Facebook’s acquisition of recent VR pioneer Oculus has always been a mind-boggling one. So naturally, the social media giant wants to go away its imprint on anything which will be remotely tied to being social, including in virtual worlds. That said, it’s taking a while for Oculus to feature those social features to its Quest platform, but it’s finally taking an enormous breakthrough within the latest software update that creates it almost trivial to urge alongside friends or strangers in multiplayer VR experiences.
Most computer game games and apps are naturally geared towards a solo player, primarily due to how VR systems work. That said, there’s also a growing number of experiences that are better played with others, competitively or cooperatively. However, getting others to play an equivalent game has always been a chore with Oculus, but that’s thankfully changing for the higher.
Oculus Quest owners will have two ways to ask others to play with them. First, they will do so right inside a VR app that supports the invite system, allowing them to select who to ask from right inside the VR world. Alternatively, they could find it more convenient to invite links from the iOS or Android mobile app that they will send to friends and strangers through the standard social networking and messaging channels.
Although it’s been quite seven years since Facebook acquired Oculus, it had been only earlier this year that Facebook pushed its Messenger chat platform to its VR headsets. Even then, Messenger on Oculus arrived as a reasonably basic version of Messenger. It’s only now, for instance, that the app is getting Send and skim receipts or the power to react to specific messages.
Going beyond social features, Oculus software v31 also adds some security measures to the platform. The Browser app, especially, will now be ready to store passwords on the device, and users are going to be ready to set an unlock pattern to guard those passwords. In addition, support for the new invite systems will come on a per-app basis. Therefore the Oculus software update itself is going to be rolling out gradually to supported Quest headsets.
