Facebook unveils social virtual reality app at developer conference

Global Business

Facebook unveils social virtual reality app at developer conference

Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference wraps Wednesday and the social media giant has being showing off a major push into augmented and virtual reality.

CGTN’S Mark Niu reports.

At Facebook’s F8 conference, the tech firm unveiled its first social virtual reality app called Spaces. Wearing a VR headset, in the form of a cartoonish avatar, can connect with friends in a shared virtual space even if they don’t have a VR headset themselves.

Facebook Spaces is in Beta right now, which means it’s just in initial testing phases and only available for developers to work on. In fact, Facebook’s head of Social VR said the journey is just 1 percent finished.

From the photos, Spaces immediately generates avatar choices. In a short time, we are travelling on a bi-plane, drawings images that we can share with each other for lasting memories.

“They have to start somewhere and so we’ll see if they get any traction early on. But the real value won’t come until they are able to reproduce in a more hologram like way. And I do think that is going to be several years out,” Casey Newton, Silicon Valley editor for The Verge said.

In fact, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described Facebook’s current arsenal of features as being primitive but only primitive because it’s still so early on the journey to creating immersive experiences.