Facebook Banks on Virtual Reality as the Future in Socializing

With developments in AI, augmented reality will ultimately be so good that you won’t be able to tell augmented visuals from reality, says Hao Li at the University of Southern California.
But there needs to be a hardware revolution before social VR and AR can become mainstream, he says. Headsets are still expensive and uncomfortable, and cause some users to feel dizzy or nauseous. “Until this has been solved, I find it hard to believe that the content would be so good and so engaging that people would want to use it on a daily basis,” says Li.
And it remains to be seen how much social value these tools can really provide. At one rather poignant moment in the conference, Zuckerberg demonstrated using AR to add a second coffee cup into an image of a dining table – “so it doesn’t look like you’re having breakfast alone”.
Read the full article discussing the future of socializing and Facebook on New Scientist for more.