If there's a bull case on FB to me it starts with the release of this Facebook Spaces beta.

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...

>We want Facebook Spaces to be a comfortable place for everyone. You have control of your experience, including the ability to pause at any time. Pausing moves you into a quiet space where you can take a break away from other people and activities. You can also choose to mute your friends or remove them from your space. Facebook Spaces is all about connecting with friends and family that you know and trust, and we’re committed to making VR a positive place for all.

The psychological implications my goodness...

I see Facebook are still pretending the HTC Vive and SteamVR is not a thing.

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.

> Be Yourself in VR

If second life shows anything, people want to be someone else in VR.

the seriousness that vr and vr social apps are addressed with is dumbfounding to me. watch the video at the bottom of the page -- this is a huge joke. nobody will ever put on a headset and grab their controllers when they could just use skype. skype, which is much less hassle and gives you a real face to face experience with the other persons actual face. vr/ar contact lenses are never coming within a window of time that any of us care about. vr in general will remain a useless gimmick for longer than any of us are willing to wait, probably well past all of our deaths. im sick and tired of vr hype.

This is super, super weird but could be huge.

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.

Very interesting. At this point, there may be many smaller startups that are more innovative or have higher quality VR apps, but if they are competing against FB's massive hold on all aspects of everyday life, there isn't much doubt who the winner will be.

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 watched the presentation. The most striking feature is that the avatar is created automatically from profile photos. It's probably possible to game the system, but the default is an avatar that looks like the real person. Compare this with Second Life avatars, if you've been there 10 years ago: they defaulted to some different 20-25 yo person. Not that the avatar of the speaker didn't look younger than she was, but it was still her.

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.

This looks exactly like every other social VR app, and is probably ripping off elements from several. (Of course, one could argue that social VR has been borrowing from Facebook all along.)

I can't wait until cyberspace literally becomes a consensual hallucination.

Do they have psychologists or psychology department in VR team/department?

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.

These avatars creep me out.

Facebook is an advertising platform, their main goal is to get new accounts and usage. They are going to get a lot of mileage with this via the API.

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.

I mean (besides it being Facebook), this is all well and good, but I don't see this being mainstream until VR headsets see some sort of mainstream. I guess this is some kind of chicken and egg problem, and Facebook wants to be at the forefront either way, but I can only see this being a very niche blend of Skype.

This is a pretty clever way to avoid the uncanny valley for VR videoconferencing. I assume we're a long way from photorealistic avatars based on the holoportation demo from MS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0

> It’s easy to create an identity that represents the real you in Facebook Spaces. This helps people recognize you and makes VR feel more like hanging out in person.

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?

While this probably is the future some day, I suspect that it will flop in the interim—creating a sort of Google Glass effect that turns people off to VR.

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.

This would be a great way for people with mobility issues to be included in activities.

It's like those services that popped up in the 90s that tried to translate things into the internet age. Like the service that would use your printer to print an entire newspaper for you ever morning.

Wow, those avatars actually look more obnoxious than the Nintendo Miis.

It's a cool gimmick -- and bordering on being a SecondLife spin-off -- but it won't ever replace face-to-face interaction, with digital models.

I can definitely see some usecases of these experiences. Not wanting to sound too negative, I would prefer to meet the people in person and drink a beer, eat a meal than to lounge around in some virtual room. I see the allure of it if you are staying in a place that is hard to reach. But travel itself is also an experience that can be enjoyed - even more so if it is far away and exotic.

This looks like it will have the same problem as early bluetooth headsets: you look crazy using them. As well as they can get it to work and as popular as it becomes among early adopters, it will never really catch on with the general public because most people are too afraid of looking like an idiot to use it in public.

So avatars are limited.

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.

I hope I'm wrong but I think we'll look at this in 5 years and laugh.

Yep.

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?

They won't support Steam and it will be their demise. And when they finally realize all is lost they'll add support, but it'll be too late. PC gamers like all of their digital PC games in one silo and that silo is Steam. Microsoft has repeatedly tried and failed to compete with Steam so the hubris of Facebook/Oculus to think they can win is amusing.

and this is why I think these initiatives will ultimately fail. They're way too closed and Facebook has yet to do anything meaningful outside of its social media space. VR is a totally different beast and you can certainly dress it up in social media clothing, but it doesn't mean VR suddenly falls under social media rules.

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.

Or Daydream

If you've actually tried a social/multiplayer VR experience, you would know the presence that being "physically with" the other person is much more impactful than a video chat. The avatars don't even need to look good, as long as they have a head and hands + voice communication, having a virtual environment that is much more human-like than talking to a flat screen is MILES better.

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.

Until you've played in a multi-player VR world with friends you are voice chatting with, you won't understand.

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.

I've always found Skype/Facetime/etc. to be off-putting - if only because by looking at the person I'm talking to forces me to appear to look under them (looking at the screen vs looking the camera). During interviews, I make the conscious effort to look at the camera so as to present a more normal eye contact for my viewer, but this undercuts my ability to read their physical responses. If I had true-to-size representation of a person, either in VR or with a 2D screen, that allowed me to use natural eye contact and body language I would use it far more often.

I disagree with you. I work remotely, I've had a lot of brainstorming meetings... and they almost always suck, to me the holy grail of remote work would be VR. I really want to have a meeting in VR where I can stand at a whiteboard (or an even better VR version) and show my ideas. The traditional tools REALLY suck.

Young people don't use Skype anymore.

I thought VR had already flopped, but it seems they want to keep beating that horse for a few more years.