Facebook has announced Facebook Spaces, a Virtual Reality (VR) augmentation for its messenger service utilising Oculus Rift. Do you want to live in it?
Facebook executives stressed that the technology is still in its early stages, and that the "journey to the future of augmented reality is just 1 percent finished", as Deb Liu, vice president of platform and marketplaces, put it.
"Over time, I think this is going to be a really important technology that changes how we use our phones", Zuckerberg predicted.
That makes sense, assuming you're into the idea of wearing a computer on your face (and you're OK with Facebook intermediating everything you see and hear, glitches and all).
In addition to launching the Camera Effects Platform, Facebook introduced several other new offerings on the first day of the conference, including the Facebook Spaces VR social application for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, the Developer Circles collaborative community and Places Graph, which opens up access to place names, addresses, photos, consumer ratings, and more for over 140 million places around the world. The app lets users enter VR world where they find a cartoon avatar that acts as a guide.
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AR software is already available on smartphones: displaying information over a monument, for example, placing virtual objects in the physical world, like Pokémon Go, and transforming images, like Snapchat's filters, to generate amusing effects on people.
The social media giant says that this represents a new way to interact with friends on the service through the creation of virtual avatars in shared virtual spaces.
"We know we need to do better", Justin Osofsky, Vice President of global operations at Facebook, wrote in a post on Monday. The idea is simplify what might otherwise require a flurry of texts and sharing of links.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered his condolences to the family members of a man killed in Cleveland on Sunday, whose assailant shared the video of murdering on the social network. That raised questions about Facebook's ability to monitor gruesome material on its site. As The New York Times notes, Zuckerberg has always been disappointed that Facebook never built a credible smartphone operating system of its own.
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