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!”

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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.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • NL_VR

    Impressive that it has taken so long.
    Well not so impressive :P

    • Jistuce

      It is particularly weird given that the original Rift home area already had social features. It was a notable missing feature from Quest, and I remain baffled that it has taken so long to arrive.

  • Till Eulenspiegel

    Last year Zucky promised to remove Facebook login requirement in early 2022. It seems like he changed his mind.

    • Yeah, really still want that to happen. I just don’t like Facebook. Happy to connect with my mates but I’d rather just do it via adding them as friends on my headset without the in-between “social” media account crap.

    • MeowMix

      early 2022

      Ya, that’s not true. I just went back and watched FB Connect 2021 (@ the 29 min mark), and Zuck clearly says ‘within the next year‘.

      That said, many of us in the community already assumed they would rollout their Facebook-less account system when they rollout the Project Cambria headset this year; why did we assume that ? Because Zuck mentioned they would be dropping the FB requirement during the ‘Focused on Work’ segment of the Connect video.

  • Crazily, that little video actually sold me on the simple potential of this to let me hang out with my bro in VR sometimes when he’s otherwise miles away. FINALLY, something about “social” media that doesn’t make me want to kick a flower.

    • You could privately hangout in VR a billion different ways for the last half decade …. lol
      You could even do it with the web-based HMD-to-device “Hubs” by Mozilla.
      “HORIZON: Home” is just the latest in a very long line of apps that do this.

      • Yeah, but not quite a simply as putting on my headset, “pinging” my bro, and just having a wee hang out in the Home environment with no more fuss than that.

      • namekuseijin

        yeah, but people come here all the time to crap over Horizon avatars not being retarded VR chat furries and yet you’re here offering Mozilla Hubs with an even more basic avatar than those in Rec Room and like it or not, Horizon avatars are way more animated and expressive – probably costing them in map polygons…

    • philingreat

      I totally see the benefit of only teleporting to those spots. Being able to freely move around like in other social apps brings the issue that you walk into other avatars, clip through your mates if you are standing at the same spot, it gets really annoying and chaotic.

      • So, your solution is to lock us all to a few set places on the floor rather than just have some invisible personal bubble area around people that you can’t walk into? Not a great problem solver, I see.

        • philingreat

          I have been in a lot of meeting apps. the most annoying thing for me was avatars continuously moving around it’s super nervous. the personal bubble doesn’t solve that problem

          • Well this isn’t a “meeting” app, it’s my Home space in VR, and I’d both like to be able to move around freely and have others move around freely too. With my mode you can choose not to move if you don’t want to; with your mode, I have no choice. My solution is fairer to both.

          • Elite-Force Cinema

            disq us/p/2pqssso

            And then what do you want Meta to do after they faced class-action lawsuit and loses the lawsuit? Force them to go bankrupt and go under bankruptcy until the point you want to force them to die as a company instead of doing better at treating their customers with respect & apologize for their misconduct just so that you can decline their apology and continue giving them death threats and vulgar slurs or what?

  • Zuck gets a lot of hate for his weird talking cadence and his general stiffness but as someone who struggles to not say “um” and “uhh” when public speaking that’s one of the most humanizing things I’ve seen him do in a while, speak to someone live without being heavily scripted and see him formulate those sentences on the fly like that was neat.

  • It’s Facebook Spaces again!

  • dk

    meanwhile in EU I still can’t move in the home environment…..can’t wait for 2024 :P

    • Shuozhe Nan

      I can teleport to all the dots in my home enviroment (in germany). But wondering if horizon worlds will ever release here..

  • KindaSmooth

    Looking forward to the gaming aspect. Like I think the name was.. The two of Us.. 2 people co op playing together to finish a game that doesn’t have single player. Kinda excited for that type of a scenario..

  • namekuseijin

    why weren’t they playing The Climb together? would it even show their avatars?

    btw, I want a video screen that wide in the environment…