I was recently playing some new VR games (Scanner Sombre and Psychonauts and The Rhombus of Ruin), and found the Oculus interfaces have seen a major upgrade – both Home and their dashboard are much nicer now. Since it’s been a pretty pleasant experience, I decided I’d write a quick post about it.
Your Virtual Home
Oculus Home used to be very boring. It was a pretty environment for you to stand in place and view the store and your library. I enjoyed my SteamVR home much more – you could customize everything and viewing your library was a small part of what your home was. SteamVR still has some advantages over Oculus Home (there’s scavenger-hunt like stuff in different worlds, and some of the informational screens in the home are more useful), but Oculus Home is quickly becoming just as good (if not better).
First off, your Oculus home is now customizable. The shape of the home is always the same, but you can change the ceiling, floors, walls, and items in the room. I changed mine to a sci-fi looking home that looks out on a sun and planets. Within the space, you can place decorations like tables, shelves, seating, lamps, and plants to make it your own. There are also several “toys” you can place, like a blaster, a bow, and targets to shoot at. You can also place a VR game console and cartridges based on the games you own. You can put a game in the console to launch it. It’s a fun way to interact with your library. And just like Steam, you can unlock new items over time, mostly just by playing.
You can also place TV screens and add a stream to them. Currently I can only add my desktop, but I could see this being used to display Twitch streams or YouTube videos (if they ever do something like that).
I don’t often make use of the social aspects in most VR games (or any game, really), but you can also invite other people to your Oculus Home and interact with them. Steam has done the same for a while now, but it’s nice to see Oculus finally catching up.
The new Dashboard – “Dash”
Along with the home update came a change to the dashboard you can bring up while in games. The old dashboard was dull – a flat panel in a big empty room. The new dash is still in a big empty room, but you now have an arc of buttons that float in front of you (like Windows’ taskbar), and you can easily navigate to the store, your library, social areas, or back to your home.
My favorite part of the new dashboard is the virtual desktop they’ve added. This was always an area where Steam was way ahead – being able to interact with your desktop within VR was necessary sometimes; I even bought a virtual desktop application a few years back when Oculus didn’t have their own. The virtual desktop Oculus implemented is easy to use and fits in with the rest of their new Dash UI very well. There’s even a beta feature where you can pull windows off your virtual desktop into their own VR windows. I can now edit spreadsheets in 3D! Apparently you can also pin windows so they stay visible while playing other games. I can watch Netflix in my spaceship in Elite or watch YouTube tutorials while I play a game.
Another feature that I really enjoyed was a simple VR watch you can strap to your virtual wrist. It shows the date and time and has a few buttons for quick navigation to some areas (like notifications). It’s a little touch that’s really nice to have. Unfortunately, it only shows up when you’re using the new dashboard or in your home.
I’ve also noticed Oculus will track any VR application you run, bought from the Oculus Store or not. This is great because I can now easily launch my Steam games without having to launch SteamVR first. If I could link my Steam library to Oculus somehow, I’d probably never need to launch SteamVR again (unless I wanted to, of course).
With the new UI, I’m actually much happier with the Oculus experience. Steam was certainly faster to make the home experience better, but I’m happy to see Oculus finally catching up. In the past, I’ve really only used the default Oculus apps until I got SteamVR running. Now, I’ll probably stick within Oculus’ realm most of the time. Which was probably the goal to begin with.