
Mark Zuckerberg's virtual reality demo [video] - vyrotek
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/vb.4/10103154531425531/?type=2&theater
======
clydethefrog
I've had a course about social media last year (analyses of communication via
social media, not the marketing kind) that talked a lot about the problems
with online human-human communication and how VR might be able to solve these
problems.

Physical space has social meanings. We use space to structure how we start
conversations, to show our engagement with our partner, to show our openness
to engage with others. Think of the formations you form at parties, and how
you know as outsider if you can join a conversation or not.

You also have the important of gaze. Eye gaze is not only an outward
expression of an emotion, it is used as a communicative device – as a tool to
interact with others. People turn towards to each other to make eye contact
and initiate a conversation.

Both space and gaze have so far been missing in online social media. This is
the positive value for better communication you add to social media with VR.
It's very exciting to see this development already going so fast.

It saddens me though that it seems Facebook is the company making the first
steps into this future. This cynic in me says Facebook only develops this to
have more ways to manipulate people in seeing ads and other forms of
commercial persuasive communication. Tupperware parties 2.0.

~~~
darkxanthos
You're not a cynic, that's literally their business.

~~~
orly_bookz
Ad revenue and tricking others into thinking that all that data is inherently
valuable.

Don't forget that last part.

~~~
j2bax
Tell that to an app developer that pays $2-$5 per install of their app through
Facebook. You may think your data isn't valuable, but I guarantee you that
many many peoples data is very valuable to Advertisers.

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bemmu
Placing a video call from the outside world into VR is pretty amazing.

Besides that, you can do many of the things demoed even now on AltspaceVR. I
tested it out for a few nights, and turns out hanging around in an interactive
VR space with random strangers is ruined by trolls and people constantly
quitting and joining. We never got successfully through an entire game of
"Cards Against Humanity".

Another interesting one was vTime, which focuses more on chatting. You can
move your head around and sit around virtual spaces with others, but you
cannot move. That felt much like grabbing coffee in real life with someone and
we got into deeper conversations this way. I would rate it as perhaps the most
interesting experience I had before selling my Oculus to wait another year or
two to see things improve.

~~~
thwarted
_Being able to place a video call from the outside world into VR is pretty
amazing._

Youtube and twitch are capable of doing the conference call equivalent,
streaming live video of content that doesn't actually exist, such as a video
game, to a video receiving device. The ability to dynamically create live
video is more than a few years old, even in live chat systems, from the
capability to alter the background behind you while you video chat, to being
able to wear virtual hats.

There's a lot in here that is interesting, but so much of it is a different
form factor and UI/UX on technology that already exists.

~~~
natrius
You're saying it's just a user experience shift, but that's exactly what the
comment you're responding to is saying. User experience changes can be earth-
shattering.

~~~
thwarted
Yes, I said there's a lot here that is interesting, and I think the actual
interesting stuff was seriously downplayed. I don't find the stuff that was
presented as "earth-shattering". The ability to show a moving video in a 2d
square in a 3d environment is as old as hardware accelerated first person
shooters.

We saw swimming among sharks and walking on Mars, both having potential for
highly informative and educational experiences. The rhetoric wasn't about how
much richer viewing Mars is interactively vs with flat, composite panoramas.
The Mars bit was about ~12 seconds with talk about how it was desolate and
they wouldn't want to live there… quick, get us out and here and lets move on
to… the Facebook offices (a more uninspired location for Zuckerberg to choose
I can not imagine). Oh, let's play a card game and let's draw a sword for
sword fights! The ability to draw in midair and interact with the thing drawn
is the _real_ interesting stuff, stuff that we haven't been able to do before,
and this was a demo that said, to me, "Farmville is coming to virtual
reality".

Where was showing us things we can't currently, easily do without virtual
reality? The live walk through of a building yet to be built? The facilities
engineer working with plumbers and electricians on a live, interactive 3d
model of a building? The interior designer doing interactive, full-size test
fits of furniture? The student walking on the surface of other planets for
study prep? The inclusiveness and team building of a remote team working in
the same virtual space (this was mentioned briefly in the face expressions
portion)? The ability to create and dynamically reconfigure complex user
interfaces that would be otherwise impossible to create in reality? Leveraging
the facial expressions to read people while playing poker would have been more
interesting and a step above current on-line poker playing, more so than
"look, we can throw around these cards".

