Spaces: A New Way to Connect with Friends in VR
newsroom.fb.comIf 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...
>> 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 against everything that we see.
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.
what do smart contracts and block chain have to do with AR?
AR is a human interface (transparent head mounted display) plus reality capture.
HMD lets humans interface with the world of the computer. Reality capture lets the computer interface with the world of humans.
Reality capture feeds smart contracts; if the AR cameras see you're low on some stock, "the computer" can order more, and direct the people to pick them up. Smart contracts are a reasonable mechanism for doing that.
Block chain is a shared ledger that's suitable for multiple entities tracking anything (say, reality) together, and a communications medium that's good for things that need to be auditable (say, tasks).
I agree with all of your points, except the last one. I don't think a shared ledger is required for interacting between multiple entities. We basically want a database that is beyond the control of any corporation - seems to me that a government-controlled database would fit the need.
The associated complexities and limitations with blockchain ledgers are a lot. The nodes must be propped up by large amounts of computing power, which only big companies/groups can provide, not individuals. And it's not as if the government can't be trusted, there are so many stock market indices & financial markets that aren't under anybody's control.
Do block chains necessarily require wasting as much electricity as bitcoin mining?
No. Think of blockchains as formalizing consensus reality. Each block, some "lucky" processing node (miner) somewhere gets to determine what that consensus actually is. The various techniques (proof-of-work, -stake, -etc) more or less make it hard for a bad actor to be that "lucky" node.
BC does this by letting everyone submit answers, but making it really hard (computationally intensive, aka, burn electricity) for your answer to the be the one that's accepted.
PeerCoin (to pick one) does this by making your likelihood of being The One correlate with your investment in the worth of the coin (literally how many of the coins you control). If you're the One, either your answer is accepted, or you're selected to give the answer, and then it's accepted - I'm not sure which.
You can also limit participation in your blockchain in combination with these; for example, a closed (invite-only) bitcoin would still burn electricity, but not nearly as much.
He mentions early in the talk about how some people working in VR/AR make a comparison that they're building the tech from 'Snowcrash' which he calls out as wrong model for thinking about VR.
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...
Thank you for sharing Raph Koster's talk. It gave me a lot to think about that I never really thought about before. I have a feeling this Spaces tech doesn't include a whole lot of what he's advocating for, and it probably should.
> 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 against everything that we see.
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?
"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.
You've only proven my case.
That's a lot of functionality, and there is a market for this functionality, however this market isn't the mass market.
Like computers, phones are also barely used to their full capacity. There is a quote about how we have the most powerful tools and the largest repository of information all at our fingertips, yet we concede to our whims and spend it on frivolities (see: usage of social media and mobile games vs. non-entertainment apps).
The regular consumer does not give a shit about any of this supposed functionality of AR. You can tell them "oh it'll have this, and instant alerts will be unobtrusive, and the UI, it'll be optiimized to hell and back!" But, these are weightless promises. Consumer phones haven't even gotten to the point of seamlessness and great UX (though Apple is coming close).
Snapchat is simple, AR is most definitely not.
This is an adoption problem. You can't keep throwing features at it and believe the problem will fix itself.
You don't need customers to "use AR to its full capacity" though. You need them to use one or two pieces of it enough to justify the device.
Sure, the early iterations might be more like Blackberry popularizing email-on-the-go for a small segment of the market. Not everybody needed that. But by now pretty much everyone has found at least one aspect of smartphones that they've come to depend on.
Does my mom use her smartphone to its full capacity? Certainly not! There are thousands of apps she's never even seen, some of which can do pretty great stuff! But she checks her email, organizes recipes, and takes pictures of her dog, and that's what she has the phone for.
Heck, I don't either. If anything I'm trying to use my phone for less stuff, but I'm still glad I have it.
Then this goes back to the "what does AR offer that a smartphone doesn't already?"
"Are these features enough to get people to switch to AR?"
From the sound of it, AR is just a mobile OS port.
