Oculus introduces Facebook live streaming, Oculus Voice in new update

Explaining what VR is like can be a pretty daunting task. Today, Facebook and Oculus are making it a bit easier to share VR experiences with your friends and family.

Alongside a host of social features, which also included the addition of a new events app and viewing of 360 videos in Oculus Rooms, today Oculus showed off an update to its Gear VR platform that will allow users to share live gameplay footage of their virtual reality sessions directly to Facebook.

The feature, which is launching to users outside of the U.S. today and will be released here in the States “in the coming weeks,” is meant to increase the visibility of VR content and allow people to better showcase to their friends what playing VR is like.

This is only the latest Facebook integration into Oculus. Earlier this week, Facebook introduced their first VR app, Facebook 360, which serves as a home for the site’s 360-degree photos and videos. With these features, Facebook is better leveraging their community to increase access to VR and give users who haven’t tried it a better idea of what it’s all about.

The other big announcement that Oculus made today is the addition of voice search to the Oculus Home platform on both Rift and Gear VR. This is a pretty key evolution and will make discovering content that much easier as the library of gaming titles and experiences grows in the storefront. Onscreen keyboards in VR are about the worst thing to navigate ever, so the addition of voice search will definitely assuage some user frustration. Oculus Voice, as they are calling it, will be launching with search support, but will likely evolve to support more digital assistant-like tasks, such as seeing if a friend is online or other contextual commands.