The next step of Facebook's world domination is in beta
Back at Oculus Connect last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about the need for social in VR, showing off an app that allowed you to create your own VR avatar. You could sit in VR meetings with friends, taking virtual selfies together with virtual selfie sticks, and draw in the air.
Today at its F8 conference, Facebook announced that the app, which is officially called Facebook Spaces, is available now for Oculus Rift in beta form.
You start by choosing one of your Facebook photos, and from there you’ll be presented a host of options to choose from. Like Zuckerberg, you can then have meetings in VR with friends or consume all kinds of other stuff on Facebook, like 360 photos and video and old timeline content. Or, yeah, you can just draw things in the air.
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If you’re not up for that, you can use Messenger to video call people. Oh, and there’s that selfie stick for virtual selfies. If Facebook’s virtual world, and your friends, are becoming a little too much you can also “pause” and head to your own private virtual space. Facebook says it’ll listen to feedback from the beta to improve Spaces, and that it’s looking to bring the app to more platforms in the future.
This isn’t Facebook’s first VR app. Last month the company launched Facebook 360, a VR version of Facebook that allowed you to look at 360-degree photos and video in your Gear VR. There’s also Oculus Rooms, which is similar to Spaces but more realistic and less cartoony. Both of these are just the beginning of Mark Zuckerberg’s larger push on VR, to which he has pledged $3 billion.