And mobile OS is just a Linux port. The most fundamental difference is how available the device is. Computers are something you have to sit down and use, smartphones are something you have to take out and look at, and AR could be something that's immediately present whenever you need it.
Beyond being just a more available HUD, the AR aspect should make for more direct interactions with the real world. Lighting controls come to mind since that's the space I work in. What if instead of having light switches built into your house, they became a purely virtual construct that each user places into the world?
Right now, IoT lighting feels clunky because you walk into a room, take out your phone, open an app, pick a light, and move some sliders. What if you could just drop an imaginary button on the wall by the door for each preset, or a virtual knob for dimming? It's the exact same functionality, but putting it into the relevant physical space makes it a lot more useful without requiring additional hardware for every room. And if your guests have AR glasses too, then you have a default "guest layout" for your house that's automatically available to anyone on your wifi. They get access to the light switches, but they can't unlock the front door.
Plus you don't have to worry about replacing switches in every room if you replace the lighting system. Just the one HomeKit hub (or whatever it is) and the switches are completely imaginary.
I haven't spent a lot of time imagining where AR will go, that's just one thought off the top of my head.
It's one idea, but how will it push consumers over the threshold to switch? The answer is it won't, less than 10% of the US population uses the IoT.[0]
I'll restate this again. We can keep going on and on about the cool things AR can do and features it'll have, but none of that matters if there's no consumer adoption. There is absolutely no way people are going to ditch their perfectly fine smartphones for a mildly more utilitarian device.
What is AR's unique selling proposition? How will it push consumers to switch?
Until this question is answered, all speculations on the future scope of AR use are moot.
[0] http://www.economist.com/news/business/21700380-connected-ho...
I have to agree - I think the benefits described for all these AR scenarios really don't sound worth the cost, at least to me.
In exchange for replacing all the plain simple switches in my house with a complex tower of software, hardware, and internet services I gain: the ability to turn the lights on and off without getting up, and in this scenario I lose: the ability to find the lightswitch when my AR glasses are broken / flat battery / in another room / running a firmware update.
This trade really is marginal in comparison to the things which have driven other technology adoptions, like shopping without going to the shops, or sending letters without walking to a postbox, or allowing one person to do the work of several others in the same time.
There may be other AR / VR functions which are more compelling, but so long as they are all "use this complicated and expensive new system to get this marginal benefit over something already honed to its niche" it ain't gonna fly.
I agree with you, light switches on their own aren't a compelling case for AR (though side-note: it's the RGB or tunable color temperature adjustment that tends to make IoT lighting worth considering, line voltage switches and bulbs don't do that). It's just one application of many, which I think are eventually going to be enough that it'll gain widespread adoption.
Beyond interactivity with connected objects, the other big opening seems like "contextual information on real-world objects." Some cases for that are industrial (say a factory where a floor manager can see sensor information overlaid on the production line), and will have a much easier time getting adoption because the cost and benefit are more drastic.
Other cases are consumer oriented: better interfaces for mapping/directions, personal tour guides (for museums or cities, and maybe on rental hardware before it hits wide adoption), more immersive AR games like Pokemon Go and Ingress, AR fitness trainers where you can see your personal "best time" ghost running in front of you, video conferencing where instead of putting somebody on a screen they can sort-of exist in the same space with you, etc.
I don't think any one of those is the single application where 90% of people say "I need one of these," but the combined weight of them together is something I'd want.
Heck, you can even keep your smartphone if we need it as an input, networking, and computational device, but wearing AR glasses can effectively make its screen larger so that maps and the like display past the edge of the hardware. Or maybe instead of covering the screen contents, your notification banners pop up above/below the physical device (I don't want literally everything popping up on a HUD, most notifications aren't that important). Or if you have a large scrolling list of open apps, instead of flipping through them on the phone screen, you can just reach out in space and grab the one 5-screens to the left. Even if the pixel density isn't as high as a modern cell phone, having AR on gives you interesting options for extending the device. Maybe it even reigns in the screen size back to 4" phones, and the $200 you can knock off the phone hardware helps cover the AR costs.
