Oculus Rooms

Oculus Rooms
Information
Type	Social VR
Industry	Virtual reality
Developer	Oculus VR
Operating System	Android
Supported Devices	Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Go
Release Date	December 15, 2016 (Gear VR); shut down October 25, 2019
Website	https://www.meta.com/experiences/oculus-rooms/1101959559889232/

Oculus Rooms was a social VR app made by Oculus VR for the Samsung Gear VR and, from 2018, the Oculus Go. Oculus described it as "a private virtual space to spend time with friends in VR". Friends who had joined the same voice call through the companion feature Oculus Parties could enter a Room together to watch videos, play simple tabletop games and start supported multiplayer apps at the same time.

Rooms was announced at Oculus Connect 3 in October 2016 and launched on Gear VR on 15 December 2016. UploadVR saw it as Oculus's new focus for social interaction, overlapping with the earlier Oculus Social app. A redesigned version launched with the Oculus Go in May 2018. Facebook closed Rooms, along with Facebook Spaces, on 25 October 2019 to concentrate on its new social VR world, Facebook Horizon.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Fact-checked every date, quote, number and attribution against the cited Oculus blog posts, store listing, F8 session page, Road to VR, UploadVR, TechCrunch, Engadget, GamesBeat and Toy Book articles, the full Moustafa and Steed VRST 2018 paper and the Gupta and Joseph Thomas abstract on PubMed. About review dates.

History

Announcement

Oculus platform product manager Lauren Vegter introduced Rooms on stage at Oculus Connect 3. Road to VR, reporting on 6 October 2016, described it as a "social VR hangout for up to 8 people" where a group could watch video provided by Facebook, listen to music and play social mini-games. The same presentation introduced an app launcher inside Rooms that let everyone start the same game or experience at once, and a "coordinated app launch API" that developers could add to their multiplayer titles. Rooms and Parties were expected on Gear VR within weeks and on the Oculus Rift in early 2017.

Gear VR launch

Oculus released Rooms and Parties for Gear VR on 15 December 2016; UploadVR reported that both arrived through an update to the Gear VR version of Oculus Home. Users could find friends by linking their Facebook and Oculus accounts or by searching for a real name or Oculus username. A Party was a voice call for a user and up to three friends that stayed active anywhere in VR, started from the Party tab in Oculus Home; once in a Party, the group could join Rooms. Oculus named Dragon Front and Drop Dead as multiplayer games that could be launched from inside a Room, and said that more supporting apps would follow. TechCrunch reported that Parties calls used the audio VoIP stack of Facebook Messenger.

UploadVR's Joe Durbin wrote that Oculus Social had "largely stagnated since release" and that the overlap in features suggested Rooms was now Oculus's main app for purely social interaction.

Updates in 2017

Rooms 1.2, announced on 10 March 2017, added music videos from Vimeo and let users watch 360-degree videos in Rooms for the first time. These played in a new viewing dome that friends elsewhere in the Room could also see; Oculus used Baobab Studios' Invasion! as its example. The update also added voice search for Facebook video content from the TV area. At Facebook's F8 developer conference in April 2017, a session titled "Early Lessons in Social VR from Oculus Rooms" presented the company's research and observations on how people interacted in the app.

Facebook released a public beta of Facebook Spaces, a separate social VR app for Rift owners, at F8 2017. Facebook's Michael Booth, who announced it on stage, told UploadVR that Spaces would not replace Rooms, that the two were built by separate teams, and that the Rooms team was "exploring a different problem".

By July 2017 the promised Rift version had still not arrived. That month, Nate Mitchell, head of Rift at Oculus, told Road to VR that the Rooms team shipped major updates roughly every month and could move faster by focusing on one platform, adding that usage was continuing to "tick up". He said that "Rooms is actually built in Unity, it's using Android", so features such as video and audio codecs would not carry over directly to PC. Mitchell said persistent voice calls would come to PC independently of Rooms, and pointed Rift users who wanted to hang out in VR to Facebook Spaces.

Oculus Go redesign (2018)

Oculus released a major update to Rooms alongside the Oculus Go on 1 May 2018. The company listed a fully redesigned and customizable environment, more lifelike avatars, full-length movies from the Oculus Store catalog and the Hasbro tabletop game Boggle (due later that month), with Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit "brand experiences coming soon". The update was announced at Facebook's F8 conference, and Road to VR noted that the redesigned app still supported Gear VR. The Toy Book reported that the Hasbro games would be available wherever Oculus Rooms was offered for Oculus Go, across 23 countries. Boggle became playable for free in Rooms on Gear VR and Oculus Go in May 2018, for up to four players. The app's store listing notes that version 2.4 added Monopoly Deal, a card version of Monopoly that could be played against friends or the computer.

The same announcement introduced Oculus Venues, a separate app for watching live concerts, sports and comedy with other people, which Oculus said would launch on 30 May 2018 for Oculus Go and Gear VR.