Most of this bit looked like it was scripted. It could have been scripted
better to showcase actual advances VR enables, kept the "ooh ahh", maintained
the conversational tone and gotten rid of the mundane stuff. I don't think
"placing a video call from the outside world into VR" is "pretty amazing".

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EJTH
The whole demonstration seemed very synthetic and not really that impressive
to be honest (The position detection for hands seemed a bit low res, facial
expressions seemed like something out of a 2006 webcam to cartoon-avatar app.

~~~
zapu
They are working with what they have. There are no face cameras or anything
like that in Oculus Rift, so the expressions are literally "gestures", from
what I've read. You raise your hands, your avatar is "happy", you wave your
head, your avatar is "sad" etc.

This should change in next generations of VR helmets.

~~~
ashazar
Not in Oculus in the demo, but there is this Veeso [1] with additional cam for
face tracking.

[1] [http://www.veeso.com/](http://www.veeso.com/)

------
probe
I think two major things social VR and this demo highlight:

1) The amount of things you can do in VR is more expansive than any medium
before. Video conferences for the most part is used to catch up or transfer
information faster (or at least that's how I use it, to catch up with
friends/business who are far away). However, it's tougher to use video chats
to build NEW experiences, and I can only really think of Google Hangouts and
playing something like WarLight/editing a doc that does that. Humans for the
most part build better relationships when both parties have shared
experiences, and in VR you can actually do a lot of things that you could in
real life. This is why it's so different from just "videoconferencing"

2) It finds a balance in anonymity and not having to commit 100% to a
conversation. For example, when you video conference you have to pay more
attention/be more aware of how you're acting, which explains why many times we
choose to have text convos rather than just calling the other person. In
social VR you're just an avatar so you don't have to care as much about your
appearance/interaction/subtle facial expressions etc. The outward behavioral
bar is lower so you can relax and enjoy the environment even more.

VR is a powerful medium because it addresses the above two points - you don't
have to be as concerned about your appearance/interaction when you're an
avatar AND you can actually do more tangible things in VR to actually BUILD
better relationships.

~~~
fny
God, how I miss David Foster Wallace...

On the Rise and Fall of the Videophone:

> And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if
> you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all
> kidding aside who doesn’t. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded
> without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if
> that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there
> was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video
> telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good
> old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes
> and attach prostheses and do hair- checks in the foyer mirror before
> answering the door.

> ...

> The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry’s
> psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (or VPD) was,
> of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking; and in fact it was those
> entrepreneurs who gravitated toward the production of high-definition
> videophonic imaging and then outright masks who got in and out of the short-
> lived videophonic era with their shirts plus solid additional nets.

Full Excerpt from Infinite Jest:
[http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527](http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527)

~~~
faux_intellect
Thanks for sharing this. It's always great to reread DFW. He had such
extraordinary prescience about so many things.

Another bit of gold from that excerpt:

> First there’s some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech —
> like from aural to video phoning — which advance always, however, has
> certain un- foreseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the
> market-niches created by those disadvantages — like people’s stressfully
> vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance — are ingeniously filled
> via sheer entrepreneurial verve; and yet the very advantages of these
> ingenious disadvantage-compensations seem all too often to undercut the
> original high-tech advance, resulting in consumer-recidivism and curve-
> closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors. In the present
> case, the stress- and-vanity-compensations’ own evolution saw video-callers
> rejecting first their own faces and then even their own heavily masked and
> enhanced physical likenesses and finally covering the video-cameras
> altogether and transmitting attractively stylized static Tableaux to one
> another’s TPs. And, behind these lens-cap dioramas and transmitted Tableaux,
> callers of course found that they were once again stresslessly invisible,
> unvainly makeup- and toupeeless and baggy-eyed behind their celebrity-
> dioramas, once again free — since once again unseen — to doodle, blemish-
> scan, manicure, crease-check — while on their screen, the attractive,
> intensely attentive face of the well-appointed celebrity on the other end’s
> Tableau reassured them that they were the objects of a concentrated
> attention they themselves didn’t have to exert.

------
return0
Social VR is what second life has been doing for 15 years. I have anecdotally
surveyed a few users and none of them was sold on VR. It's fun for the first
day, but between being expressionally and physically limited and getting
nauseous, none of them found it pleasant enough for long-term use. Virtual
worlds are having a rennaisance nowadays, with many new companies springing
up. Personally , i am not sold on the future of VR-goggles at all.

~~~
Wintamute
Why judge on the limitations of first gen hardware? How many nascent
technologies and industries would have been dismissed if we'd done that? Or is
it the possibility of creating a fully immersive new medium for creative
expression, potentially a new artificial substrate of reality, that doesn't
excite you?

