Facebook has tasked developers with the challenge of building their own operating system (OS). The company has been expanding its offerings and building experience outside of its original niche — social networking. One of which is VR — a budding industry that is likely to take off massively in the future as it provides highly immersive user experiences that fit well with modern role-playing games, as well as virtual world games.
Facebook’s investment in the development of Oculus (their VR headset) and Facebook dating functionality may even be somewhat connected, but that is purely a guess on my part. That guess is based on the fact that people are(and have been) interested in more immersive online experiences for a long time. This may be why virtual reality (VR) is starting to take off, despite the (somewhat) high cost of VR headsets.
Back in the days when people had to type to talk to each other, when the first video live streams came out, millions of people watched them (despite horrific video quality and low frame rates). Now that the quality of live streams has improved to such a point where they are viable, some of the most popular events of all are live-streamed.
That includes gameplay streams and videos from PewDiePie, Ninja, and many others. PewDiePie has the second-most YouTube subscribers at the time of this article, and his content is mostly a stream of him playing video games. Also, The Game Awards (an online award ceremony for esports) was viewed by 45 million people online in 2019. Sorry, one more: Vlogs (like Roman Atwood) and other celebrity lifestyle vlogs have also taken the Internet by storm.
Considering the amount of public interest that all this reveals in seeing other people and interacting with them, it follows that platforms such as VR which offer deeper interaction and simulations that make you feel your activities could be successful. That’s an understatement…Mind-bogglingly huge is a better term. You’ll probably see VR social networks in which people use headsets to interact with each other, or even date each other. You may also see all this implemented in Facebook one day.
Aside from all that, one benefit of Facebook developing their own operating system is that they could avoid clashing with competitors that may try to bully them because they are on their platform. They’ve had their disagreements with Apple and Google in the past, and they don’t want that to affect their ability to develop products or make decisions in the future.