Shutdown

On 25 September 2019, when Facebook announced Facebook Horizon at Oculus Connect 6, the company said it would shut down Facebook Spaces and Oculus Rooms on 25 October 2019 as it focused on the new world. Road to VR described the move as a reduction in the number of separate social VR apps that Facebook and Oculus ran. In his Oculus Connect 6 keynote the following day, Oculus CTO John Carmack said he was "really sad" about shutting down Rooms. He said that "a number of people find some value in it", and that Rooms "can run on Quest", but that "it's not showing any growth. It's trending down", and that the company wanted to "focus efforts on the bigger bets".

UploadVR reported in December 2019 that the Rooms team was now working on Facebook Horizon, that Horizon did not list support for the Oculus Go, and that no replacement had been announced for Go owners. It suggested vTime, Bigscreen and AltspaceVR as alternatives, noting that each needed a separate account and did not use Oculus networking.

Features

At launch on Gear VR, a Room was styled as a futuristic living room. TechCrunch described a group-controlled TV that showed popular Facebook videos by default, or videos from a user's Saved folder or News Feed once a Facebook account was connected; three in-house games (a card-matching game, a word-guessing game in the style of Heads Up, and a memory game called Lights); and an app launcher listing installed VR games that supported the Coordinated App Launch API. Spatial audio indicated where each friend was in the room, and avatars' mouths moved as their users talked. Rooms did not need a controller: users looked at items and tapped the Gear VR touchpad. Engadget's Nicole Lee described separate areas for changing an avatar's appearance, watching videos, playing board and card games at a table, and sitting to talk. Each avatar had a floating tablet as its control panel, and users moved between areas by gazing and tapping. Avatar heads turned to match the user's head movement, tracked by the phone's sensors, and mouth movement followed the microphone input.

The 2018 redesign gave each user a private copy of the same studio loft. UploadVR's David Jagneaux reported that users could change the floor, wall material, time of day, outdoor scenery and the photos on the walls. A large media wall could show cast videos (including 3D films), photos and music. 360-degree videos first appeared as a preview orb that a user could click to enter the full video. The screen could not play files stored on the headset or on a network media server. A game table held Pairs and a few other basic games, and multiplayer titles such as Dead and Buried could be queued from the media hub. Engadget added that video could keep playing in the background during board games, and that users could sit on a couch to watch movies from the Oculus Store. The store listing describes Rooms as a personal home base in VR where users could invite friends to play tabletop games, watch TV and movies, listen to music, share photos or jump into other apps together, and decorate the walls with photos from Facebook.

Version or date	Platform	Main additions
15 December 2016	Gear VR	First release with Parties: shared TV with Facebook video, three in-house games, group app launcher
1.2 (10 March 2017)	Gear VR	Vimeo music videos, 360-degree video dome, voice search
1 May 2018	Oculus Go, Gear VR	Redesigned customizable loft, more lifelike avatars, Oculus Store movies, photos and music
May 2018	Gear VR, Oculus Go	Hasbro's Boggle for up to four players, free
2.4 (date not stated)	Not stated	Monopoly Deal card game
25 October 2019	All	Service shut down

Research and other uses

Fares Moustafa and Anthony Steed of the UCL Interaction Centre ran a four-week in-the-wild study of 17 participants in existing social groups that had become geographically dispersed, each given a Samsung Gear VR. They were free to try Oculus Rooms, AltspaceVR and vTime, but 27 of the 33 recorded sessions (82%) took place in Oculus Rooms, which the authors attributed to its tight integration with the Gear VR interface and the ease of creating sessions. Three participants (18%) found the way Rooms handled a user dropping out disturbing: the avatar moved erratically, slowed to a halt, turned grey and disappeared. Participants built avatars in the Oculus Rooms Avatar Editor; 9 of the 17 (53%) made avatars that represented their current selves. The paper, presented at the ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST) in 2018, reported that users experienced emotional states broadly similar to those they would have face to face in the same groups.

In a 2019 case report in A&A Practice, Abhinav Gupta of the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Children's Hospital Colorado and James Joseph Thomas described using Oculus Rooms, as a multiuser VR application, to calm an anxious 10-year-old boy while he was taken to the operating room and during induction of anesthesia, keeping a virtual connection between child and parent without the parent being in the operating room.

Reception

Reviewing the Gear VR launch, Engadget's Nicole Lee found that the simple head and mouth movements made a group in different places feel as if they were together in one room. Oculus product manager Madhu Muthukumar told her, "We want you to feel like being in VR is sort of the same as being in real life", and called the feature "early magic". UploadVR's Joe Durbin called the two features "some of the biggest use cases yet" for friends on Gear VR.

After the 2018 update, UploadVR's David Jagneaux wrote that Rooms had seemed mostly abandoned since Facebook Spaces appeared, and that it had now become "a dedicated social hangout space". He argued that social experiences of this kind were "the secret sauce for what makes VR so special". Engadget described the redesign as "swankier". Writing after the shutdown, UploadVR's David Heaney called Rooms "the Go's flagship app".

See also

• Oculus Social
• Facebook Spaces
• Oculus Venues
• Horizon Worlds