Since Facebook’s first headset brought virtual reality to the masses, many things have happened. Facebook may be the forerunner, but it also wants to be the foregone conclusion.
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Editor’s note: Virtual reality and augmented reality were once high expectations, and they were considered to be the next big thing after mobile. Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus for $2 billion that year brought the market’s hype of VR to a climax. It has been 5 years since Oculus’ first VR product, Rift, was launched. In these 5 years, what progress has Facebook bet on for the next platform? What’s the next step for VR and AR? PETER RUBIN reveals the secret for us. The original text was published on the “Connect” website. The title is: 5 Years After the Oculus Rift, Where Do VR and AR Go Next? The length relationship, we published in two parts, this is the first part.
Key points:
Facebook engaged in VR and AR accounted for one-fifth of the total.
Facebook has solved many problems in VR in the past five years, but there are still many more difficult problems to be solved
Facebook’s goal is to turn the device into something everyone can own
1. The past 5 years have not been easy, and the next 10 years will be even more difficult
One summer night in 2015, Atman Binstock was still staying up late to work overtime, and then he saw a door that shouldn’t be opened. There were only two keys in that room, and the reason for such a small number was good: because that was the place where the Oculus team used to do the Toybox demo.
This Facebook-owned VR company just participated in the E3 video game trade show and used thisDemonstration to show off the functions of your new handheld controller. With Toybox, you just need to reach out to build blocks, stand up mini rockets, and even play table tennis as usual. Perhaps the most important point is that you can do all these things with another person. Toybox not only shows that VR does not feel like playing a video game, but also does not give people the feeling of isolation-VR can let everyone be alone and together.
After E3, Binstock’s team rebuilt a demo pod at the office to allow more Oculus employees to try it out, but sometimes…unexpected events happen. So there is a locked door and only two keys. Can’t let them mess around. But now that door is open. Oh, oops, Binstock was thinking. I have to ruin someone’s night. He poked his head in, preparing to stop the intrusion, only to find that the person inside was his boss. Uh, it’s actually his boss’s boss. The person inside is Mark Zuckerberg, the man who became famous (notorious) for acquiring Oculus for $2 billion a year ago.
The chief architect of Oculus immediately changed his tone: “Oh, hi, Mark. Need help?”
The CEO of Facebook said: “No, I’m fine.”.
So Binstock watched Zuckerberg put on the prototype headset and prototype controller to play the Toybox demo.
Binstock then said: “You have to remember that things are still very unstable now. It even takes a long time to start up. Sometimes debugging for a long time does not know what went wrong.” But when he looked over Obviously, Zuckerberg is not just trying; he is practicing, he has played routines, and his movements are very smooth. BInstock realized that the person who once said that virtual reality will “change our way of work, entertainment and communication” has spent hours playing this thing, so that he can share his personal experience of virtual reality. view.
Whether it’s Oculus, VR, Facebook, or everyone’s trust in these three aspects, if you use “a lot of things happened” to evaluate it, it’s an understatement, just like when you say “2020 is really weird, right Right?” It’s just like perfunctory. All the original founders of Oculus have left, and the remaining stragglers have to make way for Facebook Reality Labs. This huge AR/VR department may account for 20% of the total number of Facebook employees. Oculus Quest 2, currently a million-dollar VR device, is not only priced at half the price of its first mass-produced headset Rift, but it is also much more powerful. Facebook has used the Portal video call device to further playEntering the hardware field, the one-year epidemic blockade is very friendly to these two things. What is not so friendly during this time is the public sentiment; given that Facebook is considered to be a complicity in the 2016 U.S. election false propaganda campaign, there are privacy issues caused by the advertising-driven business model, coupled with concerns about AI bias, and With all kinds of other issues, social giants often find that they have to defend more than any other company.
Nevertheless, all these changes make this week especially a good time to take stock: Recently, it is the 5th anniversary of Oculus Rift. In the past five years, despite all this experience, Facebook has solved an astonishing number of problems. As the company looks to the future, these issues (and unresolved issues) begin to occupy a prominent place. From Luxxotica smart glasses, which will be launched later this year, to the distant future imagined by Facebook, Zuckerberg has always believed that AR and VR will inevitably be ubiquitous. This technology has survived the initial fleeting disadvantages, but it has grown from a few million users to one billion, and this thing means much more than just adding a few commas. The question is whether the bet dropped will be rewarded.
2. Five turbulent years
Think back to the first few years of the current era of virtual reality. In 2012, the first Rift prototype was displayed behind closed doors at E3. In the fall of childhood, users on Kickstarter spent a total of nearly $2.5 million to purchase the first developer version of this headset. At that time, Oculus, headquartered in Southern California, began to grow. And it’s fast. In 2013, financing brought them nearly $100 million in capital. As the company grew, Oculus began to solve many of the problems that caused VR for the first time in the 1990s. When Rift finally came out (HTC Vive and PlayStation VR followed closely behind), this headset succeeded in what its predecessors did not: provide stable and comfortable virtual reality at the price of a game console.
But delivery is not easy. This headset requires a high-end gaming PC to provide power, and the connected cables crawl all over. It also requires external sensors to track its position in space, which further adds cables and hardware. It’s not uncommon for early adopters of devices to experience driver updates and USB port errors. You have to have the patience of a monk to figure out the problem. Just because some problems have been solved does not mean that related solutions are not a stopgap measure, and there is still a long way to go before VR headsets are as intuitive and complete as smartphones.
