Back in 2014, Facebook raised some eyebrows when they bought the virtual reality company Oculus for $2 billion. This week at Facebook’s F8 developers conference, we got a look at some of their ideas for VR.
The above video, uploaded by Marketing Land, shows Facebook chief technical officer Mike Schroepfer demonstrating some in-development ideas for how VR might let us share space and socialize with our online friends. It’s fun, if not exactly revelatory: competitors like Altspace VR are also experimenting with this kind of thing, though I could see a company with Facebook’s resources being able to bring a lot of development muscle to things. It certainly won’t hurt that they already have such a massive user base, too.
The best part of the demo happens at the end, when Schroepfer goes to give his friend a high five. His buddy makes a dap fist, and they wind up doing a VR version of the “Now I’m grabbing your fist with my open palm because I thought we were doing a high-five.”
Classic. VR really is like real life!