Cheerio is a new social virtual reality app, free to download on Oculus Go, Rift, and Quest, which calls itself the first social VR matchmaking experience. The concept is prehaps best explained with the following one-minute video:
According to their official press release:
After first launching on Oculus Rift and Go in early 2020, and tens of thousands of users joining since, Cheerio today announces that the company closed a pre-seed fundraise and has launched on Oculus Quest App Lab and Sidequest. With this launch, Cheerio introduces features brand new to Social VR to help people build one-to-one relationships, expressing themselves as personalized 3D avatars.
• Leave the app but not the conversation by recording holograms (3D video avatar recordings)
• Meet many people quickly, browsing through profiles and having one-on-one speed chats
• Control who you meet with age and gender filters
…
Users personalize 3D avatars and can communicate with others by recording and sharing public and private holograms. Online users can randomly match, one-on-one, with each other and travel together to 170 billion 360-images via Google Street View. Users upvote and downvote others’ public holograms and can
friend each other.
The idea of 3D recording your avatar (called “holograms”) reminds me of that feature in ENGAGE. There’s not much you and your match/friend can do other than explore Google Street Maps together, however. Another drawback is that Cheerio does not appear to support VR headsets using Steam instead of Oculus.
I will add Cheerio to my ever-expanding comprehensive list of social VR platforms and virtual worlds (which I promise I will reorganize and recategorize soon!).
