As you may have heard by now, Facebook is purchasing Oculus VR, a Kickstarter-funded startup that makes a virtual reality gaming headset which has so far only been made available in the form of a developer kit. The entire value of the purchase package is about $2 billion, which is insane for a company that started less than two years ago and hasn't yet made it to market, but that's another issue entirely, and you can find my colleague Roger Kay's take on it here.
What I'm more interested in is figuring out how Facebook honestly thinks they can make this odd marriage work, given that the betrothed are a massive, aging social network and a hip, young, geeky, crowdfunded startup making hardware that's just recently begun to be photographed while not plastered with duct tape.
More to the point, consider the user base (or potential user base in the case of Oculus) of both companies. Facebook, being the largest voluntary membership organization in human history -- larger than even the Catholic church, depending on how you measure it -- naturally represents a broader swath of demographics than the much narrower slice of people interested in something like Oculus.
There's no real demographic data on people interested in next generation virtual reality hardware, but we can make some pretty safe assumptions about the type of people who might be most likely to order a developer kit. They're probably not the same age as your older relatives who now use Facebook as their primary window into your life. If you are one of these relatives, am I safe in assuming that you don't own an Oculus Rift? Well, there you go.
Further, the largely male teen and early-twentysomething technophiles most interested in strapping a new universe to their faces are increasingly not spending time on Facebook. The platform famously started in a college dorm room and was only open to college students in its early days. Not surprisingly, 8 years later, the biggest chunk of Facebook users (30 percent) fall into the 25 - 34 age demographic, aging along with the company.
We hear all the time about Facebook's "youth problem" and the company's biggest acquisitions, like Instagram and WhatsApp, are clearly aimed at literally capturing some of the platforms that young people worldwide are gravitating to as they flee Facebook. But Oculus is a more radical kind of platform. And Mark Zuckerberg went out of his way to tip his hand in a blog post this week about the acquisition, touting plans to use Oculus not only as a gaming system, but as a new kind of social and communications platform.
After games, we're going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face -- just by putting on goggles in your home... Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.
Virtual Indifference?
The real question is: Does Mark Zuckerberg actually believe that Facebook's aging user base is going to be enthusiastic about the notion of a virtual social experience? I mean, these are concepts that have been around for a few decades now. I remember clunky VR video games popping up in arcades in the 1990s when we were all watching the Lawnmower Man. So I'm not just talking about the notion of older generations being uninterested in complex new technologies, this is technology that society at large -- and Facebook is the online community most representative of society at large -- has already essentially rejected, relegating it to a sort of fringe of gaming enthusiasts and nerds like myself who can appreciate how awesome it is, but also appreciate that I'll never see my mother strap one on.
You might argue that Facebook successfully introduced the world to social networking and copious sharing, something many argued older generations would never go for, so why couldn't Facebook also usher its 1.2 billion users into the new era of virtual reality?
I'd like to think that they could. The applications for this technology that Zuck is talking about are truly world-changing and worth pursuing. Bringing VR to the wider world and all those users is apparently what sold Oculus founder Palmer Luckey on the deal, as well, as he wrote on his blog.
When Facebook first approached us about partnering, I was skeptical. As I learned more about the company and its vision and spoke with Mark, the partnership not only made sense, but became the clear and obvious path to delivering virtual reality to everyone. Facebook was founded with the vision of making the world a more connected place. Virtual reality is a medium that allows us to share experiences with others in ways that were never before possible.
This is all great and wonderful and Utopian, but here comes a huge bucket of cold water on the case for virtual Facebook. Facebook users' favorite past time is to complain about Facebook. We don't like all the damn changes they make to what is a really basic interface compared to this futuristic, VR-integrated vision Zuck and Luckey are so stoked on. Not only do we get irritated with the constant tweaks, changes and new features that disappear six months later, we don't trust the company either. Back in 2012, as many as 70 percent of users said they didn't trust Facebook with their personal data, and then the NSA and PRISM came along a year later, and Zuckerberg himself admitted that the spying revelations made users trust his service even less.
Imagine if every American car maker decided to recall all their cars and replace them with autonomous self-driving cars or some other relatively unfamiliar automotive innovation. You'd see hordes of baby boomers taking up horseback riding again in protest. Or better yet, imagine that
Integration is futile
Of course, no one is saying that Facebook will be replaced by virtual reality anytime soon. Of course not. When and if it is implemented, it will likely be folded into the service as a new feature, just like Facebook did successfully with its high-profile acquisition of... uh... maybe FriendFeed? What was FriendFeed again?
So far, Facebook has struggled to integrate its big gets like Instagram, or even a partnership with Spotify, into its interface in a meaningful way.
This leads me to a conclusion that I first mentioned yesterday: while I'm sure that Facebook would love to integrate virtual reality gaming and chats with doctors on the other side of the world into its platform, could part of the calculus also be to hedge against the day that the era of the social network as we know it becomes totally played out? Inevitably, something will capture more of our attention than a feed of status updates, photos and mind-numbing games. Maybe it will be something more simple and mobile like WhatsApp. Or maybe there will eventually be a second life for a virtual universe like Second Life with broader appeal.
When that day comes that we are all Lawnmower men and women, Facebook will be ready to hand us the goggles. Until then, it remains a platform of 1.2 billion largely skeptical and increasingly crotchety users allergic to much smaller changes in the platform.
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