Facebook Wants to Become a Virtual Reality Social Network

Facebook has shown off an advanced demo of social interaction in a virtual space at its F8 conference, which included avatars capable of facial expressions as well as making hand gestures.

Virtual reality is an exciting new technology and Facebook wants in, completely, as evident by Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a virtual space where people could just hang out. The company knows that it could benefit a lot from this new virtual world and it is trying everything to be the first one to do it.

Their avatar-based social hangout space is based on Toybox VR. It is a social sandbox where two persons can work together to build blocks, play ping pong, or even team up to take out targets in a virtual shooting gallery. But Toybox was pretty limited; it just showed a player just as an anonymous blue head with a pair of blue arms that could float around in mid-air, unattached to a body.

Facebook wants to make it much more detailed! Their new demo features avatars that can also be customized to add details like facial hair, glasses, etc. Since Facebook’s VR (Oculus Rift) is not capable of tracking your facial features, they’ve also developed a workaround that tracks a person’s lip motion to enable basic mouth movement. It can combines signals from your voice, head, and hand position to recognize and render a few basic moods, like “smiling,” “confused,” “skeptical,” or “listening”.

To make it a full experience, they’ve also algorithmically approximated arm and body positions by tracking the position of the head and hands.

Virtual reality is the next big thing, and all the technology giants know it. As Google and Samsung have focused on VR for mobile devices, companies like Facebook (with Oculus) and Microsoft (with HoloLens) are betting on a whole new dimension.

Image Credits— TechSpot


  • I dont know where this new emerging technology will leave us…. Everyday a new technology is in the market and new ways are being introduced for looting the people. Poverty is still there, no health facilities or medicines are still in the market for dengue, kango virus and numerous diseases are spreading all over the world but I am really so sad to write these words that 60 per cent Pakistani people who are living under poverty but over there everyday new gadgets and mobile phones, laptops are being introduced and the rich and even those people who cant afford the smart phones but somehow managed the money to buy these items as they think these things are important to spend the life.


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