Oculus plans to bring livestreaming to Gear VR, letting users stream their gameplay to Facebook allowing friends to watch and interact with comments and reactions.
One of the common problems with Gear VR and mobile VR in general is that, whenever you put on the headset to play something, and your family or friends are with you, they can’t see what it is that you’re actually looking at. Often times, if you’re a spectator, you’re either just awkwardly staring at someone losing themselves in a VR headset, or awkwardly trying to avoid doing that. There’s also the fact you can’t stream to an online audience, such as what you might expect on Twitch. To address those needs, Oculus has announced that they’ll allow Gear VR users to stream their view in the headset to Facebook later this year.
Max Cohen, Head of Mobile at Oculus, said as much at Oculus Connect 3: “often, you’ll have more friends outside of VR than inside of VR at any given time, and so, we’re actually going to launch live streaming later this year, so you can share your in-VR experience to anyone on Facebook.”
Cohen showed some pictures of what Gear VR users can expect. As they show, it’d be accessible through the Universal Menu, allow people to Like and comment on the stream in real time on Facebook, and give the user stats on the stream afterwards.
No other details were announced, like if you would be able to see some of those stats in real time while playing in VR (like you can while doing a normal Facebook livestream from your phone). Nor did we hear about a major question on our minds: if/when will we see the same functionality on the Oculus Rift? Right now, most games display a view of the headset on the PC, and people are free to record and stream that desktop view however they want, but Facebook’s live streaming feature is currently restricted to mobile devices.