Oculus Update Makes It Easier To Party With VR Friends

Oculus today is rolling out several new social features for its VR platforms. These new features are meant to help you group up with friends easier and then stick with those friends as you jump into games. It can also help you find new friends using Oculus headsets, so long as you don't mind deeper integration with Facebook.

First up is the launch of Public Parties, which is billed as something of an upgrade to way parties currently work. Public Parties are essentially VR voice calls for up to eight people, and while you can invite your friends to join, you can also make your party public and potentially make some new friends out of the people who join your group.

As an extension of Public Parties is a new feature called Travel Together. This feature will allow you and your group to jump into certain games together "without jumping through multiple menus and waiting for friends to join," according to an Oculus blog post. At the outset, only a handful of games will support Travel Together. Those are: Echo VR, Racket: Nx, Synth Riders, Eleven Table Tennis, Elven Assassin, Epic Roller Coasters, Arizona Sunshine, Cloudlands 2, Spaceteam VR, Ironlights, Multiverse, and Pro Putt by Topgolf.

Finally, we have a new feature that will allow you to discover which of your Facebook friends have an Oculus headset. Privacy, of course, is a concern with features like this, so you have a few different options when it comes to who can see your Facebook name on Oculus; you can set it to Only Me, Facebook Friends on Oculus, or if you're feeling particularly brave, you can make your Facebook name public. When setting up a new Oculus account, this feature will default to "Facebook Friends on Oculus."

So, that's today's update – nothing massive in terms of new features, but a few that are centered around making the VR experience a bit more social. All of these features are now live, so if you own a Oculus headset, check them out.