~~~
ItendToDisagree
uh... We're easily on 3rd-4th gen hardware at this point.

1st gen: Those VR stations that used to be in malls 2nd gen: Shitty headsets
you could attach to a genesis/snes 3rd gen: Occulus (you may be considering
this first gen?) 4th gen: vive/fove/[Sony/Samsung/Google]VR

~~~
Wintamute
Do you think the average mass consumer that is considering purchasing a GearVR
cares that _technically_ it's a 4th gen VR product because of the Nintendo
Virtual Boy in 1995? I don't think so ...

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jsemrau
I think VR is as an experience overrated.

Almost daily I do Skype calls most of them are video calls. Most of the times
I have several people in the room who still can continue to communicate
directly without and technical intermediary. In addition you can write down
notifications, doodle, multi-task.

For games, I used to play doom in vr in 1997 and after 5 min the whole looking
around thing gets stale and you just want to sit down and relax on the
couch/chair. See Wiimote.

~~~
SolarNet
But imagine if all of your doodle and multi-tasking can be virtual. The
promise of VR is you can video conference, multi-task, and doodle with many
virtual apps all at once. Or with other people. Of course the problem with
that is that paper is often a better medium.

~~~
jsemrau
If that will be good or not is a question of the user interface. I regularly
sit in multi-nation phone conferences. And while there are many collaboration
tools we mainly still use a simple Excel sheet via screen share to track
things. Why? This abstraction layer works with most business users. In
addition, in Asia internet connectivity over several countries is not good so
that is the least expensive communication method in terms of bandwidth.

~~~
danielbln
I think you are shortsighted and unwilling to extrapolate today's VR potential
into the (near-ish) future.

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android521
Why are there so much negativity? I thought the people here are supposed to be
more visionary. We are one step ahead in the future than other people. Avatar
with your facial expressions. This is huge and innovative. It will not be
limited to just game players or geeks. Common people will be drawn to this.

~~~
drvdevd
Well as a long time deliberately non Facebook account holder for many reasons
of my own, I can say I found this compelling. Partly because I bought an
Oculus dev kit several years ago and was quite impressed with it at even that
stage and I'm very excited to seee resources being devoted to a technology I
would like to see in common use as soon as possible, especially for these
basic productivity tasks.

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astannard
I loved the demo, thought it was well thought out and impressive. However I
would not want to use it on a regular basis and cannot see many people being
that interested in purchasing a VR setup. I think VR outside of gaming is
limited appeal and only AR will offer any mass appeal as long as it is
portable and discrete.

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the_common_man
Wow, this is great. I wonder when we will have farmville in VR. My friends,
family can take care of our virtual farm...

~~~
roymurdock
This comment in combination with your username made me laugh way too hard.

------
pierotofy
So it begins. [https://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-
Cline/dp/0307...](https://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-
Cline/dp/0307887448)

------
Theodores
So Facebook's take on VR is that it is going to be all about people. I am not
seeing their vision but I didn't 'get' Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat
or even Chat Roulette... I will need some persuasion that this will work for
the selfie-obsessed narcissistic world, just wearing a VR headset is not a
good look.

I can see how Google's take on VR works, you re-use the phone in a budget way
and have apps that make sensible use of the format - games, 3D immersive stuff
exhibition tour stuff and other Google goodies that are good toys. Really this
brings to life what Google do anyway with StreetView, photosheres and so on,
so it makes sense. I can see a large army of casual VR users making occasional
use of that stuff. I can also see hi-end gaming going for VR, that makes sense
too and seemed the obvious market for the Oculus product. Facebook seem to
think they have some special transformative take on that, a bit like how the
Wii took the games console out of the teenager's bedroom and put it in the
front room for mum to do her fitness training games on. Until we see the
product and applications some belief is required and even then I will not be
an early adopter. This VR stuff has evolved slightly the 'cardboard' way but
the fundamentals have not changed in the last 20 years. The problems have
nothing to do with nausea from immersive VR, people probably had the same
concerns about the horseless carriage. The problems are more to do with what
exactly that use case is that compels people to be wearing VR headsets for
hours every day and whether people really do want to block out their sight to
wear some immersive headgear. This isn't going to happen on the commute home
for a while.

~~~
swalsh
"The problems are more to do with what exactly that use case is that compels
people to be wearing VR headsets for hours every day and whether people really
do want to block out their sight to wear some immersive headgear. "

I wear mine as much as I can (sadly I don't have hours a day to do it, but I
would if i could) VR Gaming is literally just the beginning. As I mentioned in
another comment, Onward is a good demonstration of the potential here. Game-
play aside, the social aspect feels very different. The game, as an FPS would
be very lame, but with the way it handles communication it's a really great
experience. Interactions feel more "life like". I'm really excited to see how
far it goes.

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imaginenore
I didn't get how the headset reads the facial expressions.

I also don't see most users designing avatars that look like them. It
shouldn't be too hard to do a conversion from a photo.

Also compare it to the PSVR social app:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK8tMwlZLEM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK8tMwlZLEM)

