Starting next week, Meta will add a more social-oriented home space to Quest 2. Horizon Home, which the company announced at Oculus Connect last year, will appear when users slip on the virtual reality headset. They can invite friends to come over and hang out, watch videos and play games together. It’s part of Meta’s vision of the metaverse, a shared virtual space where folks can do all kinds of things together, along with Horizon Worlds and Horizon Workrooms.
One of those, as demoed in a video shared by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is the option to watch 360-degree footage with friends. Zuckerberg showed off the feature with climber Alex Honnold of Free Solo fame. They watched The Soloist VR, a film that features Honnold free climbing the Dolomite Mountains. If you thought Meta’s torso-only avatars looked strange on the virtual ground, just wait till you see two of them floating 1,000 feet above northern Italy.
Quest 2 users can check out Horizon Home and its miserable-looking virtual home office starting today if they are comfortable using the Public Test Channel. Meta will roll out the v41 Quest update, which includes Horizon Home, more broadly next week, a Meta spokesperson told Road to VR. We’ll likely learn more details about Horizon Home then. Meta will add more customization options for the home space later.
