On Tuesday evening, Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox let slip that the company was working on its own virtual-reality apps.
Cox’s revelation, in a talk at the Code Media conference in Dana Point, Calif., is hardly a shocker, given Facebook’s purchase of headset maker Oculus VR last year. But it’s the first time the company has hinted at any plans to take advantage of its shiny new toy.
So what is a virtual-reality version of Facebook going to look like? Turns out we’ve already seen it.
Remember Facebook Home, the social network’s ill-fated attempt to take over your Android phone? Putting photos and status updates on your lock screen didn’t live up to the hype. But in two television commercials—one starring Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself—the company gave a very clear vision of what an immersive, IRL version of Facebook would look like.
In one commercial, an airplane ride gets livened up by a shirtless dude in the luggage compartment, drag queens, and a cute kid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_odkdk1CSYA
In the other, Zuckerberg is interrupted by a screaming goat and a pool party:
These wacky interruptions were meant to represent what our friends’ pictures and updates would look like if we could experience them all around us.
See also: Facebook Home Could Be A Pain, Unless You Really Love Facebook
The problem is that Facebook Home was a flawed product: It didn’t work as well as it could, and it just didn’t prove as compelling to users as Facebook’s designers and engineers hoped.
“The version of the world where you’re sending an immersive picture of what you’re doing is far more interesting,” Cox told his interlocutor, Recode editor Peter Kafka, at the event. “You’ll do it, Beyonce will do it.”
Oculus VR, whose Rift headset places you in a virtual world where you can turn left and right and see all around you, could be the vehicle for these experiences. It’s far less clear, of course, how we’ll capture these 360-degree views of what’s happening around us.
But Facebook has the building blocks for those tools, in its core app, as well as photo-sharing tool Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp.
Sharing cat GIFs is so 2014, in other words. Get ready for the screaming goats.
Lead image courtesy of Facebook
