It doesn’t come as a surprise that Facebook is using F8, its yearly developers conference, to explain how it is rebuilding its platforms and how it will run the company around Privacy.
In a nutshell, a privacy focused social network means that Facebook is going to be the Living room vs. being the Town Hall, which has always been Twitter’s territory. So, everyone is now finding its place in the world.
The tech press is doing a good job at covering this aspect and the 6 product principles (encryption, reduced permanence, safety, interoperability, secure data storage), so I am focusing this post on what I have heard specifically about immersive computing.
It is clear that Facebook’s he future is private, it is also clear the future of computing is immersive.
Zuckerberg kicked off the Oculus section of the opening keynote with a simple statement “This is going to be a BIG year for VR“.
So, this year, it is not about the long-term vision and engineering break throughs around immersive computing, it is all about reveling what the VR community was expecting, ship date (May 21st) and pricing ($399) or the Oculus Rift S and Quest.
With Oculus Quest, it feels like the promise of VR is finally going to live up to the user’s expectations: for the 1st time people can move around in experiences, no cable, no external tracking, all made possible by Oculus insights. It is easy to carry, and content can be casted to smart phones or TV- Read detailed product review here
Oculus is the next computing platform and it now has a suite of interoperable products for everyone: Go for immersive media + Rift and Quest for gaming.
At F8 Oculus also announced enterprise packages for Go & Quest with features adapted to large scale organizations such as bulk upload and control, quick replacement, extended warranty and support – all the details at oculus.com/business
Walmart which is training 1 Million associates with STRIVR about customer service scenario is a great case study to demonstrate the power of VR training:
According to a survey shared by Oculus:
- Training time in VR is reduced by 40% compared to traditional training methods
- 70% employees trained in VR outperformed employees trained with traditional training methods.
For medical training, piloted by Johnson & Johnson: surgeons trained to perform a specific procedure in VR outperformed surgeon trained with traditional methods by +230% on various scale of criteria. This is simply due to the fact that surgeons trained in VR feel like they have already done the procedure rather than rehearsed for it.
And finally since eye contact and full body language are absolutely critical to sense of presence and making connections in VR, the Oculus team shared their full body codex avatars prototypes.
Unfortunately, it is still years away to being a consumer product. This work is really impressive and goes all the way back to understanding how the human body works : from brain to bones to muscles to skin and layering fabric movement of the clothes on top.
If that was not complex enough, new social norms need to be created so that people can build social fabric in VR. For that element, Facebook’s knowledge of the social graph is a key asset. A toolkit available for developers around safety and integrity and there will be more to come at Oculus Connect…
