NEWS
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Samsung Gear VR gets social as Oculus adds friend support, multiplayer games
Virtual reality is getting social with an announcement that the Oculus-powered Samsung Gear VR is getting friend support.
Starting Thursday people who own a Samsung Gear VR will now be able to create a public profile and then search for others on the platform by real name or Oculus username.
To compliment the new feature Oculus is also releasing new VR games that allow users to compete against friends or other Gear VR users from around the world.
At the top of the list of new games is Social Trivia, a game, that as the name may suggest, allows up to four people to compete in a knowledge contest.
Herobound: Gladiators is said to be a multiplayer adventure game that allows up to four people to “conquer goblins and demons in arena battlefields,” complete with support for integrated voice chat to talk and strategize in real time.
Oculus Social, the virtual social space the company provides, is also getting an upgrade with the newly added ability to create rooms with friends so users can now watch Twitch or Vimeo streams in the same virtual space.
Facebook videos
Users looking for new 360 videos will have the added option of using Facebook for a source with Oculus Video gaining a Facebook videos tab, allowing users to source 360-degree video from pages and people they follow.
How many extra videos this will provide was not specified by the company; the pitch is that there are plenty of 360 degree videos on Facebook, but that would be news to many Facebook users.
That aside the new support for connecting with friends, and indeed playing alongside them in virtual reality games is, without doubt, a positive step forward in making the burgeoning virtual reality market more appealing to the broader market, even if two thirds of American don’t even know it exists.
The games released so far aren’t anything terribly exciting, but the support for multiplayer gaming is able to be tapped into by developers, so we should see a range of new multiplayer VR games in the coming year or two, that is presuming that the market actually takes off and the technology proves to be popular.
Image credit: Oculus
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