I don't claim to know exactly where we're headed, but I don't think there's a shortage of interesting uses. And maybe the runaway feature is something none of us have conceived of yet.
what if light bulbs move to infrared and the VR shifts the light down into the visible range in different intensities per user. that way, everyone walks around in total darkness (in the real world) but with their own lighting preference in AR.
not sure on the physics of that but seems like a funny idea
>Call up directions while driving with cortana / siri and have lay over unobtrusively?
It's the future. Why would you be driving? You'll be in a self-driving car, bored. That's AR time. Isn't it?
Open source distributed federated VR spaces? Yes.
Video of the talk: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024060/Still-Logged-In-What-AR
>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...
umm the muting part reminds me of the black mirror episode "white christmas". Hopefully it doesnt come to that
Muting is absolutely necessary. Play any online video game for 5 minutes and you'll understand it's a necessity.
As a general concept I agree, but this is limited to your facebook friends. This isn't randomly joining a multiplayer server, this is intentionally adding friends to a space. Ostensibly, you should know them. Adding muting capabilities seems like some weird power play that'll just lead to bullying. If you don't want someone there, just remove them. Hell, unfriend them.
And you've been able to mute people in various group voice chat programs (made for talking with friends) since forever.
But muting your own friends while gaming with them? Nah.
>>"we’re committed to making VR a positive place for all".
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.
... could you say that again in a nicer tone. I went to away to my quiet space and couldn't hear you. <slips into quiet space again>
This is going to open up a whole new world of abuse and bullying.
Taking bets on how long it will be until the first VR sexual assault lands someone in jail.
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.
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?
Why not an open API for that matter? What if I want to use my Virtuality HMD, hacked PowerGlove and surplus Ascension Flock-of-Birds rig to drop into a VR world? Why shouldn't I be able to do that if I have the equipment and skills to get it to work?
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.
To get Carmack.
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
> Be Yourself in VR
If second life shows anything, people want to be someone else in VR.
If anonymous Youtube comments show anything, some people want to be complete assholes in VR.
So are they being themselves, or someone else? :)
It was named "iD Software," after all...
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.
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.
I agree, but Spaces looks boring. When I hang out with my far away friends, we pile into Skype and play a game. MMOs like World of Warcraft have long served this niche, and it seems that Facebook has learned little from them.
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.
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 have a Vive and do all these things and I think its fair to say this is very much an acquired taste.
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.
Everything has to start somewhere. It wasn't too long ago that most people would have said the same about computers in general.
Is that true? I mean the utility of the computer was instantly recognized and brought into offices as soon as practically possible. We've way deep into 'practical' territory for VR and it really hasn't done anything but appeal to some limited industries and a tiny slice of gamers.
You can't just hand-wave the "Google Glasses" part of VR away. There are concrete barriers to entry here. Grandma is not going to like strapping a huge screen to her face, even if it can be made a few ounces lighter, for example. People don't like to be 'locked into' interfaces. Nausea is an unsolved problem. Video card power is significant for non-trivial displays.
There's a lot of cons here for the very few pros.
> I mean the utility of the computer was instantly recognized and brought into offices as soon as practically possible.
You may be too young to remember, but that is definitely not true. During the 80's, the only use they could advertise computers to adults was "you can keep you recipies in it" and "you can do accounting". Heck, "there is a world market for about five computers" was a sentence aimed at business at some point.
Wait till the Marketing departments find a way to create the need on all those FB followers, with those "trendy lifestyle" ads.
> "you can keep you recipies in it"
That's kinda BS revisionism. I'm an older guy and remember everyone losing their minds over games, BBS's, and such. The utility and acceptance was instant. And that's just the home market. In business they were on every desk well before we had that conversation.
And lets remember the 'grandma' factor was taken care of back then by moving off the CLI and memorized commands and onto a mouse-based WIMP graphical system. VR is like CLI and memorized commands. There's no way around strapping a giant screen on your face and all the negative aspects that entails.
