Oculus Rooms

» see oculus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

by the time oculus rooms became the flagship app on the oculus go in 2018, i had already decided vr was a category i was going to sit out. i did not own a headset then and i do not own one now. oculus rooms is a thing i know about from coverage of the headset launch and from the eventual shutdown notice. nobody i worked with in computer vision in ankara owned an oculus either, since the device was not officially sold in turkey and the use cases that mattered to our edge-ai work did not justify the import.

oculus launched rooms on samsung gear vr on december 16 2016. the rift version arrived in 2017. the app gave four people a virtual apartment they could share. you could look at photos uploaded from your phone or throw a virtual deck of cards on a coffee table while watching a video. the design was deliberately low-friction. on the gear vr you did not need a controller. you looked at what you wanted and tapped the touchpad on the side of the headset.

the oculus go launched in may 2018 as the first standalone vr device facebook sold without a phone or a pc, and oculus rooms shipped on it as the headline social experience. the headset cost $199 and was the first vr hardware most casual users actually tried. seventeen months later, on october 25 2019, facebook shut rooms down alongside facebook spaces. the official replacement was facebook horizon, which had been announced at oculus connect six weeks earlier and would not ship a closed beta until 2020.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

rooms had the cleanest pitch of any social-vr product facebook ever shipped. four people in a small apartment doing low-effort things together. no controllers required and no real skill curve. that was the right product for the oculus go's audience, since the go was sold to people who had never tried vr and wanted a casual entry point. the problem was the same problem altspacevr had at the time. the install base for any specific vr device was small, and the chance that four of your friends owned the same headset was low. people who did try rooms generally did it once and did not have anyone to come back to it with.

~ the day it died ~

october 25 2019 was a quiet day for vr news. facebook spaces and oculus rooms both shut down with a short notice posted to the oculus blog. neither app made it to the oculus quest, which was facebook's actually-selling headset that year. the official replacement was facebook horizon, which was not ready and would not be ready for another two years. for the seventeen-month flagship app on the device that introduced vr to a mass audience, the wind-down was striking for how little fanfare it got. by 2026 the oculus brand itself is gone, rebranded to meta horizon worlds, and rooms is one of several abandoned attempts at the same social-vr idea sitting underneath it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »