At GDC 2018 this year, Oculus released word during their ‘Inside Oculus 2018’ developer talk that Home, the customizable user space for Rift, is gaining the ability to host multiple players as well as user-generated content.
The new Home space arrived with the Rift Core 2.0 beta update released back in December, although the update lacked the ability to host more than one person in one of the artfully decorated spaces at one time. A future update, we learned, will include the ability to join others in Home via Parties, and launch apps in sync with friends so you can jump into games together – basically everything we wanted from the original Rooms function that was originally intended to come both Rift and Gear VR, but only made its way on the latter.
Home also lacked customization beyond the ability to kitbash preset items (pasting things together), but the addition of user-generated content will allow for especially talented users to completely customize their Home space. Director of Engineering Ross O’Dwyer demonstrated by sculpting a bust of himself, importing the bust and resizing it and copying it on the fly while in Home. Imported objects will be based on the GLB file format, supporting physically-based rendering. There will be an in-VR tool for creating content and importing into Home. We aren’t certain on the specifics yet, but we’ll be keeping our eyes out for official announcements.
The multiuser/content creation update is said to arrive sometime in summer 2018.