A Day at Facebook Connect in Oculus Venues Beta

By Jyotsna Kadimi

On Sep 7, 2020, I received an email that I had been selected for the Oculus Launch Pad (OLP) program, a 3-month program by Facebook Oculus that supports creators from diverse backgrounds to build and showcase working prototypes to win the Oculus scholarship. I couldn't believe I was one of the 100 members to be chosen from the US and Canada to be part of the 2020 cohort!

We were onboarded within a few days, and the program kicked off with an engaging 3-day Bootcamp. Each of us received an Oculus Quest headset three days before they announced the Oculus Quest 2. We eagerly look forward to the launch of the new Quest 2 at Oculus Connect 7 (OC7) aka FACEBOOK CONNECT.

OC7 is quite special, and it will go down in history as the biggest VR Conference in VR! Facebook made a big shift by renaming it to Facebook Connect. Why? Because now it's not just Oculus who is officially making strides in the VR industry with their hardware and app store, it's Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) encompassing everything AR/VR with products like the Portal (smart video calling device), Project Aria (their AR glasses), SparkAR (effects creation tool), Horizon (VR world-building platform), etc., depreciating. It's now in their mission to advance in digital media to provide immersive experiences.

The pandemic pushed the conference to go fully virtual and it served as a great opportunity for Facebook to showcase the power of social and immersive media. The official site facebookconnect.com gave you two ways to participate the first being in VR, the second option online. They streamed everything online on Facebook (platform), and more importantly, to increase the visibility of FRL, they streamed, posted, and organized the live and on-demand content on the Facebook Reality Labs's Facebook page. Sweet! So anyone anywhere with a FB account could easily stream the conference without any hassle; all they had to do was follow the FRL page to keep up with updates. And during the conference, for every live-streaming session you shared on your timeline, Facebook personally thanked you by tagging you in the comments and asked you what your favorite part of the conference was. Way to make your user feel special, brownie points for fan engagement!

Now to the exciting part. Of course, you want to have everything available in the 2D video format. But they released the beta versions of Facebook Horizon (invite-only) and Oculus Venues (early access with limited spots) to a small group of members. Venues lets you watch live events with your friends in VR, i.e. Social VR. As part of this year's OLP cohort, I was fortunate to be automatically signed up for Horizon Beta ten days before the Facebook Connect. OLP 2020 itself had 100 members and then there are investors, those who signed up for special access through newsletters, developers who can enrich the platform with some amazing content. There is a Facebook Horizon Community page and it's incredible to see the cool worlds some of them are building. Below is a picture of me in OLP's Horizon world you can see the rocket behind me that symbolizes Launchpad. OLP created this as a welcome gift for us to dive in and play around.

On the day of the big conference, I was lucky enough to sign up for the Oculus Venues. I was skeptical I was going into a SocialVR experience, but I wasn't sure if I was ready to socialize in VR with avatars who look-alike with informal usernames displaying as their names. Imagine my avatar displaying my name as let's say Chocofrog instead of jyotsna.kadimi ! I've been in ALTSpace a few times before, though, so I kind of knew what to expect.

I tuned into the FRL's FB page to watch Zuckerberg's keynote and put on the Quest. You could do the experience either sitting or standing in your room, and set a boundary region as your play area. If you get closer to the boundary a guardian system appears. Quest asks you if you want a stationary experience (i.e. you are sitting in a place) and if you choose it, it automatically creates a circular guardian around your seat.

My Quest was already connected to my Facebook account it is important to link it for the best experience, especially if you want to join your Facebook friends in VR. I found the Oculus Venus Beta app on the Oculus Store, quickly installed, and entered Venues, which took 40 seconds tops. The onboarding process was smooth: I was in a black space, if I moved a bit into my guardian, only the area I bumped into would highlight instead of illuminating the entire guardian, which I thought was a cool feature it doesn't obstruct your vision too much. For example, if my elbow went outside the guardian, only the grid around my elbow would illuminate.

They had a few screens to tell you how to conduct yourself, to respect others' space, and if you feel uncomfortable how you can safeguard or block that person. So one of your wrists (depending on whether you are a lefty or a righty) will have the 3 buttons: safeguard, menu, mute. The instructions tell you how to use it it's very guided (it's very important to guide the user in VR). The safeguard button is new when you click on it you enter a zone, it gives you a feeling of being in your personal space by blurring your environment and gives you the option to report or block a person. You navigate around smoothly, mostly teleporting (i.e. you point your controller to the location where you want to go and hit the trigger to transfer your avatar to that location). Then you enter a room where you get to design your avatar. I had already worked mine up when I tried Horizon so it showed me the same, with options to either edit it or exit. You can be a different avatar every time - you can dress professionally, change your hair or your face, or be a different gender or race.

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