Oculus Rooms continued that tradition. It offered "people-centric quality time," as LeBeau describes it, rather than activity-centric quality time. But in London, the Social Experiences team knew that this wasn’t the endgame. "The ability to feel socially co-present with somebody in VR is probably its biggest superpower," LeBeau says. Rooms—along with Facebook’s own VR meeting place, Spaces—was about as constrained as social VR could be, and the London team wanted to explore more broadly.

If you want to think about social VR like Facebook and Oculus do, then imagine a set of three criteria. There’s synchronicity, whether or not people are experiencing something virtual at the same time. There’s symmetry, whether or not people in a space are in VR. (Facebook Spaces' ability to place a video Messenger call between VR and IRL, so that one caller is human and the other is an avatar, is an example of asymmetric social VR.) And then there’s familiarity, whether or not the people in VR know each other.

Oculus Rooms is synchronous and familiar. Facebook Spaces, the same. But when it came to relaxing familiarity, LeBeau’s team immediately thought about live events. "When I think about hanging out among people that I don't know, I'm not looking to immediately get to know every one of them," he says. "Going to a concert or a sporting event or a tech talk or a movie—these are all things where you gather around people you don't know, but it's not about the people you don't know. Yet, it wouldn't be nearly as fun if it was just me alone. They're adding to the vibrance."

That’s how Venues was born. But getting to here took a little longer.

When LeBeau and his team set out to craft the perfect live experience in VR, they eventually discovered a paradox. You need to give people the feeling of being immersed in the actual live event, and also the feeling of being immersed in the virtual crowd—and if you’re not careful, those two things can jeopardize each other.

Or so they found out when they settled on what LeBeau calls a "hamster ball" design. In this early iteration, everyone was grouped on a giant plane, like floor tickets at an arena show. People could toggle into a navigation mode that would let them move around within a crowd, then toggle back into "content mode," where they’d be re-immersed by the performance.

Oculus

This led to what they called the "Roomba problem," in which the team would wind up bouncing from place to place, backing up, turning around, and just basically becoming totally disoriented. But there was a bigger issue as well: People testing this early version of Venues had no idea what they were looking at. "It just wasn’t close enough to anything people could understand," LeBeau says. "Just because you can in VR doesn't always mean you should."

Thankfully, there’s a converse to that rule: just because people did it before VR doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. "We started thinking, 'What if we could use the vertical space more?'" LeBeau says. "'What if you could bank the seating and then you can kind of curve it around'—and I was like, 'Oh. We built a coliseum.'"

The question the Greeks had cracked millennia ago turned out to be just the thing Venues needed. LeBeau’s team started putting users into the new version and they got it. They were immersed in the content, but they also felt the crowd. They felt, in other words, like they were there.

And that’s the entire point of VR. The entire reason Facebook bought Oculus in 2014 for more than $2 billion. "Our investment in this whole field is really pointed at the fact that we believe VR is the medium that will enable the sort of social connectedness that you can't achieve in any other medium," says Hugo Barra, Facebook’s VP of VR. Venues represents a huge piece of that connectedness. You don't live your life surrounded only by your Facebook friends—so why would you do the same with VR?

Inside the Coliseum

When you launch Venues from within your Oculus Go or smartphone-driven Samsung Gear VR, one of the first things you notice is how many people there are. Most social VR platforms cap their experiences at 30 or 40 people for performance reasons. (When you’ve got that many people moving around interacting with each other and the world in VR, things get a little creaky on the server side.) But Venues, being designed to work with those headsets, is a constrained experience in its own right—you can change seats, and you can look around, but you can’t move around—which helps cut down on the lift significantly. That enables the app to split its total audience into manageable but still surprisingly big sections of seating Oculus calls "shards." Each shard is nine steeply banked rows of 28 seats that are sectioned into curved four-person pods, for a grand total of 252 people.

Oculus

The other thing you notice is that you know more about those 252 people than you expected. A menu immediately shows you any Facebook friends who are also attending. (While you don’t need a Facebook account to use either of the headsets, you do need one to use Venues; more on why in a bit.) You can also see those friends’ friends, providing they’ve opted in to sharing details of mutual commonality like Pages that you both like. You can also opt to sit with anyone you like, providing there’s an empty seat next to them.