Facebook is definitely one ambitious company, they once dreamed of being the biggest website in the world and that’s happened and now they’re dreaming of building their equivalent of a teleport by the year 2025. Now, we must clear up that we don’t actually mean some sort of device that can physically transfer your body through space and time to another place. We are in fact actually talking about Virtual Reality here.
“Facebook wants to build a device that allows you to be anywhere you want, with anyone, regardless of geographic boundaries,” the company’s chief technical officer, Mike Schroepfer, said last week.
It’s a dream by Facebook to enhance their use of their purchase of Oculus and consequently the Oculus Rift with their technologies of messaging and video messaging to allow people to really feel like they’re visiting friends and family when they engage in video calls.
Facebook hopes to use the Touch technology that Oculus announced in June that allows wearers of the Oculus to interact with the software inside of their visor. This controller replicates a user’s natural movements in VR and allows the software to track their hand movements with incredible detail. The next step for Oculus will be their Medium software that allows users to sculpt almost anything using the Touch piece of hardware. This video shows off the uses for the programme really well.
https://youtu.be/IreEK-abHio
So how does Facebook plan to have this “teleport” idea in place? Well in May of this year, Oculus teamed up with a real-time 3d scene construction focused company called Surreal Vision. The two companies are now working hard on building a technology that allows users to live stream their surroundings to others in a virtual reality environment. Allowing the user to feel like they’re in the very room.
The initial advantage of this would be allowing users to add in objects into a space that aren’t really there. For example redecorating a house or choosing an office layout or working with different classroom designs and such. It’s a very exciting future for virtual reality and Facebook have big dreams of fully taking advantage of it.
