Back in 2014, Facebook raised some eyebrows when they bought the virtual reality company Oculus for $US2 billion. This week at Facebook’s F8 developers conference, we got a look at some of their ideas for VR.
The above video, uploaded by Marketing Land, shows Facebook chief technical officer Mike Schroepfer demonstrating some in-development ideas for how VR might let us share space and socialise with our online friends. It’s fun, if not exactly revelatory: competitors like Altspace VR are also experimenting with this kind of thing, though I could see a company with Facebook’s resources being able to bring a lot of development muscle to things. It certainly won’t hurt that they already have such a massive user base, too.
The best part of the demo happens at the end, when Schroepfer goes to give his friend a high five. His buddy makes a dap fist, and they wind up doing a VR version of the “Now I’m grabbing your fist with my open palm because I thought we were doing a high-five.”
Classic. VR really is like real life!
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5 responses to “Facebook Shows Off How They Might Use Virtual Reality”
That top gif looks a little too “Lawnmower Man” for my liking
So basically it’s perfect, all we need is some spinning gyro contraption and we’re ready to get IN the computer 🙂
That was kind of disappointing. It’s a little disheartening that most of the ideas coming out at the moment are “Do what we do now, but in VR.” Sure it looks impressive and has an initial fun factor but many attempts at this kind of virtualisation have failed previously. (eg. Home) I guess it will be down to marketing and how strong the social effect of “My friends are doing it so I should too” is. Can’t wait for Facebook to start selling you in VR like they do now too.
Using VR for face to face communication and allowing people to be in/look at things they aren’t near (eg. Concepts and geographical locations) is the best use of VR I’ve seen so far though.
Gamers swarming to HTC Vive / Steam VR – Confirmed?
Seriously… this is the sort of crap that’ll really turn off gamers.
And you need them as the early adopters, if you think there is any chance of getting the social-network masses interested in VR.
because being an obnoxious phone retard zombie isn’t obnoxious enough