Facebook’s Oculus adds Social Games and Video Sharing To Gear VR

VR technology which has gained traction amongst users in the last couple of months looks set to be breaking barriers and becoming a truly social hub for activities in the coming days. Facebook-owned Oculus has decided to shift its focus towards making our VR experience in the coming days more social with the addition of a number of features such as the addition of social games and social elements to viewing videos while using the Gear VR.

The Gear VR, which was launched on 21st January here in India and is available for free with all S7 and S7 edge Pre-Orders, is Samsung’s VR offering that was developed in partnership with Oculus. Owners of the VR headset which is regarded as one of the best available offerings in the market, starting tomorrow, will be able to create accounts on the Oculus servers, and then get in touch with other users of the Gear VR, and also leave reviews for all apps in the Oculus Store.

Oculus wants its users to enjoy the immersive world of Virtual Reality with friends, and to help make this possible it has announced two new social heavy VR games that will allow users to go up  against their friends.

First up is Social Trivia, a game that lets you and up to four friends compete in a battle of knowledge in an artificial VR environment. The second game is Herobound: Gladiators which is a multiplayer adventure game. The game lets you take the VR gaming experience to another level and sees the user Band together with up to four people to conquer goblins and demons in arena battlefields. The game also allows for integrated voice chat to talk and strategize in real time for an unmatched co-op experience.

For users who would rather stay away from games, Facebook’s Oculus has announced host of other features that sees it bring to the platform with the help of Oculus Video the functionality to personalize your 360-degree video feed based on the pages and people you follow on Facebook. It has revealed that in the coming weeks, users will be able to connect and react to their favorite Facebook 360 videos directly in virtual reality.

And, if that’s still not good enough to get you excited, Oculus is adding the functionality to create private VR chat rooms with friends which let you watch Vimeo and Twich streams with them in a Virtual Reality environment.

Oculus’ efforts to push for social VR does not end there as it has also communicated to developers that it wants to “drive deeper social connections” and hence later this month “will release new tools for developers that make it even easier to create more incredible social VR games and apps.