Jun 12, 2017

Discover: Explore (open beta) - New Feature in Home

The Oculus Team Blog Hero Image

In an effort to make Gear VR content more discoverable, the Oculus team is excited to announce the launch of a rebuilt Oculus Home which includes Oculus Explore.

Oculus Explore is a way for people to discover and decide what to do in VR. It is a new, prominent stream of content targeted to a user’s interests and includes experiences from a wide range of sources: photos, videos, apps, the web and events. As the Oculus platform grows, our goal is to provide new ways for users to get quickly and easily to experiences that might be interesting to them, while aiding developers in attracting new users.

As a developer you can create Stories about your app. You might showcase experiences within your app or new features you’ve released. These stories are opportunities for users to download or re-engage with your app. Stories are shown based on a person’s interests. There are two types of Stories you can create:

Announcement Stories - These stories allow you to highlight changes or updates to your app such as new game modes, levels, social features, or character classes.
Standalone Experience Stories - These posts can be used to provide people with a preview for each self-contained experience in your app. This type of Story is best for apps that bundle multiple experiences (e.g. videos, photo sets, or standalone experiences).

Oculus also auto-generates stories for “trending”, high traffic apps. If your app is highly used and you want it to be eligible for a trending story, all you need to do is make sure you’ve submitted a cubemap and a 2D video trailer to the Oculus store.

To create a story, go to your app’s Oculus dashboard and click on Discoverability. Select the story type you want from the left hand menu and provide the following assets. Note: these stories are only shown to English-speaking users at this time.

Tagline - 2-5 word sentence about your story
Description - Provides more detail than the tagline. Should be 2-3 sentences about your story and cannot include HTML or other markup. This should be specific to your story content, it should not be a copy and paste of your app description.
Image - This should be different than your cover art. It should reflect your story and should be 16:9 Aspect Ratio and a 2560 x 1440 24-bit PNG file.
Facebook Trailer Video URL - After uploading a 2D or 360 video (preferred) to your Facebook Page, copy and paste the video URL and provide it here. See more details on video requirements below.
Cubemap - Please make sure you submit a cubemap for your app to the Store. This is required for all stories.
Start Time - The time you would like your story to start showing up in Oculus Explore.
Deeplink Message - A string that you create that will be provided as a parameter in the app launch intent. If a user does not have your app installed when clicking on the deep-link, we will prompt them to purchase your app. This is mandatory for In-App Content stories but not for Announcement stories.

Before submitting, remember to leave enough time for the review and feedback process. We will verify that the story is high quality before choosing to accept or reject your submission. You can check the status of a pending submission in your app’s Oculus dashboard.

If you would like to create new cubemap assets, you can view our best practices for creating cubemaps in our Oculus Store Art Guidelines document. You can find more information in our developer documentation portal here.