Mediaboss Marketing

I'll use any excuse to break out this image again.

Aurich Lawson

You didn't think Facebook spent $2 billion on virtual reality company Oculus just to dip its feet into the next unproven frontier in video games, did you? No, the massive company has reconfirmed that it is interested in bringing its core social networking apps to VR in the future, to let users share 360 virtual views of what they're doing, for example.

At the Code/Media conference in California last night, Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox responded to a question about "the one thing you haven't accomplished yet that you'd really like to figure out," by saying "virtual reality is pretty cool; we're working on apps for VR."

To Cox, VR is just a more impressive, all-encompassing extension of the kind of experience sharing millions of users already do on Facebook. "You're just sending a photo, you're sending a video, you're sending a piece of text, you're sending an idea, you're sending a thought. [With VR], there's a version of the world where you're sending a fuller, immersive picture of what you're doing..."

Cox cited existing VR demos that put people in the seat of a Blue Angel jet fighter or a yurt in Mongolia as examples of the kind of 360 virtual experiences Facebook usersranging from everyday Joes to celebrities like Beyoncwill eventually be able to share with their friends on the platform. "You immediately understand... the first time you're in it, you realize you're looking at the future."

This "announcement" really isn't a surprise. When Facebook acquired Oculus nearly a year ago, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was effusive aboutpossibilities beyond the headset maker's initial gaming focus. "Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom with students and teachers all over the world, consulting with a doctor face to face, or going shopping in a virtual store where you can touch and explore the products you're interested in just by putting on goggles in your own home," Zuckerberg said at the time. Oculus' Brendan Iribe toutedthe ability to talk to a friend's virtual avatar "face to face," rather than in a 2D video window on a flat screen.

Executives from Oculus and Facebook have consistently said they expect virtual reality to be the next major computing platformmaybe even the final computing platform. Given that expectation, it would be a bit silly if Facebook wasn't working on some sort of VR extension for its social network. On the contrary, working on the assumption of a VR-dominated future, Facebook seems determined not to lag behind the crowd, as it did with underpowered mobile apps in the early wake of the smartphone revolution.

As for Facebook becoming a mandatory part of the end-user Oculus experience, the folks at Oculus have continually insisted that Facebook has been an extremely hands-off corporate owner. "I guarantee that you won't need to log into your Facebook account every time you wanna use the Oculus Rift," Oculus founder Palmer Luckey told a Reddit AMA shortly after the acquisition.

"The agreement with [Zuckerberg] was 'Use what services you want from Facebook. We're just here to help,'" Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe told Ars last summer. "If you don't want to use any, you don't have to, but there probably are some services that we provide, like payment services and all kinds of things that they have a really good platform for that we don't."

Read more:
Facebook in your face: Why social VR apps arent a surprise