~~~
errantspark
"the demo's facial expressions were controlled by button presses, not facial
analysis"

~~~
2bitencryption
I'm honestly surprised by that, since it seems like just using a simple webcam
to read your expression and pick it that way would be a much more natural
choice, and probably the least technologically complex aspect of that entire
setup. Though I guess you can't always be in an environment with a webcam
pointed at your face... but if you have an Oculus on your head, my guess is a
webcam isn't far away.

~~~
errantspark
Except the Oculus is occluding your face.

~~~
badsock
Not disagreeing with you (because it's definitely not just a simple webcam),
but there's been progress in this area:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgKkEnaaSDc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgKkEnaaSDc)

~~~
errantspark
Nice! I hadn't seen this before. Interesting approach to capturing the facial
expression. I'd bet the first commercial implementation of something like this
will be based on cameras inside the helmet combined with IR illumination,
We're going to want those anyway for gaze tracking and it might be that they
can do double duty. This is clever, but from a practical standpoint I bet
capturing expressions will be easier with cameras.

~~~
aab0
You can definitely see where this is going. My first thought was the same: 'we
need eyetracking for foveated rendering anyway, so we can get realistic eyes
for free', and if you can do that, you can track the eyebrows and muscles
around the eye (doesn't need great fidelity), and I wonder if that gets you
all the way to the rest of the face as well? Can you smile/frown without it
tugging on the parts closer to the eyes which the future headsets can observe?

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bharath28
That was an interesting demo. I read on another comment in this thread, that
the backgrounds were fake. Let's assume for a moment that they were not.
Imagine all of this happening from the perspective of the dog. The dog
(replace human to further this exercise) is completely unaware of all this
happening around him. Could we in the future have people talking about us,
around us and not be aware of it? Think of this interaction again from the
perspective of the 4 people (include the video call) who were talking in the
room. At one point, i was so engrossed in the main scene, that i forgot that a
certain part of the environment was not aware of the main players. This
spooked me out - what if in the future, i can't tell which part of my
environment is real(aware of me) and which part is not. Inertia i guess. We
always get over these humps.

~~~
talmand
For the time being I would assume you would notice the 360 degree camera
making its way through your house.

That is, until we work out using a stable wormhole as the means of
observation.

~~~
bharath28
That is true. Or until the camera's get small enough and numerous enough that
your environment drowns them. It was still an interesting experience.

------
mulcahey
I think VR is going to be a bit like 3D TV and not really live up to the hype.

~~~
swalsh
Maybe this particular VR application, but you can try a Vive on right now and
see for yourself. To me, its extremely compelling.

~~~
aedron
Last week I was at a VR arcade which had a very good setup of Vives, good
floor space, good hardware, instructors, etc. It was my first time with VR,
and I spent about half an hour with the different VR experiences.

It was a lot of fun, and I went and grabbed the entire family and forced them
to try it too. They all enjoyed it. Very different experience from anything
else.

But since then, I have had no desire to go back and do it again. Nor have any
of the family members mentioned it (including three boys between 5 and 12 who
love gaming). Nothing about the experience was compelling enough to capture my
attention in the long term.

VR has great novelty factor, but no killer apps (yet?).

~~~
drcross
It sounds like having a computer without having the internet in 1997. When
they add the social factor and include things like being able to do desktop
work, in high fidelity while wearing a lightweight pair of shades, its going
to change a lot of things.

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swalsh
I've had a lot of fun with the social aspects in OnWard. Just about 10 minutes
ago before I left the game, my group was standing in a circle joking around
(until the enemy snuck up behind, dropped a grenade killing us in one blow.

