While Oculus Quest was devoid of any of Facebook’s social VR applications at launch, Oculus Venues is finally available for the headset. That means that, for the first time, Quest users will have a first-party social experience in which they can also connect to Oculus Go and Gear VR users (but not Rift).
I wrote previously about the fragmented nature of Facebook’s social VR strategy: between four separate apps from the company, not a single one actually supports the entire ecosystem of Oculus headsets. While that’s still the case, the situation has gotten slightly better with today’s launch of Oculus Venues on Quest.
Oculus Venues lets users get together in virtual stadium seating to watch scheduled and sometimes live content like sporting events, stand up comedy, and concerts. It’s the first of Facebook’s social VR apps to come to Quest, and that means that Quest users finally have a first-party means of getting together with friends using Oculus Go or Gear VR. Rift users, unfortunately, are still left out.
Oculus recently announced the launch of Oculus Venues on Quest, and previewed some of the upcoming events headed to the virtual venue this Summer: on July 24th at 5PM PT [your timezone here] you can catch Liverpool vs. Sporting CP at Yankee Stadium live, as well as Tenacious D’s rock opera ‘Post-Apocalypto’ on July 31st. The company is promising more to come.
We’re glad to see another headset supported by Oculus Venues, but Facebook’s social VR play is still in an iffy place that deeply fails to leverage ‘Oculus’ as a connected ecosystem of VR users as opposed to a logo on five different headsets. In the meantime, third-party apps like Bigscreen actually do offer a singular place where users of almost any headset (Oculus or not) can be social together in VR.
