Thread by @MarceloPLima

Today was the Oculus Connect 6 opening keynote, and it feels like Zuck, @boztank , Abrash and the rest of the team worked hard to answer this question. And I thought it was an incredible vision, and yes, Facebook is very well positioned to deliver on it

https://twitter.com/MarceloPLima/status/1176508011608756224

Zuck began by asking "Why are we building the next computing platform?" and the answer is to put people at the center of the computing experience. Some highlights:

- VR ecosystem is finally set up and has hit a tipping point
- $100m of content already sold on Oculus Store

- More than 20% of that $100m driven by Oculus Quest alone (a 4-month-old product)
- "We're selling Oculus Quest and Rift S as fast as we can make them"
- CTRL Labs neural input will be a foundational part of the next VR platform

- Facebook Horizon announced - if you watched the movie Ready, Player One, this looks like the Oasis - a virtual world where you can build anything, play with friends and have new experiences - very exciting vision

- @boztank: relationship closeness inventory: frequency, diversity and strength of your interactions
- Very cool demo watching basketball with his dad, in VR, with avatars, in a virtual reconstruction of his dad's den

- "We are building AR glasses" no kidding :)
- Will release a whole new social layer on Oculus
- Log in with Facebook account, will be able to chat with friends on Messenger from VR (super cool)
- Events: can organize a tournament and invite friends
- Can post to FB from VR

- This will supercharge discovery of apps for VR developers
- This is brilliant: Facebook is (finally) integrating Oculus and Facebook and messaging, and this will benefit both sides with more applications, engagement, social connection and entertainment

- Deep links to apps in VR will let friends easily join you inside a VR experience from a FB post
- Oculus for Business - some folks think this is a waste of time but I think it's very smart. Lots of companies are using Oculus for business: Hilton, Nestle Purina, E-On, Walmart...

- Farmers Insurance, Ford, JnJ
- Sandra Humbles from JnJ shared some amazing stats: surgeons trained to perform hip surgery in VR could do the real thing 83% of the time with minimal guidance; control group (no VR): 0%
- Goal is to make VR available in hospitals everywhere

Why is Oculus for business a smart idea?
- It allows Oculus to sell more devices, improving gross margins and generating more $ for reinvestment
- It lets Oculus explore for product/market fit; you never know what's going to work until you try
- It gets people familiar with VR

- In time it could develop into an entire line of business for Facebook (indeed, they announced an ISV Partner Program, something you only hear from enterprise software companies)
- It ties in with Mike Abrash's vision of a mixed-reality collaborative work environment

The entire keynote is well worth watching; it's posted here:
facebook.com/Oculusvr/

For a line of business completely ignored by Wall Street and that doesn’t even appear in Facebook’s financials, this is an incredible effort

Day 2 of Facebook's Oculus Connect 6 opened with @ID_AA_Carmack and here are some highlights from my point of view:
- Low friction of putting the device on and getting into/out of the VR experience is probably the biggest predictor of retention (why Quest is so good)

- GearVR had very low retention because it was a pain to set up
- Immersive media - watching movies in VR - will most certainly be a top 3 application
- VR is a universal platform - should be able to do everything (gaming, watching movies, social, enterprise applications)

- Developers are leaving money on the table - if Beat Saber had 10 music packs, I'd own them all
- (Note: Carmack is a huge Beat Saber fan)
- You can now watch every 3D movie ever made in VR, and connect to your iTunes library, too

- Eventually, like Netflix, we'll transition to streaming
- One day, the VR headset will be the best screen in the house
- People are already building successful enterprise businesses today on top of VR (mostly training)
- There's already a good-sized ecosystem there

- I live in Dallas and most of the team is in Menlo Park or London or elsewhere so we spend a lot of time in videoconferences, and it's not a good experience
- Most times I can't even recognize people in person
- We're working on doing virtual meetings in VR; watch out Zoom! :)

- We'll have to add file management and RAM because soon we'll have multitasking for productivity use cases
- Eventually we'd like to cast your phone screen into VR, so you can hold your phone and see it in VR (what a cool idea!)

- Working on 4K displays which will give you the impression of 1080 resolution, great for Netflix
- Please use User Voice to give us feedback - it gives me credibility on my long list of complaints
oculus.uservoice.com/forums/921937-…