VR is an amazing medium for remote social interactions. There's potential
here. Not everything has to be about selfies, and self obsession. It's
possible for random people to have a good time with each other. The internet
makes it possible for you to find another person similar to who YOU are, and
VR makes that interaction more personable. It's literally the best of both
"Worlds".

------
Kapura
Multi-user VR is really, really cool. It seems that Facebook is betting
heavily on headset prices coming down (which they will, obviously) which will
allow their metaverse to become the de facto virtual hangout space. That two
bundo FB shelled out for the acquisition seems like it was a really good deal.

~~~
laughfactory
Except that having been addicted to Facebook once and quitting cold turkey
about a decade ago, I'll never do Facebook again. To me things like TV
(particularly streaming services) is close to a drug in terms of
addictiveness. Facebook was too. And this looks even more addictive. I'm sure
it will be insanely immersive, and that, my friends, is a serious problem.

------
markingram
Fake it until you make it. Backgrounds are all pre-recorded. Not live! But
it's an interesting concept once they manage to get all the scenes live. I
still prefer face to face though.

~~~
repsilat
I wondered about that dog on the couch... Still, pretty neat (and, come to
think of it, a little less worrying than giving Facebook access to a webcam in
my house.)

------
jsprogrammer
_takes selfie with virtual selfie stick cam and posts it to facebook_

"we can do anything we want"

Does anyone know if there are any other demos/applications available?

------
decayy
Why would I do any of this ?

It seemed a bit forced in my opinion.

~~~
swalsh
You're lucky you have all of your friends close to you. Some of my best
friends are a 2 hour plane ride away. This would be great (if they could
afford it).

~~~
throwaway287391
I thought the demo was neat, but I don't quite get this -- how is looking at
the cartoon avatars your friends chose possibly going to be more personal than
(or even nearly as personal as) video chat, which has been freely available
for years on every major platform and allows you to see your friends' actual
faces with their actual facial expressions? Is it just anticipation of the
avatars eventually getting replaced with a full realistic real-time 3D
rendering of your body?

~~~
drcross
Absolutely. There was a research project last year where they uses sensors
built into the visor foam and they could reproduce your emotion based on your
face movement. Of course we'll eventually all be scanned into the system and
at that stage you can decide to use an avatar or your normal face. The real
benefit here is social VR. Being able to co-exist in VR to do your work will
be ground breaking.

------
zerognowl
"Virtual" being used here quite frequently when there is quite a bit of Hyper-
reality influences too.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality)

Virtual Reality describes the apparatus, and the merging of reality with
simulation, or even simulacra of our physical sensoria.

Hyper-reality describes the meta nature of our culture, media, and society.
Imagine this: consuming a video of Zuck talking about VR headsets whilst
wearing a VR headset, whilst inside Facebook headquarters, all inside your
Facebook timeline.

------
joshuaheard
Amazing demo of the interface of the future. One thing I would change is to
move the other people's avatars to the background so they don't move around as
you look around. It was making me dizzy. They should be fixed to the
background but be able to move themselves around in your field of vision by
walking around, as they would in reality. Obviously a work in progress, but
everything else looked great!

~~~
zigzigzag
The thing I noticed and nobody else seems to be commenting on is that these
virtual realities were actually just 360 videos? Why was nothing actually
being produced by a real 3D engine? I thought viewing 360 vids in VR could
make people sick because you don't have the sideways motion of the head. I'd
expected them to spend their time in actual virtual realities, not QuickTime
VRs.

------
iambateman
Man that line about Timberlake was forced. And then he made his wife say it
too. Hah.

Ok in all seriousness.

We little humans perceive most of our world through spatial interactions. The
possibilities to make a world enhancing device are incredible and scare me.

I'm concerned that people will forget how great the real Redwood forest is. Or
how great real sex is. Or how meaningful life can be apart from a virtual
Reality. I'm afraid that the fake version could be so appealing that I would
reject the real and choose to dive into my own Matrix. Many people already
play 7 hours per day...what's to stop them from never leaving a more immersive
experience?

Like I said, the positive potential to improve science/meetings/remote
work/etc is pretty incredible. I don't want to sound like a Debbie downer. But
sheesh we need to consider the potential risks to society of a pseudo-reality
addiction that is as alluring as VR will be very soon.

