Oculus Offer Ability to Watch Soccer World Cup Games in VR Parties

• Oculus aims to bring soccer fans together to watch the games in special VR parties.
• Facebook has teamed up with Fox Sports to offer a limited schedule of matches that cover some of the opening games of the tournament.
• The move may open the door for similar streaming of sporting events in the future.

The soccer World Cup is upon us, and it’s the first one that viewers will be able to enjoy in VR. Those with either a Samsung Gear or a mobile Oculus Go VR headset can watch matches on the move.

But Facebook has pulled out all of the stops by bringing to the tournament to its Oculus Venues app. The app projects major events - sporting and otherwise - into a virtual space in which viewers can gather to watch and discuss what’s happening on the screen using their Oculus avatars.

The app will feature several live streams of World Cup matches courtesy of Fox Sports over the next couple of weeks. Still, this move should serve as a test for the viability of VR as a means to showcase major sporting events. While the technology has indeed been used for such purposes in the past, this is perhaps one of the larger concerted efforts to bring Sports and VR together.

Facebook has also released a schedule of the games that it intends to stream via the app:

• June 17^th: Mexico vs. Germany (8 am PT)
• June 20^th: Morocco vs. Portugal (5 am PT)
• June 22^nd: Costa Rica vs. Brazil (5 am PT)
• June 24^th: England vs. Panama (5 am PT)

The app may also include later games in the tournament, though Facebook has yet to confirm anything beyond this initial schedule.

Unfortunately, the feature is only available to US viewers at the time of writing. Those in the UK can use the BBC app to live stream the games instead, though this doesn’t come with the party functionality of the Oculus Venues app. Oculus is also quick to point out that viewers in other countries can still use their headsets to watch matches and there are plenty of available streaming services.