INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Five years ago, Facebook acquired VR pioneers Oculus for $2 billion
This week, it snapped up neural-interface pioneers CTRL-Labs for somewhere north of $500 million, and announced that its own massively
multiplayer VR shared universe Horizon will launch early next year.
Oculus became (somewhat creepily named) Facebook Reality Labs, headed by
Andrew Bosworth, one of the company first 15 engineers, who also headed the company transition from desktop to mobile advertising
It doesn''t take much imagination to see that he now in charge of a much more interesting, and longer-term, transition: from the World Wide
Web to whatever lies beyond.
Their big multibillion-dollar bet, the vision floating in Mark Zuckerberg crystal ball, is clearly that this
new frontier is &cyberspace,& to use William Gibson term, or ''the Oasis,& to borrow from READY PLAYER ONE, a copy of which was once issued
to every new Oculus employee
Virtual reality, in other words, and/or maybe &mixed reality,& which combines our real world with virtual artifacts.
I can see your eyes
I admit mine are twitching skywards as well
AR/VR, like nuclear fusion and Brazil, have been the future for so long that it become a little hard to take that future seriously
Neuromancer was published in 1984
Jaron Lanier demo&d the first real VR headset and motion capture wearable, the EyePhone and DataGlove, more than thirty years ago
No wonder the notion of a shared global VR space increasingly feels like a retro-future.
But to Zuck credit, the path to change here is
obvious and therefore plausible: use gaming as the bridge
Create the world first and best massively multiplayer online VR game
(The theory being it will be more immersive, and therefore more compelling, than Magic Leap mixed reality.) Use Facebook power, scale, and
wealth to bring gamers in until there a thriving community of many million monthly users.
Then, transition to the larger vision, of VR
slowly supplanting the Web itself; replace laptops with headsets, phones with overlays on smart glasses, and keyboards with neural
Not all at once, but bit by bit, as the Horizon gameworld gradually, over a period of years, becomes a platform for socializing and
messaging and work as well as play
Then the Internet denizens won''t just visit Facebook web site, or launch its app; instead they will, literally if virtually, live in
Facebook walled garden.
Is that vision more than a little creepy? You betcha
Is it one that likely to come to fruition? Well, no, I wouldn''t say likely
But I&ll concede it has a chance, one sufficiently nonzero, and sufficiently potentially spectacularly lucrative, that Facebook ongoing
multibillion-dollar bet makes sense
Lucrative in terms of both money and implicit power
Like I said: more than a little creepy.
Of course this isn''t Facebook only vision of the future
It just one of their bets
Another is to essentially pivot from social-media advertising to messaging and transactions
You have to grudgingly admire their willingness to explore abandoning their current fantastically successful business model in favor of the
Anything to disrupt the innovator dilemma.
Will this bet pay off? Will Facebook Horizon, plus VR and neural interfaces, be the gateway to &a
consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions,& to quote William Gibson? While the odds are against it, it still seems to have a
better chance than anything else on our collective horizon.
