In 17 years, Facebook has gone from a university social network to a potential guardian of the newest computing platforms in the world: augmented and virtual reality. Its Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) division sells the Portal videophone and the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset, and is behind a new line of Ray-Ban smart glasses, with more advanced AR hardware in development.
Facebook is also building and financing VR software, sometimes competing with smaller developers. Last year, it launched its own virtual social network called Horizon in beta. He is also experimenting with an RV workspace system called “Infinite Office”, which can combine the real world with the virtual. Particularly during the coronavirus pandemic, these efforts could attract more people to work and socialize through VR.
At the same time, Facebook is experiencing a crisis of privacy and moderation. Its platform has been widely criticized for bringing online extremists together and allowing discriminatory targeted advertising or harmful misinformation. These problems will almost certainly accompany the company in VR and AR, complicating the already thorny questions about privacy and autonomy in these new spaces.
Facebook Head of Reality Labs, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, rated 2020 as a “tremendous” year for VR, and in a blog post last week, he outlined plans to focus more on RA and Horizon the following year. I spoke with Bosworth during Zoom about how FRL will solve today’s problems in futuristic technology.
There is a pattern of social spaces being launched for VR, so realizing that there is a really large audience outside of the headphones and launching on the desktop or on the cell phone. Do you consider this path viable for Horizon?
Yes, it is definitely a possibility that we consider. If you want to build a social product, you want to reach people wherever they are and demand that they have a headset that is not free, when they probably already have some other device connected, it just prevents some people from having access to participate. And that is not good for any of us.
Let’s start in RV because if you don’t understand this central mechanics right, the rest kind of doesn’t matter. There are already many excellent software that together solve the job of feeling 2D to 2D; we are doing one of them now. So, we really wanted to have a solid VR foundation. One of the things we always talk about is how to make this cross platform, how to make people use and participate at any level they can.
Facebook talked about a system to allow people to put apps on Oculus Quest which is less exclusive than the Oculus Store. What is the status of this?
I am very excited about this direction. And the status of this is that it is arriving much sooner than people think.
One of the pain points for Oculus last year was the move to requiring Facebook accounts to use the headphones. If VR becomes something you’re using at work, it looks like a Facebook login isn’t necessarily the best way to access it.
I think one thing that is a puzzle piece that you can put together with this is now, since we talked about linking Oculus and Facebook accounts, Facebook talked more about account management in general. One of the areas of focus of the product for us is to make it easier for people to manage all of their accounts. Therefore, Facebook Workplace accounts are a good example. It’s one of those pieces that I think when we look at Infinite Office, we intend to support it as one of the techniques that people can use to feel like, “Yes, I can have my Facebook account at work, and that’s what I ”I will use it in certain contexts. “
And this is very consistent with how we want to approach it in general. We want people to have complete control over their persona, right? If you want to be Batman in VR, you can definitely be Batman. We just want them to be Bruce Wayne, too, if they wish. And so we’re trying to think that way – expanding the opportunity space for “Yes, you are Batman, but you can only be Batman” to have a lot more control over your persona, your connections and how you appear. This is the job we seek as the Infinite Office continues to develop internally.
This seems like a kind of reversal of the way Facebook talked about having a unique identity and a unified online presence.
I think the reality for us, especially in VR, is the ability to have a lot more control over your appearance – that’s not something Facebook really cared about when you were dealing with just one profile. Many of the problems at the time Facebook was founded involved especially authenticity on the internet. You know, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Authenticity was a premium feature – you really knew who that person was and you could count on it.
Now we really got a kind of full circle, where you can be incorporated. Facebook was never able to control how you appeared in a real interaction with someone; it was never something we could control. Suddenly, you know, in VR, we it is a broker of that. So we need to provide you with all the wealth of self-expression that you would have access to – in fact, a richer set of self-expression than you would have in the real world. So, yes, the new media requires new consideration. I don’t think it’s inconsistent. I think it’s just an acknowledgment of what that medium is.
How limited is the work of Facebook Reality Labs due to Internet connectivity issues? Something like Horizon becomes much more difficult when people do not have stable and fast Internet access, and the pandemic has obviously highlighted these gaps.
I believe there are two parts to this. I am always impressed with what we can do locally. I don’t think any company has done more than Facebook in terms of reducing artificial intelligence and running it locally on the device – for example, the Portal, which does all face detection and camera direction locally on the device. And this is a great opportunity that allows these devices to be useful even when they are not connected in many contexts.
The second thing is, you are certainly right. The really rich material we are envisioning for Horizon may require a robust internet connection. Obviously, I hope that not only private companies, but governments around the world will realize how much connectivity to the Internet and access to information is increasingly a human right that we need to support. But even if you have limited access to the Internet, again, we are seeing tremendous luck with artificial intelligence enhancing the experience that people can have.
Avatars require far fewer bits to express the richness of facial expression than [Zoom] does. Right? This is a very high bandwidth connection. We can reduce this to a smaller number of pixels by animating my face and sending them. And you can still have, not a 100% accurate understanding of my expressions, but a 95% accurate understanding and dramatically lower bandwidth cost. So there are technologies here that can really benefit. Moving towards avatars can really help us connect, even over limited or low bandwidth connections.
You talked about how privacy and security issues translate to the work of Facebook Reality Labs. What are you doing specifically to ensure that many of the problems that arose on Facebook last year involving moderation do not happen in something like Horizon?
I really want to separate content moderation from privacy, because these are very different issues. Content moderation is a problem that will stay with us forever. He was with us. There have always been battles over who would be the editor and who would be the censor. That’s a human problem that came up, you know, as soon as the press came up. Probably before that.
Regarding privacy, I feel lucky. I feel that we are founding a new set of media at the height of the privacy debate, not just in this country, but in the world. We can have these conversations openly. We are in a golden age for privacy experts and the tradeoffs around it, and we are trying to take advantage of all this talk that is already going on and publicize these use cases so that people can discuss them.
What are the business models after that? It seems that as long as Facebook Reality Labs AR and VR use Facebook’s advertising model, there will be an exchange of privacy at some point.
You know, very much in a technology tradition, we are not really focused on the business model. You kind of assume that if you build something great and useful, you’ll find a way to make money from it.
I believe in [targeted] publicity. I think it makes the experience that people have in the world much better than untargeted advertising. I think it is extremely important for small businesses. I think it is extremely important to maximize the use of human capital. This is a debate that is a distant debate for augmented reality and virtual reality. It is not a short-term debate.
And so, I have the great luxury of not worrying about it. I have enough real problems to solve before I worry about the business model. And then we have to build it before I can think about it too much. And I am confident that if we do, there will be many opportunities.
For a short-term problem, people compared Horizon to Facebook groups. What happens when a group like QAnon starts to organize on Horizon? How do you find them and decide what to do with them while you thread the needle so as not to make it look like you’re being scary and watching everyone all the time?
I don’t think there is an answer to that, and there is certainly no answer that satisfies all parties. We know this from our Facebook experience. And so I think that in terms of content moderation, you can expect us to really support Facebook a lot, which has done the job of talking to governments, talking to experts and is constantly reviewing its policies as the facts change.
I think you never expect to have a stance, because as soon as you take a stance, the bad actors will find small loopholes. It will never end. There will be no solution. I think people should expect it to be like any digital space and, frankly, any physical space that goes back to history. You need to continue to evolve the regulations as you observe the behavior.