Your home room is about to get a little more crowded.
What you need to know
- Oculus Home is becoming Horizon Home in the next Quest update.
- Horizon Home uses existing Oculus Home locations but allows you to bring your friends along for some quality virtual hang out time.
- Oculus is improving how parties work, making it easier for players to invite their friends to Horizon Home and then quickly jump into parties within games from there.
- Oculus Avatars should be making an appearance in more games soon, as they're being added to Unity and Unreal engines for developers to use.
If you've ever turned on your Oculus Quest or Oculus Quest 2 and wondered why you're all alone in an empty virtual room, don't worry, Facebook has been thinking the same thing. That's why Horizon Home will be replacing the existing Oculus Home, giving you a fresh new home location to spend time with friends or by yourself, if you so choose.
Horizon Home is the next extension of Horizon Worlds and Horizon Workrooms, allowing you to create your own home space and giving you the chance to invite all your friends in for some quality virtual hang out time together.
Horizon Home is an in-place update of Oculus Home, meaning your current environment and any that you have saved or downloaded will still be usable in Horizon Home — just with a lot more social capabilities.
Facebook says it's also working on enhancing Horizon Home so that players can further customize their space and make it fully theirs. More than likely, we'll see similar functionality to what the desktop Oculus Rift version of Oculus Home does.
Inviting friends is as easy as opening up the new redesigned friends dialog and sending an invite. Once your friends accept, they'll be transported to your home where you can hang out, party, or easily join up together in your favorite games without having to separately be re-invited. This will still only work with supported title,s but Facebook expects that list to grow.
Oculus Venues is becoming Horizon Venues, letting you bring all your friends to a virtual venue after joining up in Horizon Home. Just as before, Horizon Venues will let players take part in virtual concerts or other events alongside their friends and plenty of strangers, giving you a more real-world feeling of presence than a simple live stream could deliver. Live NBA games will soon be making an appearance in Horizon Venues, too, so keep an eye out for that in November.
In addition to that, you might be seeing your Oculus Avatar in more places over the coming months, as Facebook is adding Oculus Avatar support to Unity Engine in December and Unreal Engine 4 early next year. That means developers can now integrate your Oculus Avatar directly into their games, much like Nintendo did with personal Mii characters on the Wii.
Always getting better
Oculus Quest 2
$299 at Amazon $380 at Walmart $299 at Best Buy $299 at Walmart
It keeps getting better with each update
The Oculus Quest 2 offers almost everything that you could ask for from a VR headset like an impressive display and refresh rate, easy setup, and portability. Every update also promises to make it even better over time.
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