Oculus today released the Oculus Venues application, which it revealed during Oculus Connect 4 in October. Oculus Venues is a multi-user VR application that allows you to share live events in real-time with friends, family, and strangers from all around the world.
Oculus Venues gives you the opportunity to enjoy live stadium events, such as professional sports, concerts, and stand-up comedy acts. Venues also enables you to watch movies with your friends in a virtual theater setting. With Venues, Oculus can offer nearly unlimited seating capacity for almost any live event.
Oculus isn’t the first company to attempt an unlimited capacity VR event platform. Two years ago, AltspaceVR debuted its FrontRow technology, which offered unlimited copies of live virtual performances. Oculus took a different approach. Instead of virtualizing everything down the stage performer, Oculus Venues pulls in a live video feed from the event and presents it in a virtual stadium where you can take a seat and enjoy the show.
Oculus Venues offers two seating preferences. You can sit in stadium seating with the crowd of avatars, or you can opt for a private solo viewing experience. Oculus also built tools that enable you to mute or block people that annoy you and a tool to report people who harrass you.
Oculus didn’t say if or when Venues would come to the Rift platform, but it’s available now for the Go standalone headset and the GearVR mobile headset. Oculus’s first Venue’s event kicks off tonight with the Vance Joy concert at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre at 7:30 pm PT, and Oculus has a lineup of Venues events to keep you busy all summer, including more concerts, Major League Baseball games, and feature films from Lionsgate.
