There has been a lot of talk surrounding VR technology's propensity to augment our realities in interesting and creative ways. However, a question that is also often brought up is the technology's ability to engender loneliness.
There has been a push to counter this, or at least, accommodate a social aspect to users' respective virtual worlds. "VR is very isolationist: You put it on and you forget your surroundings; you forget the people around you," Max Planck, supervising technical director of VR storytelling initiative Story Studio, tells Engadget.
The recent response to this growing concern comes in the shape of a multiplayer feature within the virtual movie theater app Oculus Cinema.
Quite like what the name implies, the app will try to virtualize the movie-watching experience. This will include not only the content being watched but the act of watching it as well, simulating fellow Oculus Cinema users in a shared virtual space that imitates a movie theatre. An interesting artifice offering the convenience of aloneness without a direct confrontation with it.
For Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, part of the goal is to create a user experience with social interaction at its nucleus. "We already have a lot of internal social functions in [Oculus] Cinema that are going to be rolling out in the next few months," says Luckey in an interview with Road To VR. "Things like avatar systems, being able to communicate with people over long distances ... rather than just local multiplayer, but having actual long distance multiplayer as well."
Although Oculus Cinema is currently available for Samsung's Gear VR, the updated consumer version will launch with the Oculus Rift in 2016. "What's going to be shipping with the Rift has a lot more [social features] built in than the version of Oculus Cinema shipping right now," says Luckey.
However, in practical terms, it still remains to be seen whether these features will truly help create an environment that fosters connectivity or just collective aloneness.
