Gaming —

Facebook’s first VR app surprises, lets us collaborate and be juvenile

Has serious issues, but hand tracking, doodling, media sharing work great in VR "Spaces."

Ars' Sam Machkovech tests Facebook Spaces in VR, with help from Kyle Orland. Edited by Jennifer Hahn.

After receiving a robust reveal at 2016's Oculus Connect conference, the first bonafide Facebook VR experience launched for free as part of a surprise announcement on Tuesday morning. Ars Technica's staff didn't get advance notice about the first Facebook Spaces beta going live, so we had to hit the ground running to check it out.

The above video includes the first-ever Ars "meeting" in a VR chat space, but considering all of the silliness and infantile humor included, we'd be hard-pressed to technically call this a "work" function. We came away from our demos surprised and impressed by the features that this beta includes—but if the app wants to be serious about either business or fun, it has obvious work to do.

Draw your blade (in more ways than one)

Facebook Spaces currently requires a full Oculus Touch VR setup—meaning, the Oculus Rift headset and its trackable Touch controllers. Not even the Oculus-developed Gear VR will work, as hands and robust processing power are essential for the VR app in its current form. (It may not seem like a processor-pushing app at first blush, but we'll get there.)

Spaces starts out as a very solitary experience. You might expect Facebook's first major VR product to come with a massive news-feed wall on one side and a virtual Rolodex of friends on the other, but this one launches with a dark, barren campfire scene (rendered as a flat "360 degree" image) and a few of your tagged photos. Pick an image with your face in it, the app says, and it'll try to auto-generate your VR avatar.

This generator just plain sucks. The photos it picked out were all lousy source material for various reasons; some were part of massive group photos, and others had been posted by friends with black-and-white filters or bad lighting. I couldn't go into Facebook and manually select more recent photos or clearer photos of just my face. I was stuck with this app's crappy approximations, which all wanted to make me look like Justin Timberlake.

Thankfully, I could manually retune Facebook's automatic choices, but that revealed a bigger problem: Facebook's avatar system is somehow more limited than Nintendo's aging Mii avatar system. That's a low bar to clear, but Facebook doesn't include real beards, has weird haircut limits, has a scant selection of custom colors, doesn't let you individually pick different colors for eyebrows or beards, and doesn't let you manually shrink, grow, or move elements (nose, eye distance, mouth, etc.) around the face. In my case, my shade of pale skin, auburn shade of hair, blonde eyebrows, small-yet-pointy-yet-rounded nose, and puffy upper lip were all impossible to recreate. (I eventually found beard options, which are hard to pick out because you have to tap your face in the exact right spot to load them.)

We'll have to see if this is an inherent Facebook Spaces limitation, to keep memory use low for the sake of VR performance, or if more facial details and accessories other than glasses appear in an update.

Wacky options like mohawks and dyed hair are also off the table, but that doesn't mean Facebook Spaces is fundamentally hum-drum. The app's full potential revolves around one of its simplest tools: the pencil.

Use a pencil to draw whatever you want in mid-air. Much like other VR art programs (particularly Tilt Brush), the default pencil generates basic lines as opposed to volumetric shapes. You can pick a thicker stroke to create fuller objects more quickly, but in general, you'll generate floating lines—and can pick from a 60,000+ color spectrum if you really want. (The standard color-picker contains a few dozen colors.)

What's clever here is, when you draw something as a full, combined shape, like a tree with green leaves and a brown trunk, Facebook Spaces recognizes it as a complete object, even if you pause to tap your pencil on different colors or draw out lines and dots that don't perfectly touch the core of your doodle. This is welcome, because you and your friends will almost certainly want to pick up, play with, and share the objects that you create. Make a hammer or a sword, then get into a sword fight. Draw a model of a house, and then pass it across your VR table for others to look at and review. Make a hat or a mask, then put it on your face—or be mischievous and slap it onto your friend's.

Everything you draw with the pencil tool can attach to other objects, to other people, or to photos loaded and shared in the Spaces room. But, wait, I called this app "solitary" at the outset. We could use other people in here!

Join the semi-Muppet party!

The menu system includes a "friends" tab, and when this loads, any FB friends of yours currently tooling around in Facebook Spaces will appear at the top. Below them are any of your friends who currently appear as "active" in Facebook Messenger, either on its mobile app or the basic Facebook website.

Tapping a Messenger friend will initiate a video call... and that's the only way you can communicate with non-VR friends while using Spaces.

You can faintly see the VR-world warning that asked me to take my headset off to type my username and password in. Ugh.
Enlarge / You can faintly see the VR-world warning that asked me to take my headset off to type my username and password in. Ugh.

The most annoying thing missing from Spaces' beta is a virtual keyboard. Booting the app for the first time will alert you to take the headset off after initial load to log in using a keyboard and mouse (and a bug in the beta makes you do this every time you boot, even if you toggle the "remember me" box). If you want to send a Messenger friend some warning text before trying to start a video call, too bad. You can't send messages, and Facebook didn't bother including an emoji picker as a fill-in for this essential communication option. Your Oculus Touch controller will buzz with alerts if you receive FB text messages from friends, but after you read them, your only allowed response is... to initiate a video call. What the heck, Facebook.

