Say Cheese! Today we’re launching the Dream Cam, which lets you open up a navigable virtual camera that works with any web site that supports a webcam and mic.
Try it out for yourself, Dream is available for free on Oculus or Steam.
We’re really excited to launch this new feature which breaks down barriers any passionate VR user is likely familiar with. For the first time, it is possible to connect with anyone from VR regardless of whether they have access to a VR headset or not — all they need is a mobile phone or laptop.
Our goal with Dream is to make it as easy as possible to connect and collaborate with anyone, so what can you do if that other person doesn’t have a VR headset? The solution to this seemingly intractable issue presented itself as we were using our virtual camera solution to make explanatory feature videos. What if we could somehow connect that same camera as a webcam to our integrated browser? Then anything from teleconferencing on Skype to streaming on Facebook Live would just magically work.
This ended up being significantly easier said than done. After months of tackling some hard problems, we’re launching this feature today. As always, Dream is available for download on both Oculus and Steam for free. To use the Dream Cam open it up manually from the menu and use it with a website of choice or it will automatically open when you enact a call on a service like Skype, or when a website attempts to access the webcam or microphone.
We’ve tested this with the following services: Skype, Google Hangouts/Meet, Facebook Live, YouTube Streaming, and even Zoom’s web client. Anything that supports a webcam and mic as a website will just immediately see the virtual camera as a webcam and mic input. Currently Facebook Messenger does not work due to a Dream Browser bug that will be resolved in an upcoming release.
Since the Dream browser is entirely integrated into our custom engine and stack, we were able to rewrite parts of the architecture of Chromium to pull video and audio directly from our engine. As such, this does not require any external software like OBS or arbitrary Windows drivers that need to be installed — this feature is entirely encapsulated in Dream, and will work out of the box.
That’s not all that’s new. We’ve added a new integration for Twitch so you can quickly navigate your account and tune into your favorite streamers which will show up when they’re live.
It’s also now possible to bookmark favorite websites. This makes it much more convenient to go back to websites that you use often.
Finally, we’ve made a number of performance improvements to Dream and fixed numerous bugs. These improvements are particularly noticeable on minimum spec machines, as we’ve cut down significantly on CPU usage.
We’re excited to see what people do with this new feature. Whether it’s calling your Mom from VR or streaming to YouTube, the sky is the limit with who you can call and what you do with one another.
Idan Beck
Dream — CEO
