When the social titan Facebook acquired Oculus many people wondered about the reason.
That time, social networks were all about connecting the world and virtual reality (VR) was about connecting people to the world. In short, they weren't like the best of friends.
But at that time also, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisioned a world where VR would be a place for communication, not at all an isolation. With years Oculus seemed to be out of its focus, the truth is that Facebook is finally bringing in the answer.
On April 18th, 2017, Facebook introduces Spaces, the company's answer to social VR.
Spaces is essentially a separate app which allows users to emerge into a virtual space and browse through their Timeline with friends. As a social app, users can create an avatar by simply importing one from Facebook, or by creating a cartoonish one that is customizable.
After that, users can then invite their friends to join the VR experience. As a start, Facebook showed off how users can create artwork, play games, listen to music and watch 360-videos in VR.
To use Spaces and experience VR, users indeed need a VR headset. According to Oculus, the recommended processor is Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater, NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater for graphics card, and a 8GB memory.
But since at the moment of introduction, only a little fraction of people own the device and the hardware requirements, Facebook is allowing users to interact using video calling feature on Messenger.
Here, users will appear as a 2D video within the virtual space oppose to 3D because of the lack of VR ability. The video chat screen will show up in a little floating square.
Facebook Spaces was first announced at the 2017 Facebook's F8 conference. Geared with the Oculus headset and a Touch controller in hands, users have a virtual helper called Justin who appeared in the form of an animated cartoon avatar.
Spaces with its hardware, can capture head movement and predict hand gesticulation. What's more, it can also infers what the user's eyes are looking at, creating what appears to be an eye contact, which is integral to face-to-face communications.
One of the reasons Spaces can do this is because these avatars are stylized and cartoon-like. "They're not hyper-realistic, where you can find every little flaw," said Mike Booth, the product manager leading the Spaces development team.
The same goes with mouth movement. By listening to the user's voice coming from the Oculus Rift's microphone, Spaces tries to guess the shape of the mouth. While it isn't accurate, "We're not trying to be super photorealistic," continued Booth. "We just want to show that you're talking."
Gestures to VR are emojis to text. "You have to invoke them," said Booth. "They're not supposed to be accidental."
"We want to bring you and your friends to VR," said Booth. "I hope it'll make more people look at VR as something that people will actually want.