Facebook's new virtual reality chat application will cast paid staff on "integrated" trolls

SAN JOSE, California. -The merger of Oculus and Facebook continues at Oculus Connect's sixth annual conference this year, with this year's biggest example: Facebook Horizon: A new exclusive Oculus VR chat app that mixes cartoony avatars, social spaces and playable games similar to the current mega-hit VR Recording room. The beta version of the app will not be released until the beginning of next year, but in the meantime, we had the chance to test it and discover the crazy plan that Facebook has launched for the first time times in virtual reality.

After testing the Solid-if-Early app, I interviewed two Facebook representatives about existing social-VR apps such as Recording room and VRChat, who have their own creative and organic approaches to meeting strangers in virtual reality. Facebook says it's going to try something we have not seen yet in a chat, VR or other application: a full concierge service.

After crossing HorizonThe tutorial "You will meet humans who are part of our team in the product, called" Guides "," Ars Technica, director of Facebook's AR / VR experiments, Eric Romo, told AFP. "These are the people who will try to set the tone of what's the environment." When asked to clarify when it was about paid Facebook staff, sitting in headsets with microphones and waiting for new users to arrive, Romo replied: "Yeah!" He added that these staff members would be "saying," How can I help you? What can I show you to do? "

VR "time out?"

This is undoubtedly the most intense Facebook plan to date to introduce users to a new product. No existing Facebook features or associated apps (WhatsApp, Instagram, for example) have ever intended that a human could appear as a host, host, and assistant at first start, instead of serve in a customer service or official technical support. .

I asked what would Facebook 's approach be if a user engaged in this process of integration keeping in mind the drag or abuse. The meanest Horizon users are put in VR "time out", or worse, to attack the official humans Facebook?

Meaghan Fitzgerald, head of Facebook's AR / VR content marketing, said HorizonVR Greeters do not "be moderators, they will not be responsible for enforcing the rules". She added that FB would rely heavily on built-in blocking and reporting tools to assess if and how users might be limited for abusive behavior (and she was careful not to describe any type of abusive behavior) . Horizonspecific discipline in the works).

"But[[[[Horizon Guides]Fitzgerald continued. "People who come into these environments – a lot of research shows that they do not have the intention to enter – sometimes they are, sometimes people want to cause problems. more often, they do not know how to behave.If you see someone running and screaming, you will run and scream.If you see someone having a conversation about "Hey, here's a new activity Do you want to go for a walk? ", This changes the tone of the space People are really influenced by this.

When I insisted on the question of how Facebook was preparing to enter the intimate world of VR chat rooms (with its own employees in the social collimator), Romo conceded that the descriptor of "closed beta" was crucial so far ahead of the launch of the application. "It's absolutely fair to say that we have a lot to learn, which is why we start slowly," Romo said. "There are many potential vectors of challenges we face, and we need to learn them slowly as we move forward."

Dogfighting as a Trojan

As for the application itself, which I've tested in Oculus Quest, make no mistake: it's the Facebook version of Recording room. This means that it revolves around social spaces and mini-games, giving friends and strangers the opportunity to meet and spend time in virtual reality.

The application already includes an amazing Trojan to embody people in social reality: a fighting game between football in which your pocket controller Oculus Touch becomes a fighter plane. Use the position of your hand to manually steer the plane into a relative space. The camera used in the third person will move you in the same way, as opposed to deforming a jet fighter as if by magic.

The effect may seem uncomfortable as previously described, but I was impressed by the remarkable quality of this "paper airplane" flight model. The connection I felt with a plane in my hand probably helped my brain to translate how a battleground of virtual reality had shifted around me. Between the position of my hand and a joystick, I was able to maneuver a plane gently and cautiously through the cave gates and under other bulky objects while aiming for weapons and objects in a two-by-two football game.

While I was not flying, I was walking in my arms, talking with strangers and gesturing with my finger and thumb in the air with my hands. (Make a hand sign and your avatar will smile, you'll frown.) In a social space, I saw a Facebook staff member choose from an integrated inventory of geometric shapes, then copy, paste and manipulate. shapes to build geometry nearby as a tree. This same staff member also wrote a very simple programming note to rule a silly prop in a beachside lobby: throw three fruits in a basket and an umbrella stands out. I could hold this umbrella talking with people on the beach.

"We really want you to meet people you do not know," Romo insisted in our interview. A mix of open social spaces, mini-games and world-building opportunities makes perfect sense for achieving this ambitious goal. But this mission statement, about going out with strangers, is a clear detour from the company's previous online chat application, Facebook spaces, which HorizonThe confirmed team is defeated in favor of Horizon. Nobody had an estimate for when The spaces will be turned off.

Facebook has clearly put a ton of work into the friendly and yet not strange look of its cartoon avatars. In particular, I noticed "a pretty face at rest" and a living eye contact with all the virtual reality avatars I talked to during my test. But it's still a combination of applications and virtual reality avatars that Facebook is resetting to present a brand new discussion interface in just a few years. Between this fact and the team's repeated warnings regarding the "first days" of the application, we are still waiting for Facebook to inspire the assurance that it will launch a social-VR application and will keep it for more than two years.