YouTube VR will have shared rooms and voice chat instead of comment sections
The virtual reality version of YouTube is adding shared rooms that will let people view 360-degree videos together, part of a larger update to Google’s Daydream VR platform. The new feature, coming later this year, offers what YouTube VR product lead Erin Teague calls a “co-watching experience.” That means that small groups of people can enter a viewing session, talking to each other via voice chat.
Teague describes community as “one of the core pillars that makes YouTube YouTube.” People will have control over what they’re viewing, but they’ll be able to see what other people are watching and choose to sync up the same video. People will appear as customizable (but generally human-looking) avatars, and they’ll speak out loud in real…