Assuming you coordinate with your non-VR friend and get a call started, you'll see a floating tablet in your virtual space that displays your friend's camera feed. Pick up and move your floating tablet to change the angle of the image sent to your flat-screen friend. (Flat-screen users cannot currently move themselves in Facebook's VR space, which means those tablet-on-wheels things are still the clear winner in the mobility department.) And then you can, you know, talk to your friend while waving around in VR. A small preview box shows you an approximation of what your friend is seeing, so you can get a sense of how your arm-waving and talking look to the outside world.

By default, Facebook Spaces uses the Oculus Rift's microphone to pick up and transmit your speech, which is handy; no "push-to-talk" button required. Additionally, your VR avatar's mouth will open and shut while you talk, and it's accurate enough for an automatic system—maybe a few points less than how mouths move in South Park, and it doesn't reflect emotion in your voice, but it's still pretty good.

But VR calls to standard Messenger friends seem less like a useful feature and more like a cheeky advertisement. Hey, chump! Look at how my head and hands can translate into VR really smoothly! Look at the inappropriate things I'm drawing in mid-air! Don't you wish you existed in virtual semi-Muppet form? It'll only cost you $600!

Resource-hogging dong factory

VR meetings are a little more interesting, because all users in VR lobbies have access to a few Facebook-specific tools (in addition to all users being able to draw and manipulate objects). They also have the option to grab a selfie stick and pose with other VR participants for a photo, which you can then instantly share to your Facebook friends. Call it stupid (and it is), but everybody seems to love rocking the selfie-stick in VR (or watching it happen over 2D Messenger video) at least once.

If you want to share 360-degree photos and videos, for example, Facebook Spaces is a little more nimble and pleasant than handing a Google Cardboard or GearVR to someone else. Since the image-sphere wraps around the chat room in the same way for all VR users, one person can point at part of the 360-degree image, and everyone else will know what he or she is pointing at. However, Facebook Spaces doesn't support stereoscopic 360-degree images, so the world around you looks flat, like the wall of a snowglobe.

Any images you share in Facebook Spaces, 360-degree or otherwise, have to be pulled from Facebook. You can hand flat photos around the chat space, which people can either hold in their hands or stick in static, floating spots in the air, or you can stick images into the center of the VR room's table, at which point they appear as larger projections for all participants to look at. It's kind of like a work meeting in that way, and if you wanted to create a makeshift PowerPoint presentation in VR, you could do so... if you upload every necessary image to your personal Facebook account in advance. Even then, you can't use a VR equivalent of a laser pointer to guide attention to your images.

This kind of virtual conference has more humanity than a cramped webcam shot of a sitting, motionless face.

But this FB content limit is a giant bummer. You can forget about using a standard Web browser or YouTube plugin to share text or multimedia in your chat room. But even within FB's gates, the lack of a keyboard means it's currently impossible to search Facebook's vast public content archives for specific content like videos or posts.

Once the novelty wears off, Facebook Spaces leaves users with two basic things to do: talk out loud and draw doodles. These are both pretty brilliant in action, though in our limited experience, some of the voices didn't broadcast very well; even Skype does a better job of handling packet loss and voice prediction than this. Also, I admittedly wasted no time drawing penises all over my FB world. My colleague Kyle Orland brought our demo's frame rate to a disastrous stutter when he found the "duplicate" function and applied it to my "art," thus turning Ars' first FB Spaces chat into a resource-hogging dong factory.

But it's very easy to draw and share anything without breaking the virtual chat interface, and the animations applied to arms and faces put FB's VR chat efforts on a level far, far higher than any others. It's just that much easier to buy into video chat when the participants look expressive by default, especially as they're able to walk, pace, and wave their arms. I would argue that this kind of virtual conference is more convincing, and has more humanity, than a cramped webcam shot of a sitting, motionless face.

Thus, Spaces is already close to being a truly useful virtual conferencing tool—major beta-related bugs notwithstanding. (Some connectivity and arm-animation glitches need to be worked out here.) Letting users pull assets from the general Web, and giving them easier access to general Facebook functions like news-feed reading and live-video streaming, would do a great deal to convince me that Facebook Spaces isn't just a wiener-drawing waste of time. Add support for more than four participants in a single chat—possibly with a more strict "mute by default" function in those cases to control crowd noise—and Spaces could well be on the verge of small-business-worthy VR collaboration, if not enterprise-worthy stuff.

For now, I like it a lot more than I expected, even though the app makes me look like the weird Walter character from the Muppets movie. The wiener joy may fade, but the hope for a truly useful VR chat room in the near future persists.

Listing image by Sam Machkovech

Channel Ars Technica