Live from Virtual Reality
A Facebook Live series produced inside Facebook Spaces. Presenting as an avatar, in a room that did not exist, to an audience that was not in it.
What it was
A series, running across 2017 and 2018, produced inside Facebook Spaces and streamed out live to Facebook. The host was an avatar, the set was rendered, the guests were wherever they physically were, and the audience watched a broadcast of a place none of them were standing in.
Facebook Spaces itself was shut down in 2019, which is worth saying out loud. This is what most early work on a new platform eventually looks like: the thing you made it in stops existing, and what you keep is the part you learned.
Every part of the normal job changes on you. There is no lighting to set, because there is no light. Camera moves cost nothing, which sounds like an enormous gift and is actually a trap: when the camera can do literally anything, the only thing standing between you and a meaningless shot is your own restraint. And you can't see the people you're talking to, only cartoon approximations of them, so the timing of an ordinary conversation has to be rebuilt from the ground up. Every pause lands wrong for about a week.
Why I keep doing this early
The most useful thing about being in a headset in the mid-2010s was not the headset. It was arriving at every argument about the next technology having already had the argument once, in a version nobody was excited about yet.
I gave a TEDx talk in 2017 wearing one, which is a slightly ridiculous thing to do on a stage and was entirely the point. Buying the hardware early is a research method. It is also, reliably, the cheapest way to find out which parts of the hype are load-bearing.
Related
The TEDxNashville work and the Cost of Valor films are the same habit applied to different hardware.
Wondering which half of your own work is at risk?
Ten questions about how you actually get paid, and my honest read on what's exposed and what isn't. No score, because a score would be a number I made up.