Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg formally announced Quest v41 includes the ability to invite friends to your virtual home “as soon as you put on your headset.”
Horizon Home has been the announced name for the social feature since last year when Meta revealed it would be coming to Quest. Over the years Facebook tested and retired multiple VR apps aimed at meeting with a small group of friends, including Oculus Rooms and Facebook Spaces. More recently the company released Horizon Workrooms for work meetings and Horizon Worlds for creating public social experiences inside VR. Meta is still in the midst of a restructuring process that includes cancelled projects and changing policies, like the promise that Quest will drop the requirement it be connected to a Facebook account.
Meta says Horizon Home is rolling out “soon”. Typically, system updates for Quest headsets take place over a couple weeks as the company ensures new features work as intended. Zuckerberg demonstrated the Horizon Home feature in a video prepared with climber Alex Honnold showing how the two of them could use Quest 2 in different physical spaces to watch Honnold’s recent 360-degree video release together.
“More options to customize your home space” are in development, Zuckerberg wrote.
The feature should allow people to more easily jump into a game together or watch videos with physically distant friends or family. Horizon Home was announced last year but Meta is yet to detail any external content partnerships or specific apps beyond its own which support this key functionality. For now that means 360 degree videos can be watched together, but in the future might it incorporate traditional content like Bigscreen and Apple’s SharePlay?
We’ll dive into how Horizon Home functions and what we can do with it as soon as we can access it.
