You (and your friends) can become cartoon avatars in Facebook VR
Facebook just took one step closer to realizing a sci-fi dream of hanging with your friends in a digital dimension.
While it’s not quite Star Trek’s holodeck, Facebook Spaces allows those with Facebook-owned Oculus Rift and Touch virtual reality hardware to share photos, videos, drawings and more in a VR realm populated by cartoon avatars.
The VR platform was announced Tuesday by social VR chief Rachel Rubin Franklin during the keynote at F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference in San Jose. The beta version of Facebook Spaces rolls out immediately.
“We are fundamentally a people-first computing platform,” Franklin told USA TODAY after a preview of Spaces Monday at company headquarters. “At the end of the day, people need to be with people they care about. So the question we asked was, if they can’t do it in person, what’s the next best thing?”
The next best thing actually was previewed last October by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who demoed a first pass at Spaces before an audience at the Oculus Connect conference. Zuckerberg and colleagues were shown in avatar form sharing photos and taking selfies in a 360-degree rendition of Zuckerberg ’s home. That same experience now awaits anyone in possession of Oculus Rift VR goggles and its Touch controllers, a $600 purchase that also requires a powerful PC that can cost up to $1,000. Facebook friends you invite into this VR space must also own Oculus gear.
While Oculus and its big ticket VR hardware peers — including Sony PlayStation VR and HTC Vive — can deliver state-of-theart realism, their price points continue to be a barrier to entry for all but hardcore enthusiasts.
Another roadblock for virtual reality is that analysts continue to tout the comparatively populist potential of smartphone-based augmented reality, as evidenced by last summer’s Pokémon Go augmented reality craze. Face- book on Tuesday made a big push into augmented reality, opening its camera platform to developers and laying out a vision in which Facebook’s apps will display digital information on the real world and add digital objects to the physical world. “We’re making the camera the first augmented reality platform,” Zuckerberg said in the F8 keynote address.
But while VR remains expensive and in the hands of few, it is capable of teleporting humans into virtual worlds in a way AR cannot.
Although Facebook Spaces at present remains rudimentary, a demo conjures up what may be possible with more computing power. The ultimate social space would find high-powered digital scanners replicating your movements and gestures in real time and placing that virtual you in a group space with other digitally-teleported humans.
For now, however, here’s what you’re getting when you step into Spaces: Oculus goggles on your head and Touch controllers in your hands, you’re able to select from a short list of digital avatars that already look like you. That’s because Facebook uses machinelearning algorithms to go through photos on your Facebook page to create an avatar with your general looks, which can be customized at will.
Once you’ve got your avatar set up, you meet up with invited friends around a virtual circular table. The table keeps people from wandering around the room, Franklin says. Tools laid out in front of you grant access to anything archived on your Facebook page as well as things such as a selfie stick (yes, you’d be taking photos of you and your avatar friends) and a pen.
The pen is a bit of a revelation. It’s simple, but the effect of grabbing it with a touch controller and writing on thin air is riveting.
In Spaces, whatever you draw suddenly has a physical property, as if frozen, and can be grasped with your VR hand and moved around your virtual world. Draw a crown, then grab it and place on your friend’s avatar’s head. Wild. But is it safe? Facebook has been grappling of late with destructive and dangerous uses of its platform. There have been concerns that the trolling that has plagued other online platforms will find its way into social virtual reality interactions.
Franklin says Spaces users are in control of who enters their world, adding that invited friends can be removed with the click of a button. Another protective feature ensures that if an avatar gets too close to you they fade out.
“We didn’t want people to get freaked out or scared, say if someone starts waving their hands in your face,” she says, adding the feature can be turned off “if say I want to give my husband’s avatar a peck on the cheek.”