Oculus goes social with new features for Gear VR. Now you can play games and share content with Facebook friends in VR.
Oculus just announced a slew of social VR features that will be available to anyone with a Samsung Gear VR powered by Oculus.
Starting Thursday 3/10, you will be able to create a profile and search for friends on the Oculus platform, either by their real name or Oculus username.
Social Gaming
Oculus will also be rolling out made-for-VR games to Gear VR that let you team up with friends or compete against people from all over the world.
A teaser image of the Oculus team was shared of them hanging out in a room (above) playing a new game created by Oculus called Social Trivia, which lets you and up to four friends compete in a battle of knowledge. Social Trivia will be available in the Concepts section of the Oculus Store.
Oculus Social, which you may remember when the VRScout team hosted karaoke nights in the social chatroom, will be updated with the ability to create rooms with friends. So you will be able to watch Twitch or Vimeo streams in a private room with your close friends.
Band together with friends in Herobound: Gladiators.
Herobound: Gladiators, which is already available on the Oculus Store, is being released as a multiplayer adventure game. You will be able to band together with up to four people to conquer goblins and demons in arena battlefields and use integrated voice chat to talk and strategize in real time for co-op action.
Also, starting tomorrow, you can leave user reviews for all apps on the Oculus Store which should help with sorting and discovering new Gear VR content.
Personalized Facebook Integration
Oculus, which is owned by Facebook, is also unleashing a couple new Facebook integrations for your VR experience.
A new Facebook Videos tab will be added to Oculus Video, and starting next week, you’ll be able to connect your Facebook account with Oculus Video to personalize your 360 video feed based on the pages and people you follow.
Like and share VR content on Facebook.
Oculus also shared that in the coming weeks, you’ll be able to like and share your favorite Facebook 360 videos from within VR. In the image above you can see an ability to also “like” a post and even react to it with Facebook’s reaction emojis.
Later this month, Oculus will release new tools for developers that make it even easier to create more incredible social VR games and apps.
