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Oculus planning a trivia game and more for social VR

Oculus planning a trivia game and more for social VR

UploadVR may have spent a little too much time last night visiting with random avatars in the new Oculus Social app, but when we woke up this morning we found ourselves just wanting more. In particular, we’re hankering for something more than Twitch streams and Vimeo videos to watch with the denizens of the Internet. Thankfully, Oculus Chief Technology Officer John Carmack plans to give it to us.

Carmack replied to a few of our tweets revealing the Oculus Social Alpha app that was launched yesterday “in a very raw state” will be joined by a social trivia game experience pretty soon.

In addition to the trivia game, Carmack promised some “VrScript based experiences.” Built on Scheme, VrScript is a new scripting language for Android VR that Carmack helped to develop to enable rapid iteration on virtual reality development. In addition to that, the VrScript is built to allow for easy iteration on networked social experience, like Oculus Social.

A trivia game suggests possibly a bigger roadmap for Oculus’ social implementation. In Oculus Social right now the social functionality is limited to VOIP, head based non verbal communication, and group video viewing. All in all it adds up to a very effective experience, but the interactions between avatars is limited. A trivia game would have to add some more back and forth functionality like the ability to submit answers, for example.

Palmer Luckey has already told us that the Social SDK goes “beyond a puppet and gameplay avatar and voice chat,” saying, “it is all the other things you need to be able to do.” It looks like we will see some of those things demonstrated over the next few weeks with Carmack’s trivia and VrScript apps.

We will follow this closely and update further as any additional details emerge.

 

Update: Looks like we will be able to see video choices in Oculus Social as a group in the future.

Update 2:  Trivia and other apps will show up as new rooms within Oculus Social, which will act as a launcher for social experiences.

Update 3: Looks like there is a chance that “Carmack Lectures” might make it into Oculus Social too.

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