ATLANTA, GA - MAY 06: Vance Joy performs during Day 3 at Shaky Knees Festival at Atlanta Central Park on May 6, 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Scott Legato/Getty Images)
A new type of SocialVR for Oculus and Facebook.
On May 1, Oculus launched its first standalone headset, Oculus Go. With its $200 price tag, the headset was a critical and consumer hit -- and some have speculated that it has already sold 200,000 units in the first month alone.
Today, Oculus launched Venues (also announced earlier this year), which allows users to watch live events, like concerts, sports, and comedy shows, with friends in virtual reality (VR).
Oculus
View from a "Venue."
Using VR as an avenue to stream events is nothing new, but what is new is the shared aspect -- that you can pick your seat and chat with whomever you"d like among thousands of virtual attendees -- and the fact that this is being facilitated by Facebook, whose social VR efforts to this point have focused more on intimacy than large-group settings.
As Peter Rubin notes, this is new territory for Oculus and Facebook. He writes:
Oculus has never done anything like this. Its parent company, Facebook, has never done anything like this. When you’ve got hundreds of strangers gathered together, there’s a lot that could go wrong, and technical glitches are only the beginning. People could be bored; worse, people could be assholes. And on a stage as big as Red Rocks, with technology as young as VR, "there’s no such thing as bad press" decidedly does not apply.
To kick off the series, Venues attendees can see Vance Joy playing at the Red Rocks amphitheater -- which is going live at the time of this writing.
Virtual viewers will be treated with a panoramic view of the iconic space and performance -- and this is just the beginning. As the calendar below shows, there are plenty more events in store this summer.
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