Spaces - or something like it - along with an eventual great set of AR glasses or contact lenses - is the end game.
There's no question the long goal for corporate AR is to digitize the entire physical world, catalog it, and then sell outrageously effective ad inventory / flair against everything that we see.
Using a fairly controlled VR environment as the beta case for this to get us all hooked is a huge step in the right direction and they already own the entire social graph to execute in this direction.
I don't know whether I should be excited or terrified that it's FB leading this effort.
They have the scale to execute, they have the technology to support the crucial relationships but they are SO FUCKING INVASIVE into our lives as a company.
Raph Koster's lecture at GDC got some fairly broad attention on this concept, although his was geared more to the potential negative consequences, but it's still 100% worth a watch for anybody interested in the space.
https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/03/05/slides-for-still-logge...
From working in industrial AR for awhile, this is a tiny, tiny tip of the iceberg. The (actually very reasonable) buzzword bingo is smart contracts + blockchain + reality capture + HMI = rather a lot more than better advertising.
A while later he describes a companies responses to building features after a player virtually groping another player in a virtual archery space.
The model for AR/VR that seems most plausible to me is what's described in the book 'Lady of Mazes'[1] - really recommend people check that out if they find this talk interesting.
[1]: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/lady-of-mazes...
That's too far away to be able to predict accurately and it all rests on the lynchpin of the masses being interested in augmented reality.
Although slightly different, this was the case when computers were brought to the mass market. People didn't drop their real lives to become fully immersed in the digital world. Sure there is the minority of societal outcasts that spend their entire waking lives immersed, but that's all they are: a minority.
Of course, most things are on the uptrend to becoming "digitized" in the sense that everything you could ever need is online, but it's been a very slow course.
The average Joe barely even comes close to using the internet to its fullest potential. What makes you think something as complex and convoluted as AR (not to mention expensive) will be any different?
I think that AR will become as ubiquitous as our phones because all of the core functionality on a phone will be better on AR.
Instant alerts in my peripheral vision (again a non-obtrusive display is crucial)?
Call up directions while driving with cortana / siri and have lay over unobtrusively?
Watch TV on a 100" screen anywhere?
All things that I've done / played with in Hololens demos, all amazing, all "no question" will be massively adopted when they get the form factor correct.
Heck just look at a current app like SNAP - already on 50%+ of phones of 18-24 year olds - is a perfect app use case.
Camera, stories, sharing - all better and more accessible in AR.
And they're already demonstrating the desire / utility of AR via "filters" and their new "World Lenses" release today.
Want that bunny rabbit filter on all day as your "look"? Done.
Want it only accessible to your co-workers and not your boss, cool set it and forget it as long as the device knows your social graph.
The psychological implications my goodness...
Please ... they can't even do that for simple 2d enviroments. VR isn't some magic that'll fix that.
I won't have anything to do with FB in it's current incarnation.
Oculus need to support other headsets or they are going to fall even further behind. Win the mindshare where you can, because you are certainly not anywhere near winning the PC-VR space.
All they have to do is release Facebook Spaces for the HTC Vive. Why not? Why tie themselves to only one VR platform? That would be like Facebook only supporting iPhones.
My guess is that the higher-ups are suffering from the sunken cost fallacy, and think that they have to stay exclusive to the Rift to justify their Oculus purchase. After all, if they support the Vive, why did they need to purchase Oculus in the first place?
BTW - I actually do own all of that equipment (collecting older VR gear is a side hobby of mine).
An open API will allow for any VR gear manufacturer to participate.
Think about it this way - what if in the beginning, Facebook only supported Dell branded PCs - or more realistically, only Mozilla on Linux - back when they started? Do you think they'd have been as successful? No way to know, of course, but only supporting one (or a few) manufacturer's devices doesn't seem like the best way forward for quick market saturation.
Whereas an open api would allow for far more people to get into the game; and if things started to take off, you would also see new independents spring up to sell lower cost HMDs, VR rigs, tracking systems, etc as demand heated up.
In a way I pity Zuckerberg. I feel like he's only known how to be a monopolist and, frankly, got lucky with both friendster and myspace being messy user-unfriendly messes who dropped the ball for him to pick up.
Spaces should have SteamVR, Hololens, and Daydream support on day one. Rifters already are geeky types who shun the facebook product and, if being social, can be found on Altspace or Rec Room. Its a big move, even for them, to go to Spaces where all your relatives are one click away and where you can't even use a fake name.
Worse, getting Grandma on a VR set is somewhat ridiculous. Even if we imagine a gen 2 or 3 in the coming years, there are practical limits to how much these things can be shrunk considering the FoV you want. They will always be clunky things you need to attach to your face. I'm sorry but Facebook casuals aren't running the to store for nerd goggles.
