It’s really exciting.Įxcept for the part where Facebook is at the center of it. There’s now no question that within single-digit years, believable human avatars based upon actual people will be interacting inside Ready Player One-caliber VR environments. At F8 this year, Oculus showed the next step: VR avatars that will render a person’s face, body, and kinematic movements as accurately as a CG movie. Years ago, I was enthusiastic about the idea that people could create online profiles to interact with friends and family, and that those profiles might grow to encompass personal histories - details, photographs, and videos. Between selling out voters to foreign manipulators and numerous other cash grabs that have put dollars over users’ well-being, trusting Facebook with anything personal is at best risky, if not downright stupid. Huawei might be the world’s poster child right now for questionable product security, but it barely compares with Facebook, which has historically worn its hacker culture and glib attitude towards privacy on its sleeve. While I hear Facebook saying that it’s building thoughtful privacy protections into all of its next-generation software, I find that almost impossible to take seriously. Yet once you actually see all the pieces in place, spanning a range of VR headsets and software that will enable people to exist online as virtual simulacrums, there’s an increasingly strong case to be made that Oculus’s VR work has become too important to trust to a company with Facebook’s baggage. And for all the promise of infinite virtual environments to choose from, it's basically a singular experience - extremely limited when compared to the simultaneous many-worlds scroll of the News Feed.Oculus wouldn’t be where it is today without Facebook - certainly its funding, and perhaps its vision, particularly on the software and infrastructure fronts. Its aim appears to be recreating a real-world social setting, complete with gesturing, eye contact, and - ugh - actual speech. Social VR epitomizes the opposite of this entire trend. You can be dropping hearts on someone's Star Wars meme one second, frowning at news about missile strikes the next. There's a certain falseness to Facebook "friends" you never interact with beyond the occasional Like or emoji-filled comment.īut you can't argue with how efficiently Facebook has pushed us down the social-media funnel, distilling out interactions to the point where we can blaze through a News Feed, reading, watching and reacting to dozens if not hundreds of wholly different updates. Facebook is all about breaking down your "socializing" to its most efficient forms: You can listen to, react, or say something in a conversation, but without all the "how do you dos" or small talk or all the other social lubricants that punctuate real human contact.Ĭertainly, there's a case to be made that you lose something by abandoning those frictional social norms. It did so by reducing those interactions to their most basic: the poke, the comment, the like. But it didn't do that by simulating real-world interactions online. Social VR still won't be a thing because it goes against everything Facebook represents.įacebook is now 1.8 billion users strong - it's fair to say, as the connected population goes, it's captured the planet. And even if it does, social VR still won't be a thing because it actually goes against everything Facebook represents. That's probably not going to change in the near term, or even a few years out. It still has to prove itself, it still needs a killer app, and the equipment is still unwieldy or expensive or both. By and large, the questions and concerns around VR have remained the same since the category's inception. VR has been a real thing people can buy for more than a year, there's no sense that it's really taking off. Credit: Facebookĭeveloper interest and financial largesse don't equal consumer interest, though, and on that standpoint, I just don't see it. Mark Zuckerberg talks to his wife, Priscilla Chan, from a VR environment.
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