Yesterday, Facebook took a leap many people have been predicting for years: it started putting ads inside virtual reality. The company launched a limited test of advertisements inside three Oculus Quest apps, saying it would expand the system based on user feedback. The move is a turning point for Oculus, bringing one of Facebook\u2019s most controversial features into a medium that inspires both idealism and alarm. And it raises three big questions about Facebook\u2019s future and immersive computing.<\/p>\n
The first question is how deeply Facebook will end up linking advertising with hardware sensor data. Even more than smartphones, Oculus Quest headsets are a gold mine of information about you. They capture precise head and hand motion, pictures of your surroundings through tracking cameras, and microphone audio for Facebook\u2019s voice command system. Future headsets will likely include even more intimate features like eye tracking, which would offer incredibly precise metrics on what captures your attention in VR.<\/p>\n
Right now, Facebook says much of this data either never leaves your headset or is completely segmented from its advertising system, and it says it has \u201cno plans\u201d to do things like target ads based on movement data. But as Facebook moves deeper into virtual and augmented reality, using its hardware\u2019s special features for advertising will become an increasingly attractive prospect.<\/p>\n
Facebook is reportedly working on a fitness tracker and has discussed building AR glasses that you\u2019ll use to interact with the world. These products are custom-built to produce quantifiable insights about your body and surroundings, and it\u2019s hard to believe Facebook doesn\u2019t have plans to monetize that \u2014 even if Facebook Reality Labs head Andrew Bosworth has said the company is \u201cnot really focused on business model\u201d questions for experimental hardware. Oculus is Facebook\u2019s first big test case for advertising on its own computing device, and as it expands ads on VR and other hardware, we\u2019ll see how it handles the wealth of new data types it\u2019s collecting.<\/p>\n The second question is how ads will affect VR development. Several of the bestselling VR titles right now feel like substantive console or PC games and sell at a similar price. By contrast, it\u2019s not yet clear which app genres work well with an ad-based model. (Blaston<\/em>, the first game we know includes ads, is a multiplayer dueling game that you play in short competitive bouts.) Whatever those genres are, Facebook just created an incentive to make a lot more of them, since developers get a cut of the revenue involved.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to imagine dystopian scenarios like a huge library of attention-grabbing but low-quality games and social apps plastered with pop-ups, or the seizure-inducing corporate hellscape from Ready Player One<\/em>. It doesn\u2019t help that Facebook\u2019s first tests look like flat banner ads from a website or freeware game. That said, Facebook is notoriously picky about what goes into the Quest library and there\u2019s no indication that will change soon.<\/p>\n We also don\u2019t know VR advertising\u2019s final form. Facebook says it\u2019s currently exploring \u201cnew ad formats that are unique to VR.\u201d It didn\u2019t specify what that looked like, but for one nontraditional ad platform, we could look at Fortnite<\/em> \u2014 a popular virtual world from a studio with an impeccable gaming pedigree, and one of the most effective ad delivery systems in the modern cultural landscape. (A system where players pay to promote the intellectual property of multinational media conglomerates is possibly also dystopian, but in a way most people seem okay with.) Modern consumer VR headsets have been full of ads since practically the beginning, thanks to promotional tie-ins and sponsorships. Yesterday\u2019s news was just the latest iteration of a long-running trend.<\/p>\n This iteration, though, has a big Facebook-shaped wrinkle. The Quest ads are served based on data from your Facebook profile, and Facebook\u2019s hyper-personalization is one of its most controversial features \u2014 criticized in general as a tool for social division and more specifically for enabling discrimination. Beyond any larger social effects, if you\u2019re sharing a headset with friends and family, it could feel simply invasive to have them see what Facebook thinks you\u2019re into. You can add multiple accounts to a Quest headset, but the feature is experimental and it\u2019s not clear how many users know about it.<\/p>\n And that raises the third question: how will Facebook and its critics address general concerns about \u201cBig Tech\u201d in the realm of VR? Should Facebook, for example, ban specific kinds of ads \u2014 or methods of ad delivery \u2014 from appearing in headsets? And should consumer protection watchdogs look specifically at how ads work inside the Oculus platform, which they\u2019ve largely ignored when scrutinizing Facebook?<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t hard to see these debates coming. Facebook has wanted to own the next computing platform for years, and its vision of computing relies a lot on advertising. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey once promised that Oculus wouldn\u2019t \u201cflash ads at you\u201d inside VR, but he (along with Oculus\u2019 other early executives) left the company years ago. Bosworth said in 2015 that the Oculus experience \u201cshould include ads, because life includes ads.\u201d<\/p>\n But Facebook says it\u2019s not just barreling ahead with a long-held master plan \u2014 instead, it promises it\u2019s looking at feedback as it moves forward with VR advertising. As VR gets closer to Facebook\u2019s core business, Quest users and developers will get to see if the company keeps that promise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday, Facebook took a leap many people have been predicting for years: it started…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1716,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[38,64,62,66,63,65,69,67,71,68,70],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1714"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1714"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2056,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1714\/revisions\/2056"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Immersive computing is a gold mine of intimate data<\/q><\/aside>\n
What does a good ad-supported VR app look like?<\/q><\/aside>\n