Social spaces are important for the virtual reality (VR) community as it continues to grow and develop, and those spaces and tools need to be developed to suit their needs. To address this growth in demand, Oculus has announced new features that will soon be heading to Oculus Home.
The Rift Core 2.0 beta was originally announced at GDC 2018 and is intended to make Oculus Home and more social, friendly and inspiring place to be.
For decades, the idea of a social videogame experience involved hanging out on a sofa, discussing what to play next and then loading the selected title for some multiplayer fun. Oculus are now bringing that feeling into VR with the Synchronous Social feature. This lets users hang out in the same virtual space.
Users will be able to look through each others’ videogame libraries, and even launch directly into a multiplayer experience, such as Echo Arena, without leaving Oculus Home. Developers can also integrate multiplayer apps and experiences by using the Coordinated App Launch feature.
The Oculus Team are currently in the process of stress-testing the infrastructure ready to incorporate this new feature.
When Oculus Home got its relaunch, several users were enthused by the ability to redesign the space and give it the look they preferred. This is now being taken a step further by allowing users to import custom-made assets into the VR space. 3D sculpts made in Oculus Medium will be able to be imported for inclusion in the user’s Home inventory.
The feature will allow assets using the GLB format to be imported, such as those used in Facebook’s 3D Posts in the News Feed. Oculus demonstrated the feature by showing how a bust of Rift Engineering Director Ross O’Dwyer could be placed in a Home space.
Further details can be found on the Oculus blog. As always, VRFocus will continue to keep you up to date on new Oculus Rift developments.
via Mint VR