Meta wants to expand the VR experience for kids beyond immersive gameplay and into social engagement. 

Later this year, the techco is planning to roll out a new feature for its Meta Quest headsets that will let parents add approved contacts that their 10- to 12-year-old kids can call and play VR games with. This builds on the parent-managed family accounts that Meta launched in September 2023 to help pre-teens have VR experiences in a safe way. Features offered with these kid-friendly accounts include time limits on device usage, firmer privacy settings and restrictions on the use of collected data to only serve up age-appropriate games. 

And Meta is now advancing its kids push with this impending addition of a social component that allows pre-teens to hang out with friends in VR, which is something 13+ users can already do. The company has also built in some safeguards designed to help parents feel OK about their kids being active in this space. They’ll have the option to delete approved contacts at any time, and earlier this year, Meta asked its headset users to confirm their birthdate in order to serve up the right protections to underage users.  

Despite the technology’s evolution and plenty of experimentation happening, the VR trend has yet to take off in a major way in the kids industry. This is partly because leading headset manufacturers such as Sony and Samsung say their products should only be used by kids ages 12 and up. 

This obstacle may be preventing a bigger zeigeist from developing, but some companies are already earning from VR games for kids and families, including Dark Slope in Toronto. Distributor SoReal VR just inked a licensing deal this week to bring Dark Slope’s Scarygirl: Mission Maybee game into Chinese VR venues including Shanghai Disneyland. And there are already a few kids titles available to Meta Quest users, including Resolution Games’ Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs, Baba Yaga from Baobab Studios and Myth: A Frozen Tale from Walt Disney Animation Studios.