Social VR platform Rec Room gave an update on growth and announced several new features today, including a terrain editor, a vehicle system and a Rec Room Xbox port.
A new video was posted that details ‘The Future of Rec Room‘, which comes just a few days before Facebook Connect, the annual conference where Facebook makes its big VR and AR announcements for the year. Given we’re likely to hear more about social VR competitor Facebook Horizon this week, Rec Room’s timing is likely no coincidence.
Rec Room now has over 3 million player-created rooms and games, with over 40 million room visits per month. The social VR service has also seen significant growth, with the community tripling in size since this time last year.
The biggest new features announced were the terrain editor and the vehicle system. The terrain system will allow users to go further with their environment creation and make entire worlds. Any custom terrain can be implemented into users’ rooms and games. While the video shows PC footage, Rec Room confirmed to UploadVR that the terrain editor will be available across all platforms when it launches and will support in-VR creation.
Similarly, a new vehicle system is also being added to Rec Room, allowing users to create their own vehicles, such as go karts, race cars, bikes and buses. It will support attaching players to vehicles and carrying passengers as well. You can see some prototype footage in the video above, but keep in mind that there’s no release date for either of these new features yet.
Rec Room will add in some form of economic system in the future as well, which will allow Rec Room creators to be paid for their work. Details on how it will operate are scarce for now, but Rec Room’s Cameron Brown said that the aim is for users to “be able to support [themselves] by building cool stuff in the Rec Room metaverse.”
Rec Room Xbox Confirmed
Rec Room will also be releasing on the Xbox ecosystem, including cross-play with all other VR and non-VR platforms. There’s no set date for the Xbox release, but those who are interested can sign up to Rec Room’s newsletter to hear more when the time comes.
Rec Room is available for free for PC VR, Oculus Quest, PC VR, Steam and iOS.