Everything about this is off message. I suspect this is another Zuck stinker like the Facebook phone. The problem is phones have competition so consumers chose against it. VR social apps have competition as well and I don't see consumers rushing to Facebook for this either.
If second life shows anything, people want to be someone else in VR.
I'd rather hang out with long-distance friends in VR than in video chat, which I've always found to be awkward and uncomfortable personally.
When I hang out with friends in real life, we usually do some activity too. It's not just showing up at their house with a photo album every weekend. We watch movies, play board games, cook food, or various other things while we socialize.
The other day, I played VR disc golf with my buddy who lives on the other side of the globe in a completely different country.
After that, we went into a virtual world sandbox where we essentially played giant legos together and drew and shaped a bunch of stuff. We collaboratively built a rocket ship and then we blew it up. We literally just spent hours together, playing together like kids, even though we are grown up adults. It was a blast.
Maybe for your super techy types like us, but this isn't translating down to people who casually use fb and skype. Its clunky and confining.
Free potential idea?
Use the camera and a model to re-map the video image in such a way that it appears the person is looking at you, despite looking down (or wherever) when looking at your image on the screen...? Might have to use some kind of ML system or something to "fill in the missing details", or some other kind of graphics tricks to make it look somewhat proper...
I don't find the life sized hologram thing to be that valuable. I would much rather all that money go into a zero-latency, high quality video/audio experience. life sized holograms don't solve this fundamental quality of communication issue.
am I just being a curmudgeon?
It's very Black Mirror, it sort of makes me uncomfortable but I can't explain why. I think it could be a much better version of what Facebook is trying to be, but .... something's off.
More experienced peers, who lived in times when IBM or Microsoft seemed to be all-pervasive (like FB/Google are today): Do you think these companies will fade away in the next few decades? Or they will go on to be 100-year old companies, like today's car/oil companies.
I think this has to do with making Spaces a "comfortable place for everyone", where you recognize your friends and don't mingle with strangers. It means it's an extension of the real world and actually many of the Spaces in the video were overlays over the real world. It goes more in the direction of augmented reality than virtual reality.
They also presented some interesting stuff in the areas of object recognition, 2D pics to 3D scene transformations, interacting with objects in those scenes, simultaneous localization and mapping (setting virtual objects precisely at a position). Technologically they were the most interesting announcements, in my opinion.
The news about Messenger were somewhat underwhelming: smart replies, M suggestions, game challenges, chat extensions. Interesting but not ground breaking. I'm still waiting for end to end encryption to chatbots (encryption is granted on the network but FB's servers see the messages in clear) and for WhatsApp bots.
After facebook era, I don't really buy what facebook is building. That doesn't seems to be a right social network (driving people crazy, lonely, unhealthy addicted, etc.)
If we are going to go full healthy virtual world, please think carefully.
I used to live in a city (Bangkok) that has most active facebook users in the world. The society is sick. When everyone is psychopathic, no one knows who is. That's bad to me, then I moved out to a peaceful city in the northeastern, closed facebook account. Life is going normal now.
Can you elaborate on what you mean here? In what way is the society of Bangkok "sick and psychopathic"?
They can't be particularly creative without alienating subsets of the audience. What you're seeing is basically committee-approved art: many layers of approval given the ability to veto stuff that's 'weird', leading to a bland pablum that offends everybody equally.
Developers will create useful and unexpected applications with this and in order to use the new apps you will need a facebook login.
It generates new users for them and helps to prevent someone else from stealing their user base.
Avatars get around this by projecting a person who isn't wearing a headset.
Can someone remind me if they still require you to go by your full legal name, or do they let you identify yourself the way you prefer to?
I'm sure they don't have many choices from a technical perspective, but the cartoon avatars are kind of creepy if not cringe-inducing.
Sure. But once you've had the experience of your circle of friends dispersing to different cities, the appeal becomes immediately obvious.
I'd say the real problem is that chat is good enough - it's why Google Hangouts never really took off as a place to "hang out"
Makes sense, but it could also open up a way to sell premium avatars. Or really, rent their use.
If I could design my own avatar, then pay $10 a month for it to be approved and then available to just myself in various online spaces, that would be very cool.
http://www.wsj.com/video/creating-virtual-reality-worlds/E18...
There's also High Fidelity, an open source, distributed VR metaverse started by the founder of the same company.
Second Life / High Fidelity are much closer to the ideas behind the Metaverse than this.
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/23/virtual-reality-allows-t...
Emotion detection as a service? I'll pass.
