This week Oculus released a platform update to its Rift headset for those who are fans of social VR and hope to host VR house parties in the future for their friends.
On the Oculus blog, they wrote:
“It’s a little early for spring cleaning, but now’s the perfect time to get your Oculus Home ready for visitors. Today, your personal space in virtual reality gets even better with the Public Homes beta, a new way to open your Home to visitors and the best way to explore unique Homes from the broader Rift community”
The new Facebook live-streaming and Public Homes feature allows Rift users to invite other users into their virtual homes and live-stream it while they attend. The livestreaming to Facebook is no surprise since Facebook owns Oculus.
Currently, users are able to join Oculus’s Public Test Channel to set their Oculus Home to “public”, opening up their Homes to the Rift community. Oculus stresses that this is still in Beta, and that software issues at this time should still be expected.
Oculus home has already been around for some time now, but it was largely only available for the private owner.
This new public feature will still have safety and privacy tools. As host you have complete control of the guest list; reporting abusive behavior, muting visitors, and disabling the “public” option at any time.
The official release of these new features will be planned for “later this month“, but the beta option is available now.