immersive Video
NextVR, the immersive video creation and streaming platform, have been covering live events including NBA basketball, boxing, NASCAR, and even the Democratic Primaries—all in 3D 180-degree video.
The company has exclusively partnered with Oculus to bring both opening and closing keynotes (attention Carmack fans) to their livestreaming Gear VR 360 video app. Make sure to download the free app first and you can get the front row seat your wallet never seems to let you afford.
AltspaceVR – Social Viewing
Watching a video on one of the many virtual monitors in AltspaceVR may seem silly, but really it’s no more silly than watching a giant TV with a group of people, except your new buddies are from Timbuktu, Transnistria, or Tasmania (low latency Internet speeds permitting). Because AltspaceVR supports a host of devices including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Gear VR, and traditional monitors, you’re bound to bump into someone worth chatting to.
AltspaceVR will be hosting their own viewing party of everything you can watch through the Oculus Twitch channel, except, you know, not alone.
Bigscreen – Cosy Multitasking
Maybe you’re not into the bigger social scenes like AltspaceVR, but prefer to vegetate on a virtual couch with people you know. Bigscreenlets you play your favorite games, browse the Internet, and watch anything you can watch on a standard monitor; all on a sizeable, shareable virtual monitor that lets you and all your friends see what you’re watching.
Private or Public rooms are available for multiplayer, supporting 1-4 people, so you could technically have 4 different monitors in play, one with the Twitch livestream, and the other three playing Rocket League or whatever else you while away the hours with.
Bigscreen supports both Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, including each system’s respective controllers, and can be found on Steam or Oculus Home.
So there you have it. You can watch alone, in a crowd, or with your trusted friends—and on almost any headset. And if you don’t believe me on the benefit of watching keynote speeches in social VR spaces, I’d like to submit the following as evidence:
Oculus Connect 3 day one is in full swing, but everyone’s really looking forward to tomorrow. That’s when the VR specialist hosts its anticipated keynote speech. We’re not sure exactly what Oculus will talk about during the show, but we do know one famous face will be there.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of social networking giant and Oculus parent company Facebook, today confirmed that he’ll be at the keynote to “demo something new” that the team has been building for VR. His below Facebook message was accompanied by an image of both himself and Product Manager of Social VR, Michael Booth wearing Oculus Rifts and using the company’s upcoming position tracked controllers, Oculus Touch. Is Facebook about to go big with its first social VR app?
You can trace the clues of what the company might be revealing tomorrow back to earlier this year at its own F8 developer conference. During an on-stage presentation the VR team teased a multi-user experience in which people travel led between different 360 degree photos. The demo also used Oculus Touch controllers, and users’ avatars appeared to be practically identical to those seen in the Oculus Toybox demo from last year.
Friends could warp between pictures by producing orbs and bringing them to their heads. They could also take their own pictures from inside the environment and then post them to Facebook itself through a virtual mailbox of sorts. It’s clear Facebook has big plans for this sort of application of VR – why else would a social networking site spend $2 billion on a headset? – and it sounds like Oculus Connect 3 could be where we next get a good look at like.
Last week we asked five questions we expected to be answered at the event and, sure enough, social VR was among them. It remains to be seen if we’ll still get more insight on other topics like inside out tracking.
Connect’s keynote speech gets underway at 10:00 am tomorrow. We’ll be bringing you all of the latest updates from it.
I took a short break during my time at PAX West this year to checkout VREAL’s new streaming platform at their office in downtown Seattle. At the office, I strapped on a Vive and jumped into VREAL’s virtual lobby with a couple of others to try things out. After a quick tutorial on how teleportation and avatar controls worked, we moved our characters over to a small floating island depicting a scene from Cloudlands VR Minigolf and teleported in to launch the game.
As a spectator, I was able to teleport around the golf course and view the action from wherever I decided to point my headset. Cloudlands already supported multiplayer so that concept wasn’t particularly ground-breaking by itself, but the important part is that VREAL says this same experience can be viewed by an endless audience of viewers in VR.
After the golf demo we went back to the lobby and then hopped into a tower defense game. In this game I was able to see some of the neat perspective features that VREAL offers developers. Depending on where in the map I teleported, the scale of the entire scene would change to fit the action. Teleporting near the lanes brought me down to a frontline perspective while teleporting away towards the edges brought me back up to a more strategic overview perspective.
During the demo, I was also introduced to VREAL’s new virtual camera feature. By placing virtual cameras in the world, VREAL streamers can broadcast their gameplay from a fixed point of view. So while I was viewing from within a Vive, people in the lobby were watching on a 2D screen, but without the shaky perspective view that most streamers are currently stuck with.
After the demo, I sat down with VREAL CEO, Todd Hooper, to ask some quick developer-oriented questions about their platform.
Todd Hooper, CEO at VREAL
Road to VR: What is the performance impact to the streamer? Todd Hooper: Most of the VREAL tech actually runs on the CPU, not the GPU. We have not seen a massive performance hit on games. It seems to be in the region of a couple percent. Basically we are capturing the game state and sending up to the cloud so that’s not something that touches the GPU at all. Most games are GPU-bound not CPU-bound so so far that hasn’t been a challenge.
Road to VR: How does a developer make a game work with VREAL? Todd Hooper: We have an SDK for Unity and Unreal 4. When we identify a developer that we want on the platform we give them the SDK. Our goal is to be able to have VREAL up and running for them in a day. We are not there yet, but for the beta at the end of the year, we should be able to get a new developer up and running on the SDK pretty quickly. It’s one of the design considerations for the system because there’s lots of ways you might be able to build something like this but would require the developer to do a lot of work. If you can’t get developers on board a system like this fairly quickly, it’s going to be challenging to get a lot of traction.
Road to VR: How would an interested developer get started? Todd Hooper: We are happy to talk to all VR developers so visit our website, there is an address for the developer relations team there or hit us up on twitter, we’ve got a full time team that is talking to developers. We’ve had a lot of interested developers. I think they’ve seen that a way to stream VR games now doesn’t really exist, you just stream the headset. Once developers have that streaming experience they get really passionate about it.
Road to VR: How many developers are on the platform so far? Todd Hooper: We haven’t announced any of the titles yet. We are going to be announcing titles at the end of the year.
Road to VR: What platforms will VREAL support? Todd Hooper: The Vive and the Rift are the launch platforms. We are Sony partner and will be talking more about Sony later. We also have a way to do 360 video capture so you can render that and consume it on a mobile VR device as well.
