Like, say, having your personal space violated. "Something like saying 'hey, you like this indie band too'-it's not like we're revealing your whole life story, but just a little bit to say 'hey, the door's open for you.' That's where Facebook's connectivity comes in."įor all the good things that presence can unlock-from confidence to intimacy-it can also open the door for some less enjoyable sensations that we've never encountered in our online lives. "We're trying to look for areas where we can add a special sauce," says Rachel Rubin Franklin, Facebook's head of social VR.
You can also opt to sit with anyone you like, providing there’s an empty seat next to them.Īll of which can be, frankly, a little bit scary-especially in VR, where being embodied as an avatar makes talking to strangers just as nerve-wracking as it can be in real life. (While you don’t need a Facebook account to use either of the headsets, you do need one to use Venues more on why in a bit.) You can also see those friends’ friends, providing they’ve opted in to sharing details of mutual commonality like Pages that you both like. A menu immediately shows you any Facebook friends who are also attending. The other thing you notice is that you know more about those 252 people than you expected. People could toggle into a navigation mode that would let them move around within a crowd, then toggle back into "content mode," where they’d be re-immersed by the performance. In this early iteration, everyone was grouped on a giant plane, like floor tickets at an arena show. Or so they found out when they settled on what LeBeau calls a "hamster ball" design. You need to give people the feeling of being immersed in the actual live event, and also the feeling of being immersed in the virtual crowd-and if you’re not careful, those two things can jeopardize each other. When LeBeau and his team set out to craft the perfect live experience in VR, they eventually discovered a paradox. But getting to here took a little longer. Yet, it wouldn't be nearly as fun if it was just me alone. "Going to a concert or a sporting event or a tech talk or a movie-these are all things where you gather around people you don't know, but it's not about the people you don't know. "When I think about hanging out among people that I don't know, I'm not looking to immediately get to know every one of them," he says. But when it came to relaxing familiarity, LeBeau’s team immediately thought about live events. Oculus Rooms is synchronous and familiar. (Facebook Spaces' ability to place a video Messenger call between VR and IRL, so that one caller is human and the other is an avatar, is an example of asymmetric social VR.) And then there’s familiarity, whether or not the people in VR know each other. There’s symmetry, whether or not people in a space are in VR. There’s synchronicity, whether or not people are experiencing something virtual at the same time. If you want to think about social VR like Facebook and Oculus do, then imagine a set of three criteria.
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