Me and my bud @vrbosenet have been using VR for years now, we are veterans of this technology. Just tried joining each other in Oculus Home and found the whole UX incredibly confusing and unintuitive. I can't imagine the frustration of a new user.
I'm not saying I have all the answers, but I can at least tell that this isn't how things should be. There are way too many places to look for various social actions (like inviting people, muting people, etc). In Dash, I regularly have to click things twice before they work.
Home is effectively its own app, but shares interface paradigms with Dash, which makes it yet more confusing as to where to go when you're looking to do something. If I want to invite a friend to my Home, do I so in Dash (same place where I would invite them to a party chat)?
Nope! You do it from a menu inside of Home that's hidden in a button on your wrist. There's little to no clear difference between visiting another user's Home (meaning by yourself) vs. visiting their Home WITH them, but these are done in two totally separate ways.
At one point, I found myself in Scott's Home, but I was in a separate copy of it while he was in another copy. Then we had to poke around for a few minutes to figure out how to both get in the same copy.
Visiting someone's Home (by yourself) involves grabbing orbs out of a menu and smashing them on the ground to 'open' them -- an interface paradigm not used anywhere else. Crazy idea guys, but how about we use a 'door' as a metaphor instead of smashing an orb?
A proper VR platform needs to be -- at least to some extent -- social everywhere, all the time. Not have small discrete moments where you are or aren't allowed to be with friends.
No one really has this solved yet, but that's because no one is taking a strong top down design approach to the whole thing.
And that's not to make it sound easy. It isn't. But it is necessary to break VR out of its limited form of siloed gaming experiences.
