Is virtual and augmented reality the future for Facebook?
The development of f8, the Facebook conference for developers, raises a question about the company’s commitment to virtual and augmented reality. This was already evident from the list of themes and sessions dedicated to the topic in the program, but is also reflected in recent announcements.
Everything seems to indicate that Facebook believes virtual and augmented reality is going to be a big part of the company’s future. When Facebook started out, the key thing was text, the exchange of typed messages and updates. As the social network has grown in popularity, that role moved on to photographs: we used to go to Facebook in search of vacation photos, images, static graphic material of any kind.
Over time, the growth of broader bandwidth and the popularization of the format, it entered the video age, allowing Facebook to create an ecosystem based on virality, which the company was able, in many ways, to lead. In 2015, Facebook housed the vast majority of videos with more than one million views, the format of choice for advertisers, and becoming the leader in the so-called social advertising. Facebook’s activities, which challenged a YouTube traditionally considered the leader in video, generated controversy over issues such as automatic playback of clips to inflate reproduction figures, along with freebooting, the practice of taking videos from other platforms and uploading them to Facebook.
Now Facebook is considering the development of its next ecosystem, and everything indicates that it will be virtual and augmented reality. This is obviously a more difficult challenge that before, when the company was pretty much following ongoing trends: virtual and augmented reality is still in an embryonic phase, and the number of devices in the hands of the public is still scarce, while it is not clear what competitors like Apple intend to do. But Facebook has decided to commit to the format, an idea that was already present when, in March 2014, the company decided to pay around $2 billion ($400 million of it in cash, 23.1 million Facebook shares and a $300 million earn-out) in for Oculus VR, or when Mark Zuckerberg made that surprise appearance at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2016.
Facebook is now playing for high stakes based on a strategy to attract developers: React VR, a platform to develop basic virtual reality applications; Spaces, which allows you to see yourself and your friends in virtual reality scenarios (which is not dissimilar to the avatars in some gaming platforms); 3D modeling tools to build augmented reality scenarios; virtual reality cameras and even a team of sixty people dedicated to investigating ways to interpret our brainwaves and transform them into commands.
There’s no doubt: Mark Zuckerberg sees virtual and augmented reality as the future of the company. This is not some fad, nor is it terribly futuristic: this is a scenario that has been thought about and studied for a long time, one in which the company has already accumulated a lot of experience and in which it believes it will soon dominate. That implies levels of popularization and diffusion of technology that today seem still relatively distant, a scenario that will undoubtedly define an ecosystem of great interest to many people.
During MWCs past I have talked with Robert Scoble, co-author of “The Fourth Transformation” with Shel Israel, which predicts huge activity in this area, as well as discussing other company’s strategies. He spoke enthusiastically about its application to virtually every field. Keep abreast of this topic: Facebook is not about to walk out on to a virtual reality tightrope blindfold without a safety net, and it knows where it is headed.
(En español, aquí)