Is anyone else concerned?

~~~
samizdatum
Virtual reality is perhaps an unfortunate moniker, because it encourages a
dichotomisation of reality into the "virtual" and "real", and conceiving of
these as opposing, or at least orthogonal forces. Thought of in this way,
virtual reality seems to promise a compelling-but-ultimately-empty facsimile
of reality, the ultimate fulfilment of the escapist dream.

Disruptive technologies are often initially viewed from an oppositional
mindset, which makes sense, because any disruptive technology will steal time
away from the Old Activities that existed before the technology. People who
aren't early adopters will naturally focus on the decrease in the time spent
on Old Activities.

We saw this oppositional reaction when the internet gained popularity:

* People are spending so much time in cyberspace that they won't know how to effectively navigate the real world

* People are having fantasy cyber-lives instead of spending time in the Real World

* He's seeing someone he met online, he must not know how to interact with Real People

* And so on.

But social networks descended on society in an incredibly short period of
time, and worked their way into the furthest corners of our lives. The
oppositional mindset gave way to an integrative one, where the notion of a
"CyberLife", as distinct from a "life", is simply misplaced- the internet is
now simply a part of _life_ , sans prefix and with a lowercase "l", no longer
boxed up in the conceptual category of "the Cyber".

There was another motifical recurrence when smartphones entered the fray. The
oppositional critiques were voluminous and eloquent:

* We're spending so much time texting we're forgetting how to speak to each other

* Every crack in every interaction is plastered over with the ritualized and mutually fraudulent "notification check", signposting the way to the unravelling of the social fabric..., etc.

* You can find the Real World up there, when you hold your head high, with dignity, and not down there, with your head bowed, staring transfixed at a shining rectangle, face ghost-like, bathed in the soft pearlescent glow of vapidity.

But at some point, the integrative mindset arrived. It's hard to maintain the
oppositional mindset when you get off your Uber, arrive at a restaurant that
you found on Yelp, and are chatting to your friend on WhatsApp, only to have
them sit down in front of you. The handoff between "smartphone life" and "real
life" is seamless. Smartphones are woven so deeply into our lives that if you
ask someone how their "smartphone life" compares to their "real life", they'll
just give you a strange look. Smartphones are just a part of life.

I think VR/AR could go in this direction, as just another arrow in our
technological quiver. If we start looking at things like social VR, which has
the potential to reshape the way we interact remotely, or how architects are
today routinely using VR to demo to clients, it's not impossible to believe
that the integrative mindset could eventually overcome the oppositional
mindset in terms of how we think about VR.

~~~
laughfactory
Excellent--except all your examples of the "oppositional critiques" have
happened, and aren't abating. So the concern is well founded. Every day I see
people texting, reading, watching videos, and gaming on their smartphones AS
THEY ARE DRIVING--navigating traffic, changing lanes, turning, etc. They are
so hooked on their devices they're unable (or unwilling) to unplug even while
driving a multi-ton death machine amongst other multi-ton death machines.

The truth is that humans have a tendency to be lazy. It's not a simple case of
equal substitution; we will happily choose inferior substitutions which
require less effort (or expense or time or complexity).

Will people choose to "travel" via VR? Yes. Will this reduce real-life
traveling? Absolutely. The sense of having been somewhere will reduce our need
to actually GO there.

I this the rise of VR will see many become thoroughly entranced (addicted?)
and less productive and even alive than they were previously. We will see
society split into two groups: one large, one small. The small group will be
comprised of the productive, who limit their entertainment consumption in any
medium (but especially VR). This group will be exponentially more affluent
than the much larger group. The larger group will be comprised of the numerous
people who already consume what is already available through any medium:
Netflix, Xbox, cable, internet, tablets, phones, etc. These are the people who
(best case scenario) have a full-time job, but they spend every other possible
waking hour watching or playing something. More and more of this group are
working less and consuming/playing more. And we're not talking about real life
here. Just think about World of Warcraft--but on steroids. It's going to be
insane how addictive VR will be once the bugs have been ironed out.

In short: I too worry that this is something the human race is not prepared
for. I worry that our proclivities dispose us to losing ourselves in it at the
expense of our real life and responsibilities.

The truth of the matter is that, anecdotally, I look back over my 38 years and
I can see the impact on my life of the digital revolution. I _want_ to do more
with my life, but oftentimes the allure of the easy "hit" via Netflix or the
internet is more of a draw than spending my free time learning languages,
exercising, meditating, working on some of my app ideas, writing, or reading.
Instead I choose the cognitively easy "hit" at the expense of my personal
development and health.

