Facebook is looking to build on its success in the video content market and lead the way into VR. Unlike traditional media, VR offers a complete world, creating a more immersive experience for users. It heralds an era of outsourcing imagination and everyday experiences.
For some time now, video has been a significant part of the Facebook News Feed. It’s clear that Facebook’s move into the video market has paid off. Last year, it already surpassed YouTube, the former king of video, in terms of the number of video posts and interactions (views). Now that Facebook has become the most powerful platform for traditional video content, it wants to go one step further. It wants to dominate the virtual reality (VR) space. In March 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus VR, a startup specializing in VR devices, for a total of $2.3 billion. “Immersive 3D (VR) content is clearly the next big thing after video,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared during the company’s earnings call. Given his stature as a leader in the tech space, this is not a statement to be taken lightly. There’s definitely something to VR. Let’s take a look at what that something is, focusing on how VR compares to traditional mediums like text and video.
Text requires the most mental effort from content users. Each reader of a written work of literature has to create a world in their own imagination based on their own impressions and understand the content of the work accordingly. Music is a bit kinder than words. The lyrics, melody, rhythm, and the image of the singer make it easier for users to create their own emotions. Videos are even more friendly. Movies give us more information about a story than spoken or written words, so we can use our imagination to create our own worlds with less effort. However, we still have to use our own imagination to create our own worlds outside of what the camera captures. In this way, people use the content and recreate it into their own world, and only then do they truly appreciate it.
The big difference between VR and traditional media is that VR does most of this work for you (recreating the content into your own world). This is because VR offers a spatially complete world. When we experience VR content, we simply accept the world as it is, and let our bodies (or brains) go. We don’t have to think about it as much as we do in other mediums. This makes VR content much more immersive and therefore more vivid and stimulating for the people who consume it. Imagine watching the movie Avatar in VR. We would become a companion to the protagonist, traveling through the spectacular world created by the director. Watching a movie doesn’t really apply to this anymore. Unlike traditional content where we sit still and watch, VR, with its element of activeness, is not just a new form of video, but an expanded sense of ‘experience’. It has the potential to convey detailed feelings that were difficult for existing media to convey, and that are difficult to feel without experiencing. There is no better tool for human beings as experiencers.
Since our lives are always tiring, we have increasingly preferred to “outsource our imagination”. Fiction does a lot of the imagining for us that we wouldn’t normally do if we weren’t writers. Songs fill in the gaps that words cannot, and videos fill in the gaps that images cannot. In this way, we can make other people’s imaginations our own simply by sensing and recognizing them. In an age where the world is flooded with content that allows us to experience new things without leaving our daily routine and without much effort, VR is perhaps the most efficient way to do so. Taking it a few steps further, you’ll be outsourcing not only your imagination, but also your everyday experiences. Going to a theme park to travel and ride rides can become a chore and a luxury. We’re not far from the day when we’ll be able to choose from a wide variety of options for our personal experiences.
