IMMERSE insights:
- Quest 3 makes it easier than ever to make new friends and hang out with old ones from the comfort of your own home
- Often, the best social VR apps are multiplayer games and experiences designed for small groups to engage in a specific activity together
- Walkabout Mini Golf, Wooorld, and IMMERSE are great places to start finding your community in VR
One of the greatest uses of virtual reality is for immersive social interaction. If you want to use your Quest 3 headset to spend time with people, it’s worth thinking about which VR apps will work best for that.
What are social VR apps?
Social VR apps provide a unique social platform where users can interact and connect with others in a virtual space.
These apps offer a wide range of functionalities, including the ability to create custom avatars, explore virtual environments, and engage in various activities with friends and communities.
By utilizing virtual reality technology, users can IMMERSE themselves in a social space that goes beyond traditional online platforms.
Even early social VR apps, like Rec Room, offer a dimension of social interaction, enabling users to communicate, collaborate, and have shared experiences in virtual environments, fostering a sense of presence and connection in a digital world.
Real People, Virtual Worlds
Wondering about the best places to hang out with friends and meet new people in VR with your Quest 3?
The big social VR platforms, like VRChat and Horizon Worlds, are easy to find. Like most large public spaces, however, these apps aren’t necessarily all that great for meeting people. They can be difficult to navigate, too generic for meeting people with shared interests, and fraught with relatively high numbers of disruptive individuals.
Just as you wouldn’t wander aimlessly around random locations in the real world hoping to make friends, you won’t have much success doing that in big social VR platforms either. There are people who love these apps, but they tend to hang out with their existing friend groups in private instances that newcomers can’t join.
If you want to forge meaningful connections with real people in the virtual world, the so-called social apps aren’t your best bet. Instead, look for apps that provide a fun shared activity or experience. Meeting people over a shared interest is the best way to make genuine human connections in VR - just like in the real world. Multiplayer VR platforms focused on a special interest such as bowling, poker, puzzle solving, or language learning tend to have friendly communities that welcome like-minded newcomers with enthusiasm.
Even if you already have friends in VR, this type of app provides a superb way to hang out with them. Sharing a chill game of mini golf, exploring a new city, or practicing your archery skills while you learn French vocabulary - why just hang out when there’s so much to do together?
With that in mind, here are three of the best Quest 3 apps for socializing in VR:
Play and Connect: Walkabout Mini Golf
Immersive VR lends itself to physical movement, so it’s no surprise that there are a multitude of apps where you can mingle with others while you play sports like bowling, basketball, and archery.
Many of these apps are worth a look, but one of the most beloved is Walkabout Mini Golf. Some of its wild popularity is due to the app’s design - the game blends realism and fantasy as only VR can. The highly realistic physics and fantastical settings make everything feel comfortingly familiar and excitingly new at the same time.
But while you can play Walkabout Mini Golf alone, it excels as a social game, providing all the unhurried fun of hanging out with friends on a real mini golf course. The controls are simple and the game is appealing for VR users of all ages.
Missing your friends and family far away? Meet up for a casual round of mini golf and chat while you play. You can create a private group for up to 7 players.
In the mood to play with someone new? Use the Quick Match system to be paired up randomly with another player somewhere out there in the metaverse. The courses are entertaining and mini golf is the perfect icebreaker, so strike up a conversation and have a good time.
User reviews agree that Walkabout Mini Golf is a great app for socializing in VR:
Explore and Connect: Wooorld
If you’ve ever wished you could step into the screen and stroll around inside Google Street View with your friends, VR has you covered. There are a couple of apps that use Street View’s 360 images to let you travel virtually to places around the globe and have a look around.
If you’d love to discover the world with other people, Wooorld is the perfect VR app for you. You can explore on your own, with a private group of friends, or in the public setting.
Meet up with existing friends in Woorld so you can take them to your childhood home, show them the neighborhood where you live now, and even explore together inside major museums around the world.
Looking to spend time with new people who share your passion for seeing the world? Wooorld includes a cooperative geography guessing game that transports you to a series of five locations in Street View, where your team searches for clues until you figure out where you are and mark your guess on the map.
Joining a game in progress is the best way to get used to using the app, as you’ll have friendly people to help you if you have questions. It’s also one of the best ways to meet new people in VR. Players hail from all over the world, and the cooperative spirit of the game makes it easy to talk to everyone.
User reviews note that the social aspect is one of the best features of this VR app:
Learn, Connect, and Grow: IMMERSE
The immersive nature of virtual reality makes it an ideal environment for learning a new language. Sure, you can go to another country to immerse yourself in a language - or you could just do it in VR.
There are several VR language-learning apps accessible from the Quest 3, and they vary in degree of interactivity, languages offered, and learning design. However, the only multiplayer VR platform for learning a language is IMMERSE.
While IMMERSE offers solo learning activities like practice scenarios with AI conversation partners, the live interactions like classes and conversation events are where you’ll become part of the community. Currently offering Spanish, French, and English, IMMERSE was designed around the idea that to truly learn a language, you need opportunities to use it for communication.
Have friends that want to learn a language? Get together for a lesson or a conversation event. You’ll learn, but you’ll also have a lot of fun because you’ll learn while cooking (or possibly burning!) food together, toasting marshmallows, or having a squirt-gun fight on the beach. That’s the beauty of learning a language through immersion - the more active you are, the better you’ll learn.
Want to meet new people while spending your time in a meaningful way? The IMMERSE community is active and welcoming. There are public spaces for playing games like pictionary, vocabulary archery, and basketball, and if you use the public setting when you visit the AI conversation partners, you could meet new people while you practice.
User reviews show that joining the community is one of the best things about IMMERSE:
What are you waiting for?
It has never been easier to access immersive social experiences from the comfort of home. Whatever your hobby - cooking, RPGs, art, sports, learning, or anything else - check for VR apps that will let you socialize in the metaverse while doing something you love. Your community is out there waiting for you!
