Let’s connect some dots. Five years ago, Facebook acquired virtual reality pioneers Oculus for $ 2 billion. This week, it acquired neural interface pioneers CTRL-Labs for somewhere north of $ 500 million, and announced that its own massively multiplayer virtual reality shared universe Horizon will launch early next year.
Oculus became (somewhat creepily) Facebook Reality Labs, spearheaded by Andrew Bosworth, one of the company’s first 15 engineers, who also led the company’s transition from desktop advertising to mobile advertising. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that you are now in charge of a much more exciting and longer-term transition: from the World Wide Web to all that lies beyond.
His big multi-million dollar gamble, the vision floating in Mark Zuckerberg’s crystal ball, is clearly that this new frontier is “cyberspace,” to use William Gibson’s term, or “the Oasis,” to borrow from READY PLAYER ONE. , a copy of which was once issued to every new Oculus employee. Virtual reality, in other words, and / or maybe “mixed reality”, which combines our real world with virtual artifacts.
I can see your eyes rolling already. I admit that mine are also moving skyward. AR / VR, like nuclear fusion and Brazil, have been the future for so long that it has become a bit difficult to take that future seriously. Neuromancer was published in 1984. Jaron Lanier demonstrated the first real handheld motion capture and virtual reality headsets, the EyePhone and DataGlove, more than thirty years ago. It’s no wonder the notion of a shared global VR space increasingly feels like a retro future.
But to Zuck’s credit, the path to change here is obvious, and therefore plausible: using the games as a bridge. Create the world’s first and best massively multiplayer online virtual reality game. (The theory is that it will be more immersive, and therefore more compelling, than Magic Leap’s mixed reality.) Use the power, scale, and wealth of Facebook to entice players until you have a thriving community of many millions of monthly users.
Then the transition to the larger vision, of VR slowly supplanting the Web itself; replace laptops with headsets, phones with overlays on smart glasses, and keyboards with neural interfaces. Not all at once, but little by little, as the Horizon game world gradually, over a period of years, becomes a platform for socializing, messaging, working and playing. Then Internet dwellers won’t just visit Facebook’s website or launch their app; instead, literally, practically, they will live in Facebook’s walled garden.
Is that vision more than a little creepy? You can bet. Is it likely to come true? Well, no, I wouldn’t say it’s likely. But I’ll admit that you have a chance, one nonzero enough, and potentially lucrative enough, that Facebook’s ongoing multi-million dollar gamble makes sense. Lucrative in terms of money and implicit power. Like I said: more than a little creepy.
Of course, this is not the only vision for the future of Facebook. It’s just one of your bets. Another is to essentially go from advertising on social media to messaging and transactions. You have to grudgingly admire his willingness to explore abandoning his current incredibly successful business model in favor of the unproven and unproven. Anything to disturb the innovator’s dilemma.
Will this bet pay off? Will Facebook Horizon, plus virtual reality and neural interfaces, be the gateway to “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions,” to quote William Gibson? While the odds are against it, it still appears to have a better chance than any other on our collective horizon.
