Facebook Bought Oculus VR

 There are many people out there who take a pessimistic view of Facebook. To them, Mark Zuckerberg is a huckster, out to sell us the snake oils of distraction and dopamine in exchange for our eyeballs and personal data.

 I take the more optimistic view.

 I do not believe Zuckerberg is building Facebook to offer the world’s advertisers a better way to target humanity with ads. No, giving advertisers this vaguely sinister power is just a means to an end — a way to create billions of dollars of value on the current Internet while bridging the gap to the Internet of the future.

 In my mind, the future Facebook in Zuckerberg’s imagining is much grander, bolder and more futuristic. And what is that futuristic end? It has a lot to do with the Oculus Rift. Before I explain why, let’s talk about the metaverse.

                              The metaverse?

 In the seminal piece of literary sci-fi that is Snow Crash, the author Neal Stephenson imagines a metaverse — a virtual reality world into which the technologists of a collapsed, balkanized America project their avatars.

 At the genesis of Stephenson’s virtual reality world (explained briefly in the book), the avatars started off as low-fidelity versions of the people behind them. But as the technology progressed, they became more and more representative and life-like, until the avatars reached the point that they were essentially digital replicas of their owners, projected into the cyber realm.

 In Neal Stephenson’s near-futuristic America, this metaverse was made possible by some wearable technology and a virtual reality headset.

How Facebook can help us project ourselves into virtual reality

 In one potential future, the identities we project into the metaverse will be fuzzy or even obscured. Here, our avatars will have little or nothing in common with our actual selves in the real world. They will range from pseudonymous constructions to total fantasies, like the socially-awkward straight male who plays the female dark elf seductress when he enters cyberspace.

 In another potential future, the avatars we project into the metaverse will much more closely mirror our actual selves. They will look like us, move like us, reflect our personal mannerisms, and so on. When we socialize in this virtual reality, we will be among friends, just from anywhere in the world with high-speed bandwidth, at anytime we choose.

 While it’s entirely possible (even likely) that both of these scenarios will co-exist, the latter future (where we project our real identities) will require some kind of authentic digital identity service that verifies that we are who we say we are, knows who we are friends with, and understands what we like and what we have in common with everyone else.

 In other words, it will require something a lot like Facebook.

___________________________________________________________________________________

source:TechCrunch