Virtual house parties, dinners, tours and games let you run wild in self isolation

We might be locked down in the real world, but in the virtual world, we are running wild.

Houseparty group video chat app

We might be locked down in the real world, in self isolation or quarantine. In the virtual world, we are running wild, hosting house parties, visiting museums and zoos, attending dinner parties and playing board games. Some pastimes are taking off online.

Houseparty

Houseparty has experienced a surge in growth since the coronavirus outbreak. It’s a free group video chat app with a difference. Not only can you hold face-to-face video group chats with friends and their friends, you can also share your computer screen with them and play games and quizzes across the internet, as if you’re sitting around the lounge room together. Games include Heads Up, Quick Draw and Trivia.

You can enjoy virtual dinners and drinks together, there is a virtual happy hour, and your friends can move casually between different houses. You can pull in friends from Facebook and Snapchat.

Houseparty is available for iOS, Android, the iPad and MacOS.

Virtual dinner parties

There are lots of ways to put together a virtual dinner party. You can use your favourite video chat service to create a group call with other participants. Zoom, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp Messenger, Google Duo, Skype and FaceTime are options.

How you set the scene for dinner is up to you. You could set up your own dinner table with spare monitors at the other ends, with guests appearing on videos sitting at their own tables. You could use a Google, Amazon or Facebook video hub for a monitor.

To give things a sense of unity, you and your friends might agree to cook the same food and bring it out at the same time, so that you start your appetisers, main course and dessert in sync.

You could share a few glasses of wine together as well.

You can make a project out of it. Buy some cheap, refurbished monitors online and put them around the table where your guests would normally sit, and turn your isolation and quarantine into a procession of virtual dinner parties every night.

AltSpaceVR

An image from Altspace VR

AltSpaceVR is a virtual space where you can hire a virtual room, meet up with your friends, watch movies together, conference and play games, as if you were all in the same room. You can virtually watch a movie together.

You are represented by your avatar in an environment that’s a little like Second Life.

AltSpace VR allows for some powerful scenarios. At one stage it hosted Spanish classes. Your avatar would be in a room together with all the other students internationally in that class, from across the world.

There’s a choice of how you interact with your virtual world. You can use a regular keyboard, mouse and screen in two dimensions in Microsoft Windows, or enter an immersive world by donning a VR (virtual reality) headset.

AltSpaceVR works with Oculus, HTC Vive and Samsung Gear VR headsets. Go online at altvr.com.

Virtual tours

Don’t give up on discovering the world. There are apps that let you visit festivals around the globe, historic sites, join sailing voyages, fly with NASA and visit museums.

You need a virtual reality headset and a phone. You can build your own VR headset with Google Cardboard but you can buy VR headsets cheaply enough, or splash out and buy an Oculus or HTC Vive premium headset.

The Google Expeditions app gives you access to a range of tours and adventures.

Alternatively, organisations such as zoos run live streaming cameras on exhibits. There’s Zoos Victoria and Queensland’s Lone Pine Sanctuary. In the US, there’s the San Diego zoo, Memphis Zoo and more. There’s a fantastic list of museums, zoos and theme park virtual tours here.

Online board games

The world of board games is well and truly online, with gaming platforms that not only let you play opponents online, but help you to build your own. Games are rendered and delivered in 3D. Tabletopia lets you play more than 800 board games online for free. They include AuZtralia (a game set in the 1930s in which Australia is waiting to be explored), draughts and chess. Board Game Arena claims to have more than two million opponents ready for you to challenge you playing 175 games.