"It's cool to 'meet' someone who's literally all the way from somewhere else in the world," he said. "We both believe that VR will be best when people connect human experiences." But to get there, you have to take baby steps, which is what Rooms and Parties represent. It's what we all hope it can be," said Muthukumar. "That's the aspirational push-the-envelope of VR. Still, that's where Oculus also wants to be. Right now, Oculus' social efforts are completely separate from the social VR experience we saw from Facebook, where you could "travel" to locations together and take virtual selfies with your pals. "You can hang out, watch videos together, play games and talk with your friends." Additionally, if you get tired of the virtual avatars, you can also have the entire Party leap into a multiplayer game together, as long as the title supports it. "We want you to feel like being in VR is sort of the same as being in real life," said Muthukumar. Oculus has experimented with social experiences before, like Oculus Video, which allows people to watch movies together. It seems odd to say this, but just those simple head and mouth movements made me feel like we were right there in the room together, even though we were in completely separate locations.
Similarly, the mouth movement is synced to the sound the software picks up from the microphone. LeBeau tells me that the avatar movement mimics what you're doing with your own head, thanks to the accelerometers and gyroscopes in the phone. They would look directly at me as they were speaking to me, and their mouths moved in sync to what they were saying. What I found particularly interesting is that the virtual avatars moved around as they spoke. You can also teleport from one area to another by selecting it with your gaze and tapping the headset's touchpad.
In front of each avatar is a floating tablet of sorts, which essentially acts as your controls. The tabletop area is where you play simple board or card games, and there's yet another space dedicated to just sitting around and chatting. In one you can change the appearance of your avatars in another, you can watch videos together. The virtual Room is separated into a few different areas. Before I knew it, I was hanging out with virtual avatars for both LeBeau and Muthukumar, and I, too, was an avatar. As soon as I accepted, I was transported to a virtual living room of sorts. I was invited to a Room by Mike LeBeau, a product manager for Oculus who was in London at the time. If that's the case, you can join a Room right from the Parties interface. Once you have your Party all set up, maybe you want to "see" and interact with your friends instead of just hearing their voices. Right now you're only able to chat with up to four people, though Oculus might increase that number in the future.īut while Parties is like making a phone call, Rooms is akin to inviting your buddies over. "Think of it like a phone call," said Madhu Muthukumar, a product manager for Oculus. To start chatting, tap the Party tab, choose who you want to add and then hit "Start a Party." If you're invited to a party, joining is also as simple as tapping a button. You can also see the title of the game they're playing, if any. It looks very much like any other social-chat app you can see a list of your friends as well as who's online at the time. Once I put the headset on and launched into the Oculus Home screen, the Parties interface appeared on the right. I had the opportunity to try out both features earlier this week in a short demo in San Francisco.
Combined, Parties and Rooms are part of Oculus' continued efforts to prove that virtual reality can be used not just to play games, but also to connect people around the world. Today, those features are finally live, at least for the Gear VR Rift users will have to wait until 2017. Parties is basically built-in voice chat, while Rooms is a virtual hangout space. A few months ago at Oculus' annual developer conference, the company announced a couple of social VR features known simply as Parties and Rooms.