Your Mom and Dad Are Key to Making VR a Success for Facebook

Two things happened when I placed a Samsung Gear virtual reality headset on my face at Facebook's New York City office last week: One, my glasses smudged (I hate when that happens), and two, the demo I was there to see didn't start properly.

"Do you mind if I take if off and just make sure…" asked a helpful Facebook representative after I said I couldn't see anything other than a spinning loading indicator.

It was a telling incident. Facebook, now in use by 1.65 billion human beings around the planet, has a very real interest in ensuring that VR isn't relegated to a fun diversion for hardcore gamers, but instead becomes the next great computing platform. But as I saw first-hand that day, VR as it exists today is still clunky—not to mention expensive and a little dorky (I say that as king of the dorks). If Facebook wants to make VR as ubiquitous as the News Feed, then not only will these wrinkles need to be ironed out, but it will need to prove that VR isn't merely for people interested in space combat simulations or white knuckle shooters.

In other words, Facebook needs to get your parents into VR, and it'll go so far as to make its own content to do so.

Once the Samsung Gear started worked properly I found myself in the middle of Grand Central, New York's famous transportation hub located on East 42nd Street. I was peering into the virtual world of Here and Now, a short film that Facebook's internal creative studio, known as The Factory, created to help prove that VR and its kissing cousin 360 video can be used to create mainstream-friendly content. The film, Factory creative director Larry Corwin told Motherboard, shows "everyday moments of humanity, and shows how you [the viewer] can be present in those moments."

The moments are about as far from space combat as you can get, with the film placing viewers right next to the big clock in the center of the main concourse. A lively group of teenagers plans a night out. A tour guide points upward, telling a pack of tourists why parts of the ceiling are caked with dirt and grime. A daughter tells her parents not to worry, and that she'll be fine at college. And unlike a traditional film, where the director has total control over the experience of the audience (the only clue as to what you're "supposed" to look at was the dialogue), with Here and Now I could turn my head in any direction and pay attention to whatever I pleased: I could look at a dog just chilling with his owner off in the distance or I could watch a young couple argue with each other.

"Executionally, what we just wanted to do was make sure that even though we were creating a human narrative from moment to moment, that we're giving you an opportunity to explore them as you wanted," said Corwin. "Because of this new type of media, you can see all these different things as your whim."

Facebook is not alone in trying to figure out how to de-claw virtual reality and make it palatable for people who greet the above image of Mark Zuckerberg with a great big "nope." Google touts Cardboard not as an entryway into high octane VR gaming, but as a way to "travel the world" and "go onstage with your favorite artists." Microsoft, meanwhile, is trying to sell us on the idea that augmented reality, which places virtual images inside the real world (we recently went toe-to-toe with a floating orange slice in augmented reality), is a productivity revolution in waiting. And journalistic outfits like The Guardian and The New York Times are using VR to take readers deeper inside their stories.

But will Facebook succeed in its efforts to make VR more accessible? If it doesn't, it won't be for lack of trying.

"I'm a gamer too," said Corwin. "But there's this whole whitespace of other types of VR content that hasn't been explored yet. You think about the Facebook mission of making the world more open and connected, but is there a way to also do that through VR? From a conceptual level, that's where we're thinking."