Think about smartphones and tablets. They can and sometimes are used for
meaningful and productive purposes. They _can_ be very useful tools. But for
most people they're a distraction and a time suck. Which is to say most people
spend most of their time on their devices not doing anything meaningful:
playing the latest hot game, Facebooking, Facetiming, Snapchatting, reading
the news (as vapid as it is). I predict VR will be more of the same.

Either way, we will see...

~~~
samizdatum
I think I was addressing _attitudes_ towards new technologies, rather than
their _actual_ impacts, which you quite rightly focus on.

I'm less convinced that the impacts of these new technologies are as
pernicious as you claim, though I'm very open to the idea that hyperrewarding
stimuli can "hack" reward pathways carefully tuned for a very different
environment, be it McDonalds, PornHub, cocaine, or even Netflix.

But ultimately this is an empirical question, and while I see strong evidence
that the food industry exploits our evolved impulses with carefully crafted
payloads of calorie-dense foods, I don't see correspondingly strong evidence
for a drop in productivity with the rise of ubiquitous, frictionless
distraction- if anything we see a negative correlation.

Also worryingly absent from this analysis is the smorgasbord of opportunities
for self-improvement that technology has created. Through technology, millions
of people have picked up hobbies, languages, instruments, careers, partners,
and yes, World of Warcraft, but I don't think we could tabulate these effects
into a "net-technology-induced-eudaimonia" metric and say with a straight face
that the result turned out to be negative after all.

Further red flags go up with your assertion that the population will bifurcate
into the productive and unproductive, which seems to posit some mechanism that
AFAIK we don't have good evidence for, like a susceptibility to distraction
that's bimodally distributed among the population, or the lack of/ existence
of various feedback effects that would amplify small variations, etc.

Anyway, my main point is not that these general concerns are unfounded, but
that they're not well-supported by empirical evidence, so we're probably in
broad agreement on that front.

------
bhouston
Video chatting with Skype is preferred rather than a funky VR setup
personally. I can not imagine this taking off in business. It would like be
using dressup clothes in a business meeting -- what is the purpose?

I can view this possibly useful among the Snapchat crowd, but Snapchat allows
for deferred messaging, which has great use.

------
JoeDaDude
I find the creation of avatars in VR intriguing. What FB showed is far from
perfect, and apparently the avatar's gestures and expressions are controlled
by hand motions, as another poster pointed out. Still, even without legs,
their avatars look a lot better than these [1] by Foo VR, in which they
synthesize a full body avatar solely from controller positions. [1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT3jZyOXqzU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT3jZyOXqzU)

------
iammyIP
I am always amazed about how childish this company behaves, and especially its
chef. If i would not know the age of these people and their voices i would
guess they are 10 judged by their actions. Looks this was made for childish
minds in this increasingly infantile society, and like a little megalomaniac
kids dream 'to catch all humans that are dumb enough' in his fantasy VR
bubble. I hope humankind does not get too damaged by this company and their
primary school games.

~~~
chridal
I'd actually say that the presentation was really good. It's mostly in a very
accessible form of humor that most can participate in. This presentation will
not only be seen by those in the crowd but millions of people on Facebook. The
people Mark needs to convince to use these products are not the old but the
young, and by using that language I think he's reached the heart of many in
the insanely large demographic this demo is targetting.

EDIT: Typo

------
evv
I'm ecstatic about this project but this demo was not the first of it's kind.
It was demo'd live earlier this year at F8:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzhHCcR6hic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzhHCcR6hic)

~~~
randartie
From the demo filmed today vs that demo, it feels like they've made a lot of
progress

~~~
marrone12
I wonder if the vr can actually grab their facial expressions, or how much was
pre-rendered.

------
StreamBright
I would love to see a very different use case. Lets build a virtual space with
the known parts of the universe and let anybody travel in it and visit
planets, pull up details. That would be much more appealing use case to me
than the ones demoed in this video.

------
happyindeed
I wonder if your spouse would be impressed that she sees your avatar instead
of you in a video call. It may be novel in the first 1-2 times, but then it'll
get tiresome very soon. Especially since the avatars are so poorly made (and
with teeth, really?).

------
ImaCrea
How come I can't find any pictures/video from external point of view of the
demo, just to see how it looks from outside to see Zuckerberg do his demo? Is
that all staged? Where people forbidden to take pic/video at the event?

