Improve Concurrency in Your Multiplayer Games with Travel Together and Public Parties

Our goal is to help you build more immersive, social experiences for people in VR. Last year, we announced new social features like Rich Presence and Deep Linking APIs to let developers make content more discoverable and help people see the status of their friends in VR apps, join those friends instantly in VR, or share their in-game location with a link.

This week, we introduced two more features to help make it easier for people to meet up with friends or find others to play with: Travel Together and Public Parties. Travel Together lets a group of users travel as a group to destinations inside games, and Public Parties lets users find others to play their favorite games with. You can read more about it on our blog post here.

By integrating Travel Together and Public Parties, along with Rich Presence and Deep Linking, you can improve the opportunities for concurrency in your apps. You can implement these features in your app with the Oculus Platform SDK and these services with any app backend service, including Oculus Rooms API.

You can support Travel Together and Public Parties with two easy steps:

Destinations are places in your app that groups of people can navigate to. For example, it can be a social lobby that people can go into, or it can be the 2v2 gamemode. You can configure destinations in the Oculus Dashboard. Note that only destinations with Maximum Supported Group Launch greater than one will show up in Travel Together.

You implement the Deep Linking API to allow users to navigate to specific destinations inside your app. When users choose to Travel Together, we create a deep-link payload with the same room_id for all users. Your app will need to parse this room_id and put all users with the same room_id into the same instance.

There are many more features coming soon that take advantage of Rich Presence, Destinations, and Deep Linking. Be sure to review the documentation for Destinations, Rich Presence, and Deep Linking for Unity, Native, or Unreal, depending on your development platform. We look forward to seeing what sorts of unique social experiences you build with these latest updates!