VR is in many ways awesome, but still in many ways lacking. Ease-of-use, especially when it comes to playing in VR with friends, is presently a huge pain point for the experience. Oculus’ solution to that pain point—announced more than seven months ago—launched on Gear VR where it was welcomed with open arms. Bizarrely, the same features remain painfully absent from Rift, Oculus’ high-end VR platform, especially in the face of major improvements to multiplayer VR gaming on SteamVR. Nate Mitchell, Head of Rift at Oculus, offers an update on the fate of Rooms and Parties on the Rift.
Rooms & Parties
Announced at the end of 2016, Oculus Rooms and Parties are a new app and a new feature designed to fix perhaps the most frustrating problem with multiplayer Rift gaming: finding your Oculus friends in VR. Once you actually get into the same game and match together, multiplayer on Rift is usually pretty great, but getting to that point is a frustrating challenge because once you don the headset you lose easy access to most of your usual digital communication tools like messaging and VOIP apps.
The Rooms app was designed as a universal pre-game lobby for Oculus where friends could find each other, discuss what they wanted to do in VR, and launch into that experience together. Importantly, it also gives players something to do while they wait for friends to arrive, instead of just sitting around with a headset and peeking out the corner to check their phone for messages from said friends.
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Source: RoadToVR