> That's kinda BS revisionism.
Maybe it was regional. I got my first computer in 1984 (A TRS-80 Color Computer 2). I was 11 years old. Of my friends, only a few had computers, mostly to play games. Their parents didn't tend to use them at all.
Even when I left high school in 1991, very few of my friends had a computer. Computer were more or less "everywhere", in that you could easily get one if you wanted one: If you wanted a TRS-80, you went to Radio Shack, if you wanted something else like a C=64 or similar, you went to Sears, Montgomery Wards, Target, or Walmart, or another department store. If you wanted an Apple IIe or a Mac or a PC - you went to ComputerLand. Sometimes a department store, or Circuit City. Or you went and researched the various computer magazines, and bought the machine from a vendor in there (based on friends or whatnot reviews) or got it direct from the manufacturer.
Even so - they weren't common. After high school, I moved to Phoenix, Arizona (which I call 'home' now) - and it still didn't seem like computers were common for people outside of geeks and businesses. Work was where most people seemed to use a computer, but not a lot of them had a computer in their home. More people had VCRs than computers. More people had Nintendos (NES or Super) than computers.
It was still a fairly niche hobby thing - I remember walking into small mom-n-pop shops to buy a hard drive, or a modem - usually for my Amiga at the time, but for PCs as well. Things were still at that level, even in Phoenix (if you wanted to go to the "mecca" of the time - you made a trip out to Insight).
That really all changed sometime around 1993 or so, with 486 machines becoming affordable, CD-ROM drives becoming ubiquitous, and the SoundBlaster being "mainstream". Suddenly, relatively cheap machines with fairly astounding capabilities were available (16 bit graphics for more colors, CD-ROM drives for music and multi-media, and a powerful-enough processor to tie it all together - interestingly, had Commodore had a better marketing team, things might be much different today, because most of that was available almost 10 years prior).
Plus you had stores like Best Buy springing up, and (I'm not sure on this?) something must've changed a bit in lending practices, because that's the first I recall that stores started to have their own branded credit cards (though Sears and Montgomery Wards did before then - but both of those guys were behemoths at the time). Or maybe it was that those new stores (compared to the old guard) offered terms of payback with no interest at 90, 120, or one year terms? I'm not sure - but Best Buy is what started me on my credit journey, along with renting my own apartment.
I also transitioned to a 486 and played Myst like a fiend. One could also argue that game helped to get PCs into people's homes as well. Maybe in a way it was a "perfect storm" of things all being there in one package: Hardware, software, games, marketing, credit, and a place to get it all in a "modern" setting (and no hassle from salesmen, which was Best Buy's shtick of the time)?
I don't think that is revisionism; maybe not the complete story, but not a fabrication, either. Just how I remember it...
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.
> or with a 2D screen
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...
anecdote: a week ago I tried to get on Skype with a coworker, he couldn't hear me. we hop on google handouts, now I can't hear him. we ended up just falling back to a phone call.
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?
Reminded the good old-fashioned scene from HBO's Silicon Valley https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2prsYbV1TkM
Yeah, this is so awkward. I don't get why no one has blended a camera into the middle of the screen already.
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.
How does VR improve that? As opposed to some other form of virtual whiteboard.
Laying objects and documents in 3D space is way more expressive than on a flat screen.
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.
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'm maybe not that experienced, but I do think that FB/Google are fundamentally different. Microsoft and IBM's 'products' depreciated very quickly. 5-year old software just isn't worth as much as brand new software (especially during that era.) Data, on the other hand, is like a wine that just gets better with age. FB's info about you only gets more valuable the longer they keep getting it. As long as FB/Google have active users, the moats around their businesses will likely seem impenetrable.
People age and die, though. I doubt FB will implode like MySpace, but oldsters like me, who got tangled up in its webs back when it was only open to ".edu" addresses, will die off. Then FB will have lots of data on corpses, which can no longer click on ads. It can frantically copy rivals for awhile, but once the first generation of kids stops bothering to sign up, it's on its way to the nursing home.
