FACEBOOK HAS MADE no secret of how much it wants virtual reality (VR) to be the future of social media and it has revealed a snippet of what that future might look like.
At the company’s developer conference F8, it showed off a demo of what it could do with Oculus Rift, its high-end VR headset, by transporting two different people into a shared space.
The company has already shown off some of its software with Toybox, a shared virtual room for two people to interact and play games with and against each other.
In this example, both participants were not in the same building – one person was based in Facebook headquarters 55 kilometres away from the presentation – but both were able to interact with each other in real-time.
Both were using Oculus Touch, its motion-tracking controllers which will be released later this year, as their hands and had their own custom head which they could put on.
The demo placed both in a standard VR room with a virtual table but allowed them to transport themselves into 360-degree photos. Each photo was represented by a sphere which expanded once a person brought it to their face.
After looking around a few different photos, they eventually decided to take a photo of themselves in VR using a virtual selfie stick. But not before drawing each other a tie and dickie bow to wear using virtual pencils.
Once they were taken, each photo appeared on the table in the middle of the room. They could then be posted directly to a person’s wall by dropping it into a Facebook letterbox.
While the demo was impressive, we’re still a long way from this becoming the norm. Oculus Rift was only released weeks ago and requires a high-end PC to run properly, something that’s out of reach for many people.
Still, who’s to say we won’t be interacting with each other this way in a few years time.
The full presentation can be watched here with this particular segment on VR starting at the 17-minute mark.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say