After more than three years of acquiring Oculus, yesterday Facebook announced the first significant integration of the Virtual Reality into its core product, social media. Facebook has successfully rooted in people’s lives but it did not bring anything revolutionary within last few years. However, yesterday with the announcement of its new feature Facebook space it showed the world that there are much more things to explore.
Facebook Spaces launched its beta eversion yesterday on Oculus Rift + Torch. It is the first step of Facebook’s desire to mix social interaction with virtual reality.
With the new Facebook spaces, people owning Oculus devices can connect their Facebook accounts, go beyond the world of chat messaging, and reach other people using voice and body language.
Through the app, up to four persons can make a group and join the “space”. They can chat, draw, watch 360 videos, make video calls on messenger or take VR selfies of cartoonish avatars. Considering it is only a start of the new venture, Facebook has designed it quite nicely. They are building the interface nicely and for the masses. Therefore, it will not be bulky or very heavy. However, Rift is still not a common thing, but the attempt to make it common can be clearly seen.
Though Facebook owns the Oculus and could keep all these features exclusive for that but they will not do so. Slowly they are planning to expand these for other platforms also. Their attempt to be a Google rather than an apple is definitely praiseworthy.
Spaces will not be available on the smartphone based VR systems as they only rely on one thing, which is the 360 fixed-point movement. It can give you an experience of VR but not expose you completely to it. You cannot express yourself using the smartphone VR devices as much as you can on the “Real” VR devices.
With this new feature, it clearly shows Facebook is looking forward to create such an experience and root itself so much, that it can establish itself as a platform completely different from others. The CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that VR will not see its full potential for another 10 years but with this and AR growing to its core, people will slowly move towards this type of features.
