Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been taking a personal approach lately to revealing new features coming to Quest 2. Now Zuckerberg has revealed that in the v41 software update coming sometime next week, Quest’s Horizon Home space will finally give you the ability to invite friends and tour content as a party, including 360 videos and games.
The company first announced Horizon Home at Connect late last year, which promised to someday bring to Quest 2 a simple, first-party place to meet up with friends. Over the past few months, the company added an array of social features, including teleport nodes in v38 to Horizon Home so users could more freely move around the virtual room. It was still missing the ability to share that space with a friend though.
In a video posted to Zuckerberg’s Facebook Timeline today, the Meta CEO hashed out a few of the features of v41 as he chatted with legendary free climber Alex Honnold, and watched a 360 video of Honnold breaking down a death-defying session the climber had in the Dolomites. Check out the video below:
Zuckerberg says the new features in Horizon Home will be available “as soon as you put on the headset.”
“Invite friends to hang out, watch videos together, or jump into apps right from your virtual home,” Zuckerberg writes. “More options to customize your home space currently in development. Also, check out Alex’s 360 film The Soloist VR where he takes you 1,000 ft up free climbing the Dolomites!”
It’s not exactly clear when we’ll see v41, however a Meta spokesperson told Road to VR we should be expecting it sometime next week.
There’s still plenty of other features that will need clarifying, including the number of users supported for a single Quest home space—voice parties currently support up to eight people—and how joining games and launching 360 videos together will work.
Zuckerberg tends to go light on the details before the Oculus blog tosses out specifics though, so we’ll be keeping our eyes peeled there in the meantime.
