Roblox, a family-friendly gaming platform, is gearing up for the next step in its VR journey. The company has become one of the few platforms to integrate a social aspect to the VR community. Currently on Roblox, you can chat with players across all platforms, meaning a tablet user can easily communicate with someone playing on PC with their Oculus VR.
Roblox CEO David Baszucki believes the company’s success is a testament of engaging user generated content for social immersion. The game is currently on the top of the Xbox Marketplace since its release in January. Even more unique is that Roblox is the only platform available that promotes crossplay from VR, to handheld devices, to consoles, to PC.
"Roblox is now the largest social VR experience because our Oculus players can join the whole Roblox network, which at peak times has over 550,000 players at the same time, and play along with people that are playing on phones and tablets and computers and so it's been a really rich experience,” Baszucki told iDigitalTimes. “We're deeply at work on several other platforms, as you can imagine, because Roblox on VR is a super immersive way to experience Roblox.”
A fun social experience on Roblox is important to Baszucki, but so is safety. Because the platform is geared towards a younger, the company has worked day and night on moderation systems in the chats. There are systems in place to protect users from potential bullying and derogatory language. The platform is meant to create a sense of community and have fun with other players across the world.
“We approach family safety really diligently,” Baszucki said. “All chat on Roblox runs through various levels of computer filtering. Alerts can be triggered so we can look for things that we might not want have happening in the system. We also have a user feedback systems where users can also flag users who are not being family friendly. We're pretty diligent on warnings and increasing levels of feedback to those users. The end result, unlike many other wide open environments, a very family friendly space."
The next logical step is for Roblox to incorporate voice chat into its VR experience. While Baszucki wouldn’t confirm the company’s plans for a more immersive VR experience, the Roblox CEO is excited to reveal its next wave of updates to the platform. In the end, Bazsucki and his time want to create a safe place for users to create their own video games and share them with the world.
"Long term, we want to integrate communication between VR and phones, tablets and computers across all platforms,” Baszucki said. “For family friendly usage, we want to make sure that's in an environment where we can moderate what is being spoken and typed, so we're working on towards a solution that's going to allow our VR users to communicate with phone and tablet users."
Learn more about Roblox on VR and its games on the company’s site here .
