Facebook Spaces launches: you can now Teleport real-time

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook says you can now teleport real-time as the social media platform launched Facebook Spaces yesterday.

“We just launched Facebook Spaces, our social virtual reality platform.

“With Spaces, you can hang out with your friends, teleport anywhere and do anything,” Zuckerberg said at the launch.

Facebook Spaces was launched at the Facebook F8 developer conference that held yesterday.

Rachel Franklin, Facebook Head of Social VR during the launch said “Facebook Spaces is a place for you to be yourself with your real friends no matter where you are in the real world”.

Facebook Spaces is a new virtual reality social network.

You can create a custom avatar based on photos from your Facebook profile and spend time with up to three other people in a virtual space.

You can take selfies, draw pictures with virtual pens and fist-bump your friends.

CNNTech tested out Spaces at F8.

“Upon logging in, I set up my avatar, and then tried to interact with a Facebook employee (or “friend”) in the virtual environment.

“However, Spaces didn’t work as the company advertised — while I could hear and see my friend’s avatar on the screen, she wasn’t moving, and I couldn’t draw on the Tic-Tac-Toe game she created for us to play.

“One thing that did work, though, was the selfie feature. I picked up a virtual selfie stick, took a photo, and shared it to Facebook directly,” an editor at CNNTech reported.

Zuckerberg said once users are in virtual reality, they never wanted to leave.

“The actors enjoyed shooting this video so much that they asked if they could stay in Spaces for a few hours after they were done,” Zuckerberg said referring to the actor in the video on this story.

https://www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/10103658908469891/

Inside Facebook Spaces you can also pull in photos from your Facebook account and enlarge them on the screen.

There are also different 360-degree environments you can explore, like a boardwalk or a movie set.

However, you can’t walk around, since the environments, and Oculus’ setup, are stationary.

If your friends don’t have the costly Oculus setup, you can call them from your virtual world via Messenger, and they can see everything they’re missing.

The new immersive VR experience is part of the company’s overall goal to bring people together, but connecting via a virtual world might make us physically farther apart.

Facebook Spaces isn’t the first virtual reality social network. Firms like AltSpace already host people in computerized worlds.

And although they aren’t lifelike quite yet, people inside these systems have experienced real-life problems.

Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s CTO, told CNNTech that each avatar has a bubble of personal space around them that can only be broken by handshakes or fist-bumps if the avatar agrees.

For now, only people who are friends on Facebook can interact using the app.

Schroepfer says “it removes some of the badness that can happen when people are fully anonymous.”

Facebook Spaces is available in beta for Oculus Rift, the company’s VR headset.

The app is free on the Oculus store and uses the Touch controllers to track your hand movements.

Oculus and its Touch Controllers cost $598.