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.
That also removes a layer of anonymity which, in theory isn't needed because you would be conversing with family and friends. But the second you get other people in the mix, you'll really wish you had the ability to NOT look like yourself.
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.
> The society is sick. When everyone is psychopathic
Can you elaborate on what you mean here? In what way is the society of Bangkok "sick and psychopathic"?
These avatars creep me out.
I'm surprised they are so creepy looking. You'd think Facebook could afford a decent illustrator to mock up the avatars? But knowing Facebook they're probably algorithmically generated avatar images...
"Uncanny valley"
Uncanny valley is not the explanation for all creepy looking models. It is specifically a problem with very realistic looking models and textures not being quite right, for a variety of reasons. These models are not attempting to be realistic, nor are they particularly close.
https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/living-with-robots
Interesting discussion re: the uncanny valley.
Not much creativity plus low-poly gives you that creepy look.
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.
In other words, the "Greendale Human Being"[1][2] effect.
[1] http://community-sitcom.wikia.com/wiki/Greendale_Human_Being
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.
The Holoportation video feels a lot less cringe worthy and cheesy to me. At least there's a lot more body language that's being captured, which feels more natural. Their example of being able to record real life in 3D, play it back, and walk around in the experience also seems more innovative. But of course it's much further away from being ready to use unlike Spaces.
The challenge VR videoconferencing faces is that by its nature, the people who are participating are wearing headsets that cover their faces. Even hololens headsets are going to get in the way of eye contact.
Avatars get around this by projecting a person who isn't wearing a headset.
> 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.
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.
Sure. But once you've had the experience of your circle of friends dispersing to different cities, the appeal becomes immediately obvious.
Actually I am in this position. I rather visit the people and enjoy a weekend with them than put on a VR headset. Also it's a great excuse to go away for a weekend. And if it has to be something interactive I found video conferences quite practical. Also if a meeting is important I prefer to be present than remote because it is easier to gauge reactions of people.
I've got a circle of friends I see more often than anyone else, but only on TeamSpeak whilst gaming. I would absolutely love to visit them, but we are all without exception too poor to do any such thing, so it's impossible.
I suspect this will play into the success or failure of Facebook Spaces. How many people are on Facebook with enough tech to do this (in its crude low-poly way) but who are also far too poor to flit about physically visiting those they love?
You may not like it... but your kids will love it.
I think this is key and hidden in the comments. Reading this comment, I can easily picture kids and tweens hanging out sharing videos and pics in private VR rooms.
I can totally see myself in this place 20-ish years ago.
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.
I dunno, this seems to be more useful when you're chilling at home chatting with your friends on Facebook Messenger. It doesn't matter how it looks if it's just you in the living room.
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"
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.
straight out of neuromancer
I hope I'm wrong but I think we'll look at this in 5 years and laugh.
I don't think it'll take that long.
oh great. now my kids have even less of a reason to go outside. thanks fb!
Second Life v2?
The company behind Second Life is already working on a VR-centric "Second Life v2", with what seems to me a more interesting vision of the metaverse than Facebook Spaces.
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.
It's not called "Second Life v2" it's called Sansar.
I didn't mean that literally, although it was originally announced as "Second Life 2".
Not "Third Life"?
Seems more like it is heading towards the ideas behind the metaverse[0]
Not really. This is more like Messenger v2.
Second Life / High Fidelity are much closer to the ideas behind the Metaverse than this.
More like v.3... from the look of it you are not moving around much in spaces.
If you want to try it out, but have a Vive... apparently ReVive works.
I'd really like them to offer their avatar system for other applications. Identity is so much part of social VR and it would be great to share it between apps.
Available now on the Oculus Store™ with Oculus Rift®!
Increasingly relevant:
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/23/virtual-reality-allows-t...
Emotion detection as a service? I'll pass.