------
l33tbro
Somewhere in the next 4-7 years, I predict we'll see Facebook give away free
(or sell extremely cheap) AR glasses - which have a significantly reduced form
factor.

------
6stringmerc
Makes me think of a hybrid of Second Life and Minecraft. Trying to appeal to
two very distinct demographics. Not too serious, not too cartoony. Somewhere
in between.

------
pmoriarty
That demo looked suuuuper awkward to me. Had to stop after a minute or two
because it was so painful. Like Elon Musk, who also sucks at presentation,
Zuckerberg should just get a skilled actor to present for him.

The VR app itself looked super cheesy, too. It's embarrassing to see a company
with Facebook's resources come out with an app whose avatars don't look much
better than a couple of South Park characters.

Way too much hype, and too little substance. Call me back in 10 years, when a
serious VR Skype-killer app arrives.

~~~
l33tbro
Elon Musk is a great presenter. It's refreshing to have someone not
overconfident and who is a little skeptical.

The avatars did seem pretty childish, which makes me think this thing could be
aimed at kids and teens. Makes sense, given their adoption of Pokemon Go.

~~~
pmoriarty
Musk stutters. There are also many awkward halts and pauses in his sentences,
and a lot of um'ing and ah'ing in his speeches. "um" is probably the most
frequent word that he uses. The overall impression is that he's nervous and
just not a very capable speaker.

He really could benefit from a couple of years of basic Toastmasters'
training, not to mention how much he could improve with the help of a world-
class speech coach (or even a team of them) that he could easily afford.

~~~
l33tbro
I get all that. But what I'm saying is that he has a distinctive voice.

It's refreshing to have someone who isn't so polished. Sure, the dude stutters
and stammers, but it's not to the detriment of being able to parse whatever he
happens to be saying, ist it? This softer-touch presentational style is where
he has derived so much reverence, envy, and cultural capital.

------
Animats
It's like a low-rent version of Second Life.

~~~
errantspark
Second Life IS the low rent version of Second Life. I don't think anyone has
made the high rent version yet.

~~~
toufka
The same guys who made Second Life have made a second second life that's
pretty sweet. Better in many ways than OP's demo.

[https://highfidelity.com/](https://highfidelity.com/)

~~~
zyx321
I'd read about that a while back. Seems to be shaping up pretty nicely.
Although right now the most interesting feature is their issue tracker [1] and
bug bounty system.

[1] [https://worklist.net/worklist](https://worklist.net/worklist)

------
zerooneinfinity
God that facebook banner is awful. So glad I dumped this site years ago.

------
eva1984
What is the sell point of this? Real-time lip sync???

~~~
ljk
disrupting the $200 trillion industry!

------
baby
This is amazing. I want VR so bad.

On a lower note, I wish there were real games rather than this kind of things,
but I still find it amazing.

------
macawfish
woah... this is really impressive

------
awfullyjohn
"Travel to Mars"

Ha.

Is that the trend now?

------
shitgoose
two paper clips... arf arf...

------
programmarchy
Wow. I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but that was pretty cool.

------
johndoe4589
> and (dog name) doesn't know what's going on (hahahaha) "yeah he usually
> doesn't"

Can't help but notice how certain kind of intellectuals always view animals
with contempt. They may love the animal, but they see it as a "pet". What
they're really saying, is that the dog is _stupid_.

Now personally, I'm not really excited about technology that's designed by
people who live so much in their head, that they categorize the world in
"intelligent humans" and "stupid animals". I kid you not, I'm pretty sure,
many of them do actually believe that making a computer that simulates a
completely working dog and all its behaviours is just a matter of time..
because hey, "the brain is just a computer" and obviously to them, a dog's
brain is a much simpler computer...

Now animals being stupid isn't enough. The world also is stupid, so let's just
recreate trees, which are obviously just a collection of parts "branch",
"trunk" and so on. Wooooo. And then let's touch ourselves all day thinking
about how the world is a simulation because we're obviously just a few
millenia away of simulating ourselves.

/rant OFF

I'm sure they really love their dog... but to me these type of comments are
not innocent. It reveals the materialistic paradigm that drives people making
those technologies, and I'm not sure it is for the better.

We're pretty much designing everything on mobile around addiction already, we
need more ethics in the way that technology is designed. Especially when it is
designed by people who's primary motivation in life is to amass riches rather
than actually making our life better.

