Since Facebook bought Oculus more than three years ago, the company has made a play at Virtual Reality (VR). During the F8 conference 2017, Facebook announced a new platform, Spaces.
With Spaces, Facebook is integrating social virtual reality into the core of its business (facebook.com). Spaces allows users to get access to a virtual environment, where they can hang out with friends in a “fun and interactive” way as if you were in the same room.
Spaces changes our interactions from the traditional chats to a more fun and goofy voice and body movements interaction. To start interacting with your friends, you send out an invite to them and they will join your space. You can make video calls via Messenger if one of your friends are not lucky enough to own a VR kit.
Facebook boasts of the “fun” you and your friends could have in Spaces, including taking virtual selfies, hold birthday parties, making virtual 3D drawings and taking trips.
Facebook Spaces is currently available in Beta on Oculus Rift. The company also plans to bring the Spaces experience to more platforms over time.
The only downside with Spaces is that it will not work with smartphone-powered VR kits such as Gear VR, Google Daydream and Google Cardboard headsets. Spaces seems like an interesting platform that has the potential to change the way we interact with our friends and handle our loneliness, but the limitation brought by its compatibility issues will make it hard for the masses to reach that Space.
