> I'm of the opinion that the data they could slurp up from mining your VR usage is of limited use, because it won't meaningfully improve ad targeting.

Facebook is going to get lots more data than they get from you on desktop and mobile.

“…one of the things I’m really excited about for future versions is getting eye tracking and face tracking in.” — Mark Zuckerberg

https://uploadvr.com/zuckerberg-eye-face-tracking-quest-3/

This quote seems to be about using face/eye tracking to improve the VR itself, not something about ads or data mining.

Having worked very briefly at a company that survived on ad-sales, I can assure you that face/eye tracking will definitely be used as a way to sell more or charge more for ads on the platform. At the very least it will be a way for a marketing team to go back to their bosses about how sticky their ad was. Ie ‘People looked at our ad for an average of 10 seconds!’

Yes, and there’s value to that. “Better avatars” is a central part of Zuck’s public sales pitch.

But the actual endgame is that Meta has been building a portfolio of patents that leverage eye and face tracking to better target you with ads and other content.

“The next patent really gets into it…It’s called ‘Techniques for emotion detection and content delivery’. This one is a straight up flowchart for capturing the user’s image via the camera to track your emotions when viewing different types of content. [Meta] could tie your emotional states when checking out videos, ads or baby pictures and serve up content in the future just by reading your initial state of emotion.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/curtissilver/2017/06/08/how-fac...

Yeah, many VR consumers are interested in face/eye tracking as well, because it's the logical next step for improving social VR (which a social networking giant is obviously interested in). No need to read further sinister motives into it.

I can reply to this comment now but will repost the previous reply:

Not sure why I can’t reply to the sibling comment here but I still cannot trust Meta/MZ for anything - even if the stated goal of eye tracking is to “improve the platform” “They trust me - dumb fucks” Mark Zuckerberg

Not sure why I can’t reply to the sibling comment here but I still cannot trust Meta/MZ for anything - even if the stated goal of eye tracking is to “improve the platform”

“They trust me - dumb fucks” Mark Zuckerberg

Edit: can reply as previously desired and edited to reflect that

If VR takes shape as imagined by Meta, though I personally don't believe it will, they will absolutely be in an excellent position to market to and profile you. I think the vision is that everyone spends most of their online time in VR - so interacting with all of one's interests/hobbies/discussions, online contacts, searches. All very valuable for monetization through advertisement and profiling.

I was so pumped for Oculus. I was following them way before Carmack joined. I had a DK2. What facebook did to Oculus is a good enough reason for me to hate them intensely forever.

What exactly did they "do" to oculus besides give them a ton of funding and try to bring them into the mainstream?

They broke the emerging VR software ecosystem into the open side which many companies supported and a Facebook only proprietary one they asserted ownership and control of. Before Facebook bought Oculus there was cooperation and native software interoptibility between Vive and Rift.

Then they stopped supporting desktop head mounted displays for the most part and switched to building face mounted VR computers that happened to have an initially janky, and always higher latency, passthrough mode to support acting as a display for a real computer.

>They broke the emerging VR software ecosystem into the open side which many companies supported and a Facebook only proprietary one

What? There used to be a bunch of different VR platforms, and only recently has the industry settled on a single open standard, OpenXR[1], and Facebook was (or at least claims to be[2]) one of the major contributors to that open standard.

There are a lot of things you can criticize Meta for doing with Oculus, but opposing open standards isn't one of them.

[1] https://www.khronos.org/openxr/

[2] https://developer.oculus.com/blog/openxr-for-oculus/

The second point doesn't make sense at all. Consumers vastly prefer standalone VR, and it was always the future.

For the first point, I'll give you that they prefer playing on their own platform. But they haven't "broken" anything. While yes you do need a software layer, e.g. Revive, you can still play steam games on oculus and oculus games on an index. And you have no idea whether that would have happened anyway as one of these companies got bigger.

Google used to say "do no evil" and now they don't, and they didn't get acquired before they changed. These things just happen.

>Before Facebook bought Oculus there was cooperation and native software interoptibility between Vive and Rift.

With respect, did you ever use a Vive or a Rift CV1? They absolutely had much worst interoperability prior to FB. The launch of CV2 gated it behind the Oculus store, making it impossible to use Steam with the CV2 before overwhelming negative feedback changed it.

This has been what I've found frustrating about most past VR headsets or attempts to build one: I don't want a VR headset to be like a phone or laptop and have its own computer and app ecosystem; I want a peripheral that attaches to my phone and laptop.

You can connect any oculus quest device to your desktop and use it just like Vive with steamvr aka peripheral. It is an officially supported functionality. They didnt remove it by creating Quest, they just added standalone mode in addition to the "peripheral" mode.

If anything FB has greatly improved this. Airlink is a literal step-change improvement to VR that allows the user to have a totally wireless PC VR experience, something that was assumed to be very difficult/impossible over existing wireless standards.

but you can't create lock-in and an app store out of that.

By way of analogy: They took a precocious, promising young child and assimilated her into the Borg.