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Virtual reality will become a platform dominated by intimate social experiences, even though users are in different rooms, a senior executive at Oculus has said.
Jason Rubin, the head of content at the Facebook-owned virtual reality company that makes the Rift system, says that while games and entertainment will be important aspects of VR, new types of social interaction will be the driving force behind demand in the future.
Oculus’ new Touch controllers, which enable users to use their hands while wearing the Rift headset, have gone on sale for the first time in the UK today.
“Oculus is Facebook, and Facebook believes first and foremost in social interaction – that’s what the company is about,” Rubin told the Press Association.
“Obviously Mark (Zuckerberg) has a vision for bringing social into VR – he believes in it as a social tool – and hands are the beginning of that.”
The Touch controllers are tracked by sensors, as are gestures made by users, enabling virtual hands to appear within VR experiences that can be used to touch, point to and grab items.
“In the long run, facial expression tracking and all these other things become more and more important but for now just being in a space with someone virtually and being able to reach out, shake their hand and high five opens up a different directness in interaction that has not been enabled before,” Rubin said, adding that Oculus believes as more consumers discover social interaction in the virtual world they will be drawn to it.
Oculus has also launched avatars – virtual animated versions of Rift users – that appear within experiences and can interact with other players, and Rubin says these characters play a key role in the normalisation of VR.
“It doesn’t take very long for you to forget that I’m a floating blue head and you’ll turn to me and say things and point because Touch has that presence and that ability,” he said.
“If you extrapolate that basic demo to what we’ll be experiencing in a few years, you realise that VR has the ability to have social interaction that no TV telepresence device could ever have. It’s going to open up incredible possibilities for social interaction.”
HTC Vive and Sony’s PlayStation VR have also launched high-end virtual reality platforms in 2016, with both enjoying early success in gaming and interactive experience terms, but Rubin believes social will eventually take over.
“Fundamentally, Facebook is not in this for an entertainment device,” he said. “That’s a great part of VR and we’re really excited about the games we’re launching. We’re excited about the long-term opportunities in film and video. They’re incredibly important, just as they are in a mobile phone.
“But ultimately the social aspect of it is what’s going to make VR pass the gaming console scale and go to the scale of a mobile phone or the scale of a television, where everybody needs one of these devices in their lives because that’s just what you do.
“Allowing you to reach your hands out and be able to pick something up and interact with the space you’re in completes the package and sets us up to now do software research to figure out – with this amazing system – what now can we do with it.
“So now begins the next phase, which is the software revolution in VR.”
