Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Socialize from the comfort of your couch with Rooms 1.2 on Gear VR

By

oculus rooms for gear vr
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Last year, in an effort to introduce even more people to social VR experiences, Oculus began to roll out support for its highly anticipated Rooms and Parties features to the Gear VR. First introduced at the Oculus Connect event earlier in 2016, Oculus Rooms and Parties were said to be coming to the Rift headset in 2017, and now, Oculus had made good on that promise.

With the first iteration of Oculus Rooms, you could join your friends in VR and watch movies (and cat videos) together from anywhere in the world. Well, anywhere with an internet connection, at least. Using a Gear VR setup, you could share spaces with friends, interact, hang out, and even stream live from VR.

Recommended Videos

“The first wave of VR was all about the magic of presence, the immersive sense of actually being inside a virtual space. The next step is to let you feel that same sense of presence with other people in VR,” said the Oculus Team.

But this week, the company has launched Rooms 1.2, which allows you to do even more with your friends and family members in virtual reality, as well as Oculus Events, which lets you organize your experiences. With Rooms 1.2, VR enthusiasts can now watch 360-degree content with a wider community. Thanks to the “collective viewing dome,” which can be found in the middle of any shared environment, you and your friends can watch 360-degree videos on Facebook together.

Also receiving an update is the search function for Oculus Rooms. Beginning this week, you can search for Facebook content using naught but your voice. With a new feature being dubbed Oculus Speech Recognition, your speech becomes your key to just about everything within Oculus.

The VR company’s parent company Facebook also had an announcement last week, noting that it’ll soon be rolling out VR Facebook Livestreaming by way of the Gear VR headset. Over the course of the next few weeks, your Gear VR software will add a “Livestream to Facebook” option, allowing you to share VR games directly over the social network.

Of course, there’s also the Parties feature, which hit the Gear VR last year. Using the new functionality, you’ll be able to make voice calls from VR, and even join each other in compatible multiplayer VR games like Dragon Front and Drop Dead.

There’s not much to the Parties functionality, aside from Rooms and a few games, but as Oculus is fond of pointing out, this is just the beginning. We’re still in the era of silent film when it comes to virtual reality, and with competition between the Rift and HTC Vive heating up, 2017 is poised to be the year of VR.

“This is just the beginning of social VR. We’ll continue building fun ways to share presence and take social interactions in VR to a whole new level,” the release from the Oculus Team reads.

Article first published in December 2016. Updated on 03-12-2017 by Lulu Chang: Added updates about Oculus Rooms, Events, and Facebook livestreaming. 

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Jayce Wagner
Jayce Wagner
Former Digital Trends Contributor
A staff writer for the Computing section, Jayce covers a little bit of everything -- hardware, gaming, and occasionally VR.
The Vive Focus Vision is a premium VR headset that’s actually made for gamers
HTC Vive Focus Vision is designed for location-based VR and PC VR gaming.

Most XR and VR headsets these days want to be about everything except gaming, despite it being the largest demographic for headset buyers. Well, no longer. HTC Vive just launched a new VR headset called the Focus Vision, and it's being explicitly targeted at PC gamers.

While it shares a name with Apple’s Vision Pro, HTC is targeting different markets such as PC VR gamers, in addition to location-based VR venues and enterprise users.

Read more
Apple may have stealthily confirmed the new Mac mini
The Mac mini on a wooden table.

With the Apple iPhone event now behind us, we are still waiting for official news about new Macs. We recently reported on the slew of Macs that are most likely on the way, but Apple's been silent on the matter -- until now. A stealthy line of code in the new macOS Sequoia update reveals that a new Mac mini might be in the works, and the confirmation fits right in with previous reports.

Let's start with some context. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is readying a new Mac mini with the M4 and the M4 Pro chip. Aside from the chip upgrade, the 2024 Mac mini is said to be redesigned to be smaller than ever before, marking the first major change in the design of the mini PC in many years. It's said to be around the same size as an Apple TV set-top box. To that end, we've heard that Apple might remove all of the USB-A ports on the Mac mini in an effort to make the PC even thinner.

Read more
Final Fantasy 16 has problems on PC — but this free mod fixes them
Clive fighting an enemy in Final Fantasy 16.

After more than a year, Final Fantasy 16 is available on PC, but it isn't off to the best start. Although the game is sitting at a Very Positive rating on Steam, several of the reviews take into an account an unofficial mod for the game that fixes various aspects of the PC port. It's called FFXVIFix, and you can download it for free on GitHub.

The big fix included in the mod is that it disbales the 30 frames per second (fps) cap that the game places on cutscenes and photo mode. It was something we noticed in our first look at the game on PC earlier this month. The game doesn't apply the 30 fps cap universally, creating a jarring experience as you bounce through a series of cutscenes early on in the game. With this fix, you don't have to worry about that.

Read more