Remember the time Facebook bought Oculus Rift, and everyone was laughing at the fact that we might be viewing our newsfeed through VR. Well were we wrong in assuming that. During Facebook’s F8 keynote, Facebook had a demo of Facebook Spaces which is Facebook’s attempt at getting into the VR market. By using the Oculus Rift and Touch controllers, Spaces will transfer you into a “social meet” where you can have a virtual space to interact and communicate with your friends.
To create an avatar, Facebook Spaces will either take a picture of you from your account and create a cartoon avatar or allow you to create your own customized avatar to be displayed in Spaces. Mice Booth, the product manager of Spaces development team, said that because the Rift and Touch creates a little motion capture studio, it will capture actual body language and capture head movement ans even hand gestures. It even goes as far as detecting your eye contact with whatever you are looking at. Spaces will also try to make out the mouth shapes you make based on the words you are saying, capturing them through the Oculus Rift microphone. The thumbstick movements on the touch will also be detected to display what kind of facial shapes you are making, from smiling to shrugging.
Spaces will also allow you to pull photos and videos from your feed to display them in the virtual environment for your other friends to view. It is also integrated into Messenger allowing you to have private conversations with your other friends that are not part of the virtual environment. Facebook Spaces will also allow you to create doodles, turning them into 3D objects where you can interact with them as well as the other people sharing the same environment with you.
Unlike Oculus Room which will only support Oculus Rift, Spaces will allow you to use spaces with the HTC Vive as well. Facebook is trying to show people that VR is not only made for gaming majority of people perceive it but rather trying to build a VR application that would appeal to everyone
Source: Engadget