Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer turned 40 last month. He (just barely) blew out a row of 40 candles during a mini-celebration at company headquarters, and Mark Zuckerberg posted a video to, yes, Facebook. “Schrep,” as friends and colleagues call him, could share his huffing and puffing with anyone who wasn’t there.
But what he really wants to do is share the moment in three dimensions, not just two. When friends and family view that video over the net, he wants them to step inside Mark Zuckerberg’s conference room as the candles go out, not just watch on a phone.
That was the upshot of Schroepfer’s keynote on Thursday at Facebook’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. Like Zuckerberg the day before, he teased the idea of combining Facebook with the sort of virtual reality offered by Oculus, the startup Zuckerberg and company acquired last year.
When he sits down for a chat with WIRED after the keynote, Schroepfer makes a point of saying that marriage of Facebook and VR is still years away. And indeed it is. But he believes the company is already laying the groundwork for such a marriage. “There is a deep well of research and work we’re doing in terms of how to do that,” he says. “We are very interested in making this a social experience….The true magic of this VR technology will come when it’s not a solo activity, but a joint activity.”
Virtual Reality for All
The long road to that place begins with the “immersive” 360-degree videos Facebook unveiled earlier in the week. Initially, these videos will come from professionals—big movie and internet media houses—but “within a year or two,” Schroepfer says, consumers will have access to relatively inexpensive cameras that can shoot such videos too, before sharing them with friends and family on Facebook. “All the components are there,” he says.
When you open such videos on a phone, you’ll be able to “move through them,” simply by tilting the phone here and there. Think the photo viewer on the Facebook Paper app, only with an extra dimension. That’s not exactly virtual reality, but Facebook hopes to provide additional fidelity by giving you the option of streaming these videos to headsets like the Oculus and the Samsung Gear VR, hardware that straps around your eyes and gives the (rather convincing) illusion that you’re in another place.
The pitch echoes similar talk from tech giants Google and Microsoft and startups like Magic Leap. After so many years of unfulfilled promise, virtual reality—and its cousin, augmented reality—are finally moving towards the mainstream. But as Schroepfer says, such technology has a long way to go. A very long way.
The 360-Degree Camera
Much needs to change even before Facebook’s 360-degree videos can show up in your Oculus headset. For one, you need to actually buy an Oculus headset (the consumer incarnation of the device hasn’t reached the market). And, behind the scenes, Facebook must fashion a way of automatically formatting these videos for viewing in an Oculus. “How the heck do you get them into your VR? This is the Facebook News Feed we’re talking about,” says Brian Blau, an analyst with research outfit Gartner, who has worked with VR in the past.
Indeed, Schroepfer acknowledges that the future is not yet here. “This is the Wild West,” he says. “We have to do some work on the back-end—transcode the video to play in our environment or do some other processing to make it look great on different Oculus devices.”
What’s more, inside the computing centers that drive Facebook’s online empire, the company must beef up its vast network of hardware before it can send all those 3-D videos streaming across the globe. “You’ve going to need a lot of bandwidth, a lot of compute,” says Jay Parikh, the company’s head of infrastructure engineering. “It’s not a small file. It’s a lot of data.”
But, Schroeper says, the basic hardware needed to make all this happen exists today. As he points out, a Japanese company called Ricoh is already offering a small consumer camera that can capture 360-degree video, and others will follow. “The quality is not there yet,” he says. “But you can see a short, clear path to where the quality is pretty good.” And the Oculus is on the verge of fruition. This week, Facebook is showing off the headset with conference attendees to impressive effect. So impressive, in fact, that Facebook hopes to take the idea much further than these 360-degree videos.
A Virtual Visit to the Louvre
Schroepfer envisions a time when you can use Facebook and Oculus VR to, say, join a friend on a virtual tour of the Louvre—even if one of you is in San Francisco and the other is in New York. “It’s you and I going to Paris to visit a museum without getting on an airplane,” he says, “and being able to interact while doing this.”
That requires an even greater leap in technology. “If you have someone else in the world, you want to see some sort of representation of them,” he says. “There’s a lot more data we have to track.” And even if you get this kind of mutual VR right, there’s still the headset problem. Will people really want to spend much time with hardware strapped around their eyes? But Facebook, according to Schroepfer and Oculus chief scientist Michael Abrash, the company working to this mitigate this problem as well.
As Abrash explained during his keynote, the ultimate aim is to more closely meld the virtual with what’s (really) around you. “In effect, you’ll be able to pull the real world into VR,” he said. “You want to be able to see your coffee cup so you can pick it up without taking off your headset. You want to be able to see your keyboard and mouse so you have an infinitely configurable virtual workspace.”
At this point, such talk is still science fiction. It requires, Abrash said, a “much deeper understanding than currently exists.” But that’s the reality Facebook is reaching for.
