http://i.imgur.com/WQ3HJWq.jpg

"Social VR" is a buzzword Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing hard ever since the Facebook acquisition of Oculus. It was hard for me to imagine a social VR experience I'd actually want to have at the time, perhaps due to lack of imagination. It just didn't work in my head. Awkward, stuffy and artificial. 

http://i.imgur.com/ByRNiEj.jpg

The reality of it is far and away better than I ever thought possible. It's allowed me to spend time with a friend who lives across the country as if we were in the same room together. I have Touch, he doesn't (he's on a DK2) but simply being able to see where he's looking, for him to be able to nod or shake his head, adds a whole additional layer of communication fidelity over just using Skype or something.

http://i.imgur.com/Twi9LX1.gif

Vive wands and Touch controllers are supported, but so is Leap Motion and Razer Hydra (though that last one is better on paper than it is in practice, or so I'm told). This opens up the possibility of hand gestures to anybody with any SteamVR compatible headset, which is just about everything out there. 

http://i.imgur.com/jWDNoYj.jpg

There's also something like customizable avatars, but only the head. It's similar to Oculus' own avatar system in that they saw fit only to represent the parts of you which are trackable, namely the head and hands, rather than risk any goofy looking broken joint weirdness that sometimes happens with inverse kinematics. 

http://i.imgur.com/DX4DOKS.jpg

None of these are me, but I was told by a buddy upon seeing my avatar for the first time that it looks like "gay Neo". I didn't know what to make of that, but the capability is there to create about the same diversity of appearance as offered by Nintendo's Miis, for example.

http://i.imgur.com/ne0J89F.jpg

It took a fair bit of digging through settings to get everything to work. VOIP didn't work at first, after that was solved (my mic was disabled) he couldn't hear the audio from my screen (I needed to install an outside program to enable desktop audio streaming) and so on. But eventually everything worked, and it's *glorious* now.

http://i.imgur.com/k6jWLw7.jpg

Besides the obvious application of gaming as if you're right next to each other, there's also good old fashioned Youtube. Watching the same video and commenting on it to each other in real time really drives home what a game changer virtual telepresence really is. 

http://i.imgur.com/NWOIZi9.jpg

It's a trick to get emulated console games working over the net, but it doesn't go through Bigscreen. It works outside of it as normal. So any game you already have which is netplay capable should work. You can play it on your own virtual monitor while your buddy plays on his. Something like a virtual LAN party.

http://i.imgur.com/EjLkBwb.gif

I'm unsure whether to give this a rating at all. It's not a game, is it? But it is excellent, free (currently) and adds immeasurably to playing a game online with a friend if he happens to have his own VR rig. 

If not, it's a compelling reason to buy one. I'm giving Bigscreen an 8/10. Immense promise, but rough around the edges, as you might expect from a beta. That's not a final score and will undoubtedly change when the final version becomes available.

*<sup>All images courtesy of Oculus and Bigscreen, Inc.</sup>*