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Oculus Home as a legitimate app

Orogogus
Protege
Does Oculus have any plans to expand on Home and make it more of a full-featured experience instead of what's basically a storefront and loading screen?  I made this post on the Steam forums, too, since it's something I'm really interested in and I'm hoping one of the two parties has some kind of plan in this direction.

I feel like there really ought to be a VR home-building app, and it would be natural for this to be Oculus Home or SteamVR, but it’s not. SteamVR at least lets you change environments and create them externally, but there’s no interactivity or customization in the app. Some of the most immersive, “wow” moments I’ve had in VR are when a game or app just puts you in a more or less regular room, like Fearless, The Visitor, Hulu, the computer room environments in Virtual Desktop, etc., and I think it’s something that people could latch onto as *the* VR app. I believe Facebook is putting their social emphasis on chat rooms, but I think that misses the mark for a lot of people who don’t just want a place to hang out, but would be social if they had something in common to build around – MMORPGs hit on this need, then Minecraft, and I believe VR could easily be next.

A start would be to provide some items for people to place around their rooms – static, non-interactive objects at first. Furniture, rugs, wall posters and paintings. Seasonal items like Christmas trees, Thanksgiving and Halloween decorations. Regular releases that get people to check in every now and then. Collectible items like stuffed animals, flags, stamps, world currency. Holders like shelves, cases, cabinets. Let us save our virtual homes and come back to them. Just be releasing stuff every week (and don’t neglect the organization and UI; redesign it when it gets unwieldy, and look into making it entirely user-configurable).

Then introduce more dynamic objects. Clocks, lights, gimgaws. Newton’s cradles, drinking birds, toy catapults, slingshots. Board games. Release, release, release.

As that matures, open up user creations (like Steam Workshop) and as people are creating their own objects, move into functionality. Create a timekeeping widget with code that people can incorporate to design digital alarm clocks, stately grandfather clocks, watches, toggleable holographic displays and voice activated time reports (“Oculus, what time is it?”). Music playing code that lets people stream music or play from their stored libraries and control it from virtual iPods and record players. Vehicle controlling code that lets people create tiny RC racers, full-size tanks or toy velociraptors. Combine that with virtual camera code to create quadcopter drones that output to holographic displays. Phones, televisions, email, weather reports. Make a widget for the storefront – maybe people want to see VR and nothing else, or maybe they want the full catalog. Maybe they want it to show up on a virtual computer screen, or maybe they want the current floating display.

See what companies are game to have their goods recreated in VR. See if users will want to bring their branded computer equipment into their VR home – Fractal Design cases with LEDs and windows, authentic computer monitors with accurately recreated bezels and stands, joysticks, HOTAS setups and steering wheels from Thrustmaster, Saitek, Logitech. In the kitchen, will GE, Frigidaire and KitchenAid want to see their refrigerators, mixers and microwaves in everyone’s home? In VR you don’t have to worry about storage, and a lot of this stuff will probably be free.

I mean, you kind of have to worry about storage. Once the list gets so big you don’t want to place everything directly from a unmanageable list. Think about a shopping cart/virtual inbox interface so people can buy things separately and then think about what goes where.

Keep building on the functionality. Multiple rooms. Exteriors: lawns, rock gardens, exotic scenery – wizard towers, satellites orbiting Saturn, underwater bases and volcano lairs. Shared neighborhoods to let people congregate with their friends and show off their creations. Avatars: clothing and accessories. Closets and hangers to store them, more widgets to let you switch immediately from fall to winter wardrobes. Pets! Dogs and cats and hamsters and birds and dinosaurs and made up animals. Fish in tiny fishbowls and plastic cups, three story aquariums with sharks and weird lantern-fish and octopi. A billion pet-related products. Cooking, home construction, gardening. Bigger and bigger environments, so people can start installing gondolas, zip lines, shuttle services – not because you need transportation, but because it’s cool to sit there and watch everything go by.

Start thinking about community events. Send each other presents that show up for people who have stockings or Christmas trees set up, with bonus gifts from Oculus to random recipients. A contest for the best Halloween decorations or Thanksgiving spread. Trick-or-treating to see other people’s setups and hang around with other people in costume. Christmas caroling. An Oculus Day to show off the latest creations in a giant mansion. Themed contests for recreating scenes from favorite books, movies and TV series.

If this whole thing became popular, Oculus could branch into being a provider of VR solutions. Maybe Hasbro has a new line of Transformers and wants to demo them without going to the time and expense of setting up a physical convention – they could talk to Oculus and have a team work with them to design an appropriate environment and mockups. Or someone wants to teach a class online, and needs Oculus to implement woodworking and the materials and tools needed. Themed cosplay conventions. 

I bought into VR on the PC because I was sure Oculus and Valve had all this in mind already, and more. It’s kind of disappointing that it’s not here yet, but I’m still excited and I’m just hoping that someone has the vision to realize the potential and put it in our hands. VR’s not just some games and movies, it’s a chance to build and have and see things that we can’t in real life. SteamVR and Oculus Home are the obvious places to start, and sooner would be better than later.

But to get started, what Oculus Home needs right now is an environment with persistence -- I modify it and it's saved and I can come back to it.

Start with something like this, the computer room environment in Virtual Desktop's workshop: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=635052335

Just a regular room that people will relate to and can think of as "their" room. Then start implementing features, one at a time.

First give us a few different desks and chairs and let us move them around and rotate them. 

One or two floor lamps and desk lamps. 

Options for the walls -- paint and wallpapers, paneling. Baseboard options.

Flooring -- wood laminate, tile, granite, linoleum, carpet. Rugs and mats.

Popcorn ceilings, tiled ceilings, no ceiling at all with the day or night sky looking in. Crown molding.

