In 17 years, Facebook has moved from a social network at the university to a potential gatekeeper for the world’s latest computer platforms: augmented and virtual reality. The Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) division sells the Portal videophone and Oculus Quest 2 VR headset, and it lies behind an emerging range of Ray-Ban glasses with more advanced AR hardware being developed.
Facebook also builds and finances VR software, sometimes in competition with smaller developers. Last year, he launched his own virtual social network called Horizon in beta. It also experiments with a VR working system called “Infinite Office” that can mix the real and virtual world. These efforts, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, may attract more people to work and socialize through VR.
At the same time, Facebook is navigating through a crisis of privacy and moderation. The platform has been widely criticized for bringing online extremists together and allowing discriminatory targeted advertising or harmful misinformation. These problems will follow the business almost in VR and AR, which already complicates difficult questions about privacy and autonomy in these new spaces.
Andrew Real Estate Labs, head of Facebook, Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth called 2020 a ‘great’ year for VR and in a blog post last week he outlined plans to focus more on AR and Horizon in the coming year. I spoke to Bosworth over Zoom about how FRL will handle today’s problems in futuristic technology.
There is a pattern of social spaces that start for VR, and then realize that there is a very large audience outside headsets and start on the computer or cell phone. Do you see the road as viable for Horizon?
Yes, that’s definitely a possibility we’re considering. If you want to build a social product, you want to reach people wherever they are, and require them to have headphones that are not free, if they probably already have another paired device, which disables some people from accessing to participation. . And it feels good to none of us.
We’re going to start in VR, because if you do not get the nuclear mechanic right, then the rest of it does not matter. There are already many good software that feel the task of 2D-to-2D together; we are now doing one of them. So we wanted a strong foundation of VR. One of the things we have always talked about is how you can make this platform, how you can make it what people can use and whatever they can participate in.
Facebook talked about a system to allow people to place apps on Oculus Quest less exclusive than the Oculus Store. What is the status on it?
I’m very excited about the direction. And the status quo is that it is going to come much sooner than people think.
One of the pain points for Oculus in the past year the switch to who need Facebook accounts to use the headers. If VR becomes something you use for your work, it would seem that Facebook sign-up is not necessarily the best way to access it.
I think one thing you can put together with this now is that since we talked about linking the Oculus and Facebook account, Facebook has generally talked more about account management. One of the focus areas for us is to make it easier for people to manage all their accounts. Facebook Workplace accounts are therefore a good example. This is one of the pieces I think when we look at Infinite Office, we support it as one of the techniques that people can use to feel, ‘Yeah, I can have my Facebook account at work, and that’s what ‘I’m going to use it in certain contexts. ”
And this is very much in line with how we want to approach it in general. We want people to have total control over their persona, right? If you want to be Batman in VR, you can definitely be Batman. We just wish they could be Bruce Wayne too if they were to vote. And that’s why we try to think about it that way – to expand the opportunity space “Yep, you’re Batman, but you can only be Batman” to have much more control over your persona, your connections and how you show up. This is the work we are looking at as Infinite Office continues to develop internally.
It seems like a reversal of the way Facebook talked about a single identity and a united presence online.
I think the reality for us, especially in VR, is the ability to have a lot more control over your appearance – it’s not something that Facebook ever really struggled with when you were just dealing with a profile. Many of the problems at the time with the founding of Facebook were mainly on the internet. On the internet, no one knows that you are a dog. Authenticity was a first-class feature – that you really knew who this person was and could trust it.
Now we’ve actually got a kind of full circle where you can be embodied. Facebook could never control how you turned up in a real interaction with someone; it was never something we had under control. Suddenly, you know, in VR, we is a broker of it. We must therefore offer you the full richness of self-expression to which you would have access – in fact a richer set of self-expression than you would have in the real world. So, yes, new media requires new consideration. I do not think it is contradictory. I think it’s just an acknowledgment of what this medium is.
How much is the work of Facebook Reality Labs limited by problems with internet connection? Something like Horizon becomes much more difficult when people do not have consistent, fast internet access, and the pandemic naturally alleviated the gaps.
I believe there are two parts to this. I am always impressed with what we can do locally. I don’t think any company has done more than Facebook to shrink artificial intelligences and make them work locally on the device – for example, Portal, which does all its face detection and camera direction locally on the device. And this is a great opportunity for these devices to be useful, even if they are not connected in many contexts.
The second thing is definitely that you were right. The very rich stuff we suggest for Horizon may require a robust internet connection. Clearly, I hope that not only private businesses but governments around the world realize how much internet connection and access to information is increasingly a human right that we need to support. But even if you have limited internet access, we again see good luck with artificial intelligences that enhance the experience that people can enhance.
Avatars need far fewer pieces to express the richness of facial expression than [Zoom] do. Right? This is a very high bandwidth connection. We can actually reduce it to a smaller number of pixels that give my face animation and send it. And you still can not have a 100 percent accurate understanding of my expressions, but like a 95 percent accurate understanding and a dramatically lower bandwidth cost. So there are technologies that benefit. Moving to avatars can help us make connections even through limited or low bandwidth.
You talked about how privacy and security translation to Facebook Reality Labs’ work. What are you specifically doing to ensure that many of the issues that have surfaced on Facebook over the past year do not happen to something like Horizon?
I really want to separate the moderation of the content from the privacy, because these are very different issues. Content moderation is an issue that will stay with us forever. It was with us. There has always been a battle over who should become editors and who should become censors. It’s a human problem that arose, you know, once the printing press did that. Probably before that.
As for privacy, I feel happy. I feel that at the current height of privacy debate, we are establishing a new set of media, not only in this country but also in the world. We can have these conversations in public. We are in a golden age for privacy experts and the compromises surrounding it, and we try to take advantage of all the conversations that are already taking place and put these usage cases out into the world so that people can debate about them.
What are the business models after that? It would appear that Facebook Reality Labs AR and VR are using the Facebook advertising model, there will be privacy compromises at some point.
In a technology tradition, we are not really focused on the business model. You assume that if you build a good and useful thing, you will find a way to make money on it.
I believe in [targeted] advertise. I think it makes the experience that people in the world have much better than targeted advertising. I think this is very important for small businesses. I think this is very important for the maximum use of human capital. This is a debate that is a distant debate for augmented reality and virtual reality. This is not a short-term debate.
And so I have the great luxury of not worrying about it. I have enough real problems ahead of me to tackle before I worry about the business model. And so we have to build it before I can think about it too much. And I am confident if we do, there will be many opportunities.
For a more short-term problem, people compared Horizon to Facebook groups. What happens if a group like QAnon starts organizing on Horizon? How do you get it and decide what to do with it while threading the needle so as not to make you look creepy? everyone supervised all the time?
I do not think there is one answer to that, and there is certainly no answer that will satisfy all parties. We know this from our experience on Facebook. And so I think about content moderation issues, you can expect us to lean really heavily on Facebook, which has done the removal to talk to governments, talk to experts and constantly review its policies as the facts on the ground change.
I do not think you ever expect to take one stand, because once you take a stand, bad actors will find small loopholes. It’s never going to end. There is not going to be one solution. So I think people should expect it to be like any digital space, and frankly, any physical space that goes back in history. You need to continue to develop what the regulations are while observing behavior.