VR is finally going mainstream. Those who have been involved in VR saw the early hooks Zuckerberg set with Oculus years ago. Zuckerberg saw the implications with VR early on which is why he just wrote a check immediately when the opportunity was presented to buy Oculus.
Why is Zuckerberg so interested in VR? Data. VR is an immersive experience and users even lose track of where they are. It’s why you see the videos of people running into walls, tv sets, smashing light fixtures or getting hit by ceiling fans, etc. Most headsets still don’t have eye tracking but that’s becoming a more common feature and Zuckerberg wants it.
Even without eye tracking, facebook knows what you are looking at by where your head is aimed. With eye tracking they also get pupil dilation and any microtremors. From head movements you get heart rates. Cameras are being added to capture facial expressions now too ”for richer social interactions”. In the virtual world you can tell where some people are looking and if they are smiling or frowning, etc. All of those responses flow through facebook’s servers and can be monitored and mined to see what Zuckerberg can profit from the most. Knowing what gets people’s attention and holds it is a window into the subconscious that few know how to control. Companies used to pay millions of dollars to evaluate how consumers interacted with ad campaigns. At facebook, users themselves pay for the monitoring equipment now and other companies will pay facebook for targeted access.
It doesn’t sound so insidious yet but remember that facebook indexes you and compares you to other similar people to learn more about you. Facebook also experiments on their users. They expose users to stimuli and measure the response. The thing about VR is the metrics available there are direct lines into the subconscious and reveal personal information about you. Heat maps are generated of what you look at and for how long. Are you looking at crotches, breasts, butts, or children? Is a stray glance real interest (likely) or just a stray glance? Who will you get compared with or declared similar to? Do you deserve to be there? Is there any way to know how you are categorized? Remember that facebook and other social networks routinely get served with warrants to gather up information collected on users. Want those tools and that data available for repressive christian-fascist politicians bent on Handmaid’s Tale style government?
VR is amazing fun and lets you see and experience all sorts of amazing things. People also have trouble differentiating between real and VR experiences as the brain treats VR experiences like they really happened. There are opportunities for revisionist history and training and conditioning. Anyone using Oculus headsets from facebook is putting Zuckerberg in control of your experiences and he’s never been a benign CEO. He understands the power inherent in VR and is building an empire around it now.
Things get very dangerous when one person can control what you see and hear and can measure and categorize your responses.
There are other headsets out there. Anyone curious about VR should look to anything but facebook/Oculus. As an aside, the founder of Oculus is Palmer Lucky - smart geek who is also a rabid trump supporter who used his VR millions to run a meme factory that lied about Hillary Clinton in 2016. When that was exposed, he had to resign from Oculus and now runs a border surveillance company intended to cash in on trump’s border wall. Palmer’s sister is Ginger Gaetz (formerly Lucky). Ginger is now married to Florida representative Matt Gaetz. The family is dirty but it’s zuckerberg calling the shots now. This just shows how innovative technology (Lucky essentially kickstarted VR) can get perverted by unscrupulous people like Zuckerberg.
Apologies for the tome but this stuff matters and people need to be aware.
Thanks for the heads up. We (company I work for) just bought a bunch of VR headsets and I think they might have been Oculus.
If this will be your first time in VR, be aware that many skimp on the computers and that can result in stuttering and pauses that really break immersion and even can make you physically sick. If the images stutter, might want to talk with whoever bought the systems. VR needs lots of compute and graphics power for the best experiences - it’s having to render two eye views at 60 or 90 frames per second. If you feel nauseous at any time, it’s important to stop and recover. Those who try to “power through” feelings of nausea can end up conditioning themselves to get nauseous by putting on a headset. It’s a weird thing but part of it is that depending on what you are doing, your brain has to smooth over the visual cues that don’t make sense. Any movement you don’t cause can cause problems. Movements you cause are much better tolerated. Have fun, though. It’s a very fun thing to do.
Oculus headsets aren’t the best ones out there, though. Facebook wants to keep prices low so they can gather information from more people so the headsets end up being lower resolution and make other compromises.
The best experiences come with other headsets. For business use, if the Oculus headsets don’t meet expectations, you might want to look at the Vive Pro, Valve Index, Varjo headsets, and even the HP G2. No idea if eye tracking is important in your application but not all of those support eye tracking. There’s others out there too. Some of these headsets also use a different kind of tracking than Oculus headsets. The “Lighthouse” based trackers are the absolute best tracking but have their own issues. The headsets that do inside-out tracking like facebook”s and the G2 have cameras that look out at the room to determine head movements and those can get confused in low light or complex areas.
In training applications, operator stress is measured using eye tracking, heart rate, and probably other metrics, and stressful scenarios can be repeated until users get the hang of whatever activity is being trained. It can really provide insight into how well trainees are doing. Those same metrics are what facebook wants for other reasons.