So the work has to continue, just like other companies do. But the acquisition of Oculus is just the beginning. FaceboOkay also began to invest a lot of resources to strengthen the company’s internal research channels. Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said: “It feels like we have invested a lot of time and energy in this, we can accelerate it into something that can be widely adopted, because only in this way all people will be interested. If this is a high-end , Super niche, very expensive toys, that is not what Facebook wants to do at all. Therefore, from the beginning, our goal is:’Can we make this thing everyone can have Something?’”
Before Zuckerberg bought Oculus in 2014, “Everyone can own” has always been his priority. Caitlin Kalinowski, who is now the head of Oculus hardware, said: “When I was recruited to Facebook in 2012, I talked to Zach about having the hardware part of the next platform. Of course, I think he still knows how to have the hardware part of the next platform. I don’t know what that is, but he really understands the potential of VR.” They first set up a dedicated team in Seattle, and chief scientists Michael Abrash and Binstock began to study the most difficult problems of VR. Later, various facilities were set up in Redmond, Pittsburgh, and all over the United States. The team of doctoral experts became larger and larger, and they wanted to find a way to get rid of the shackles of VR and immerse them as much as possible. Here at Menlo Park, Kalinowski and her colleagues are committed to transforming emerging technologies into product forms.
Push money in on this end, and the results on the other end will follow. The first is Oculus Go, which was launched in May 2018. This device is wireless, but it cannot track itself in space, so its experience is limited, and it is more like a device that relies on mobile phones to provide capabilities. (Remember Samsung Gear VR or Google Cardboard?) But a year later, Quest also solved the problem. The company finally figured out how to integrate outward sensors, and finally overcame the obstacles of Inside-out tracking (inside-out tracking technology). Then, in December 2020, their post-production was launched: that was Quest 2. In five years, Facebook increased its annual R&D expenditure from 5.9 billion U.S. dollars to nearly 18.5 billion U.S. dollars. It has also turned its flagship VR headset into a product that has taken a big step toward mainstream devices at half the price of Rift.
However, perhaps more important than the headset itself, the financial potential of the VR ecosystem has begun to show up in the software of this equation. 20In 16 years, a game called Raw Data became the first VR game with a revenue of $1 million. By early 2020, more than 100 games have joined the ranks. This involves all VR platforms; specifically, a third of the games on the Quest series do this.
This means hot games like Beat Saber and Onward, but it also means two of the most interesting use cases for VR: the social world and fitness apps. Rec Room is a multi-user social platform through which users can build their own world (and even get married). In the year of 2020 alone, the number of users on this social platform has increased by 6 times, which makes it estimated The value reached 1.25 billion US dollars, becoming one of the first unicorns in VR. Facebook’s own social app Horizon is also about to be launched. Meaghan Fitzgerald, head of Facebook AR/VR product marketing, said: “Now we have enough people through whom we can promote these communities and expand their scale.” The company also recently added A new avatar system has been released, and users can use voice to drive the mouth movements and expressions of the avatar. (Almost certainly, for the version of the VR headset will also perform eye and face tracking, thus pushing this system to new heights). Zuckerberg said: “If there is no eye tracking to make eye contact with the other person, if there is no face tracking to make expressions naturally, then it is not the best social platform.”
Games like Supernatural and FitXR that focus on exercise have achieved remarkable growth in both audience and results. Supernatural will charge users a monthly subscription fee of $20, and then there will be coaches to conduct aerobic exercise courses. With the cooperation of the drums of the selected playlist, you can hit various colored magic balls with various actions. It is said that this app has a very popular Facebook community, and users will upload videos of their daily exercises.
Sam Cole, the co-founder of FitXR, said: “We continue to see a wide distribution of our user base, not only in terms of age and gender, but also in terms of fitness ability. From’I am a bodybuilder, But I don’t like doing aerobic exercises, but I’m very addicted to doing this.’ Until those who can’t sit for a long time and struggle with fitness all their lives are our users.” Nevertheless, the average user of this app The daily closed-loop activity time still reaches 35 minutes. Cole said: “A customer recently told us that it feels like the best way to exercise since they have exercise.”
For Mike Verdu, the game director who came to Facebook in 2019 to be in charge of AR/VR content, this is a very convincing turning point.. When talking about the fitness industry, he said: “I think we finally have a use case that can be widely used and can be applied continuously. Fitness is inseparable from personal life. It is something to do every day, but to do this. Companies must be good at providing fresh things, including exercise, music, and content.” In other words, VR as a service. Verdu also sees other use cases emerging, such as creative tools, productivity applications-part of the organization will use VR to hold weekly meetings, and everyone will use an internal app to meet in a virtual meeting room-but for him The important thing is that content creators can finally see their results on a promising but untested platform. He said: “We have only scratched the surface of what VR can do. It is so exciting to see developers start to explore those experiences that will exist for a long time.”
What “a long time” means in the world of games and apps is one thing. But what it means for VR and AR in a larger time frame is another matter. Companies are still investing in technology; Apple is particularly concerned, and it seems that there are reports every week about its exploration of high-end VT headsets or AR glasses. Facebook may have been a forerunner, but it also wants to be a foregone conclusion, so it is trying a different approach: specific endurance, and in a public setting that everyone can see.
Translator: boxi