Today, we’re launching Oculus Rooms and Parties for Gear VR!

We’ve always known that the future of VR is social—and with today’s launch, we’re making that future a reality across the Oculus platform. These exciting new features are now available on Gear VR and will come to Rift in 2017.

The first wave of VR was all about the magic of presence, the immersive sense of actually being inside a virtual space. The next step is to let you feel that same sense of presence with other people in VR.

Finding your friends in VR is easy. Just link your Facebook and Oculus accounts or search for people by their real name or Oculus username. Once you connect and become Oculus friends, you can see when your friends are online, start a voice call, or jump into an experience together.

Join a Voice Call with Friends in VR

Oculus Parties lets you and up to three friends join a voice call from anywhere in VR. Parties ensure that no matter where you go on the platform, you can always communicate with your friends.

Starting a party is easy. Click the “Party” tab in Oculus Home, select who you want to join the party, and you’re good to go.

Hang Out Together in Oculus Rooms

Today you’ll also be able to experience Oculus Rooms, a private virtual space to spend time with friends in VR. We focused on enabling social activities that mirror how you may hang out with friends in real life.

Once you and your friends are in a Party together, you can easily join Oculus Rooms. From there, you can choose what you’d like to do: gather around the TV and watch videos, play matching or guessing games, or hit the group app launcher to jump to a multiplayer game like Dragon Front or Drop Dead. Look for even more apps to support this feature in the coming months.

This is just the beginning of social VR. We’ll continue building fun ways to share presence and take social interactions in VR to a whole new level.

— The Oculus Team