Virtual Reality
When Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook two years ago, many were scratching their heads, wondering what the social network wanted with a startup virtual reality company. Now at Facebook’s annual developers conference, the company showed off some developments of how virtual reality might take social sharing to a whole new dimension.
At Facebook's F8 developer conference recently, company CTO Mike Schroepfer gave a live on-stage demo showing some of the first early development of the Facebook/Oculus Social VR team, and highlighting the potential of Oculus VR for social interaction. See the full video below.
Although it was obviously a prepared demonstration, probably with a bit of software 'smoke and mirrors', the potential for integrating virtual reality into the Facebook user experience was brilliantly shown.
During the demo, the two participants, separated by 35 miles interacted in VR with hand gestures, voice chat and head movements. Both users were wearing Oculus headsets and hand controller devices. The interaction between each of the participants seemed to be almost as natural as if they were standing together.
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In VR they could see each other as an avatar with resolution about as good as a Nintendo Mii character, but they did explore customizing each other by creating neckties for each other and then pinning them to the other's avatar. It was clear in the demo that hand movement and low latency important to social VR interactions.Using 360 degree photo disks the users brought up to their faces, they would visit different locations. The locations were static, but presumably the experience was very immersive through the Oculus headset.
The social app demo ended the pair taking a virtual selfie inside what looked like a 360-degree photo of London, and uploading it to their Facebook account by dropping the virtual photo into a digital mailbox.
Although it was a brief glimpse, Facebook's acquisition of Oculus is really starting to make sense, and the technology could really take off. In the future we really be able to meet up with each other anywhere in the world, or in any world for that matter and share experiences. What we do there, only time will tell.
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