Chairs: Regular chairs, folding chairs, office chairs. Sofas, couches and recliners, beanbag chairs, corner sofas, massage chairs.

Posters and paintings. Advertisements for Steam games and peripherals. Fine art. Bonus if users can choose a picture frame, import an image file and resize it at will, then hang it on the wall.

Computers and TVs, video game consoles, receivers, things that people have in their real homes.

And then you start thinking about different rooms and fantasy locales, multiple rooms, exteriors and interconnectivity between users.

It's a snowball rolling downhill. Once it gets started there are just more and more things that can be added and the possibilities become obvious, but it needs that seed. I don't think Oculus and Valve should leave this to apps like BigScreen, Virtual Desktop, LightVR or whatever. It's going to step on some toes, but this needs money and commitment behind it.  Just throwing money around isn't going to make VR applicable to regular people; it's not a question of getting enough games and movies. VR should be about regular people being able to create and shape their own realities, and that starts with giving everyone a room that they can personalize.
15 REPLIES 15

Orogogus
Protege
Well, I can see the difficulty with discussion forums in VR -- there's no spectacular VR keyboard solution yet, so text entry is problematic.  A chat room is really not the same thing at all, especially if it's just 8 people.  They should try to see if some kind of smartphone-style swipe-typing is workable with the Touch controllers.

Whatever the difficulties are, however, the store really needs to include user reviews even if people have to type them in from a browser.  A storefront with a no return policy and no user reviews is kind of rubbish, Oculus.

kzintzi
Trustee

Orogogus said:


Whatever the difficulties are, however, the store really needs to include user reviews even if people have to type them in from a browser.  A storefront with a no return policy and no user reviews is kind of rubbish, Oculus.


are you sure you're seeing the same Oculus Home as the rest of us? are you even seeing Home at all? do you have a headset? user reviews have been in there for a while..

gotta be honest, seems like you're trying to get bites coz most of your arguments/issues are the same things people with a lot more posting history have been commenting on for a while.
Though you are more than slightly incoherent, I agree with you Madam,
a plum is a terrible thing to do to a nostril.

Orogogus
Protege

kzintzi said:


Orogogus said:


Whatever the difficulties are, however, the store really needs to include user reviews even if people have to type them in from a browser.  A storefront with a no return policy and no user reviews is kind of rubbish, Oculus.


are you sure you're seeing the same Oculus Home as the rest of us? are you even seeing Home at all? do you have a headset? user reviews have been in there for a while..

gotta be honest, seems like you're trying to get bites coz most of your arguments/issues are the same things people with a lot more posting history have been commenting on for a while.


I have a Rift, but I make purchases through the browser interface.  They put the reviews in the headset store but not the browser version? 😕  'Cause I'm looking at the browser store and it totally has no reviews.  But I know the headset store has sorting options while the browser store doesn't, so it's completely possible.  (EDIT: Just wildly unintuitive.  How do people even enter the reviews with the headset on?  You're talking about actual reviews, and not just the star ratings?  Those star ratings are another thing that don't show up on the web store, awesome)

Anyways if I'm just rehashing old topics then I'll stop.  Gotta make room for the people with posting history.

kzintzi
Trustee
not asking you to make room for people with posting history, it just seems that you're rehashing things that have been said before in multiple threads and been argued about ad-nauseam for so long if they come up again it looks like trolling. especially when you're total post count is basically your massive posts about how "its all wrong". if you're new here, Welcome to the party, if you're a lurker and been watching the forums for ages then that's cool too.

as for buying in the browser and then opening them in Home, ok sure (I'll admit I've never bothered opening the browser to buy stuff since it's right there in Home), but the review stars are right there in the Home interface - it's not like you can miss them :wink:

Though you are more than slightly incoherent, I agree with you Madam,
a plum is a terrible thing to do to a nostril.

Orogogus
Protege
Yeah, those stars are ratings, not reviews.  It's kind of baffling that the web interface doesn't have the ratings, but they're not critical.  On Steam or GOG I might use ratings to determine which games get a closer look, but for VR I'm looking at everything anyway.  It's more important to see why people are happy or unhappy with a title.  Sometimes it's a major issue that would affect my enjoyment, and sometimes everyone has a hangup that wouldn't concern me, especially if there's a rating bombing campaign going on.  Origin and Ubi don't have reviews, either, and it makes them kind of garbage, too.  If there were a generous return window then it might not be such a big deal, but the "all sales are final unless local law forces us to offer refunds" policy makes it real bad.  At least Origin has a return policy.

As far as posts go, until the Connect conference and the PSVR launch I wasn't really worried, but now I'm concerned whether Oculus knows what it wants to do on the PC.  If there are dead topics that just lead to flame wars, then maybe the mods should put those in the rules sticky and just tell people not to talk about them? I don't think it's a super good sign if anything I wrote up above falls in that category, but whatever.

Thmoas
Rising Star
Steam has been in development for how many years? Do you remember what Steam was and how it functioned in the first few years?

I see Home as just a storefront for now (and a launcher), it doesn't need to be more. Let them focus on other stuff before being able to add a custom chair and to walk up the stairs. Let's wait it out a bit and see where we are going. Let's see what touch offers, how the keyboard problem gets solved by clever developers etc...

I understand the features are really basic but they are just starting out if you compare them to Steam or Origin. I'm sure those things will come but they will want to do it with a VR snuff to it, and this takes time designing and developing.

The 2D Home should have the technicalities and the 3D Home I'm sure they will expand in the future. There's no point creating a 2D Steam or Origin clone, they are selling VR headsets, there's no point in that! I'm sure they are focussing on cool VR stuff instead of re-creating the same things that are already there in 2D.