Facebook Plans To Build A Teleporter

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Facebook, like all techies, has a dream of teleportation. Facebook Chief Technical Officer Mike Schroepfer said that the company wishes to “effectively build a teleporter” by 2025.

Big ambitions for VR        

On Tuesday at a press event at the Dublin Web Summit, Schroepfer said, “Facebook wants to build a device that allows you to be anywhere you want, with anyone, regardless of geographic boundaries.”

Facebook wants to add physical feedback to improve the virtual reality experience to trick users’ senses to make them believe that they are at a place when in reality they are not. For quite some time, the social network has had its sights set on the possibilities of virtual reality, but for the average user, it still remains somewhat theoretical technology.

How Facebook plans to make VR a reality

Virtual reality seems fake today because of three gaps Facebook is trying very hard to close, says the report. The first is seeing yourself and others, as allowing people to see themselves is one of the biggest challenges associated with making virtual reality feel real. The second is imitating the environment, and mimicking the actual challenge is the next gap on which Oculus is working. The third and last challenge is to let people create their own worlds, for which Oculus is required to give average people who do not have a lot of money or training a way in which they can create their own VR content.

Facebook, which acquired Oculus VR last year, plans to release the Oculus Rift VR headset next year. Oculus revealed Oculus Touch in June, replicating the natural movements of a user in VR. The Touch controllers make it possible for users to see their hands, thus adding more depth to the experience.

The Touch, which is expected to ship by the middle of 2016, will come with a tool called Medium, using which users will be able to sculpt 3D objects with the help of controllers. Oculus calls it “digital clay.” In May, Oculus teamed up with Surreal Vision, which is a computer vision company with a focus on real-time 3D scene reconstruction.

The two companies are working together on building technology to live stream the actual environment of a user into virtual reality. The concept adds the advantages of VR into the real world. The advances Oculus is making with Touch and Surreal Vision are laying the groundwork for Facebook’s advanced VR plans, but the technology still has a long way to go.

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