Facebook is keen to improve the process of joining VR experiences via its Quest headset. Today at the company’s Connect conference, they announced that Quest users will be able to make and take audio calls via Messenger. The functionality will be available later this year, the company says.
The Quest has generally struggled with its social interfaces over the years, a surprising shortcoming for a device made by a social networking company. Its new mandate last year for users to sign into the platform with their Facebook IDs created some PR issues for the company but has enabled them to eliminate some redundancies in their social workflows.
Users will be able to make calls, send messages or request users join their “party” directly from the native Messenger integration inside the Quest.
Earlier this year, Facebook announced support for Messenger chat inside the Oculus ecosystem, but audio calls will likely help users organize VR meetups more efficiently and help them stay away from typing in VR, which is still a pretty rough experience.