Meta is adding social hangouts to the Quest’s VR home space - The Verge
Meta is rolling out Horizon Home, a small-scale hangouts space for the Quest VR headset. The feature was announced after Meta changed its name from Facebook last year.
Meta Quest virtual reality headsets will soon offer an option for hanging out with other people in your homescreen. The v41 Quest update will add a multiuser Horizon Home space, which Meta announced last year at Connect. Horizon Home lets people put on their headsets and immediately invite other Quest users to jump into social experiences, including watching VR videos as a group. It’s a step toward a larger Horizon-branded “metaverse” that Meta has been rolling out piecemeal over the past few years.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Home’s rollout in a video with Free Solo climber Alex Honnold, offering a brief demo of the system. Zuckerberg and Honnold appear as Horizon’s traditional legless avatars and pop into a 360-degree video of Honnold free climbing the Dolomites, then switch to a space landscape for more chatting. In the Facebook post, Zuckerberg says more options for customizing your Home space are “currently in development.” A Meta spokesperson told Road to VR that the v41 update would be coming next week, when we’ll presumably find out more details about the system, including how many people it supports in one hangout.
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