What is Facebook doing with Oculus?

Facebook sees VR as a blank slate with no clear leader. If they can be that leader, this could be their chance to join Google and Microsoft among the top 10 largest tech companies.

Facebook has been trying to do this sort of thing for a long time. They’ve wanted to be more than a social network. They were the original “casual gaming” platform before Android and the iPhone ended that. They tried to sell a Facebook phone. They’re attempting to be the sole source of internet access for remote regions of the world by beaming down broadband connections from solar-powered drones.

Oculus is one more attempt by Facebook to orient themselves at the center of everything. As with Google/Android and Microsoft/Windows today, if Facebook can get you on their hardware in their environment, they have first dibs on getting you hooked to their services.

But Facebook isn’t alone. The Oculus acquisition could alternatively be viewed as a defense against the coming onslaught of VR- and AR-based upstarts. Facebook is only one of many social networks preparing for virtual and augmented reality. Others include Google, Microsoft/LinkedIn, Twitter/Periscope, and Snapchat.

Facebook, Google, and Microsoft all have hardware initiatives and well as large user bases and social networks. Google’s social assets include your Android and Gmail contact lists as well as your (old, unused) Google+ account. After trying their hand at Google Glass, they withdrew to pure technology development resulting in Cardboard, Tango, and Daydream - a comprehensive toolset for smartphone-driven VR and AR.

Not long after consumer social network, Facebook acquired consumer VR OEM Oculus, for-business headset maker Microsoft acquired for-business social network LinkedIn. Microsoft has been hard at work on their augmented reality headset, HoloLens, which is explicitly intended for business. They also own Skype and maintain the “social” infrastructure of the majority of enterprise employees via Microsoft Outlook.

Twitter acquired Periscope, a live video streaming app (think real-time experience/reality sharing), and Snapchat acquired Seene, an app that performs 3D face scans to create virtual reality avatars. These two efforts aren’t as overt and ambitious as the three above, but then these two companies aren’t trying to build the VR hardware and infrastructure ecosystem. They want to ride it.

So this question is really: why are social networks so excited about virtual reality? There are a lot of reasons. Here are the two biggest: Physical separation is the primary roadblock to social interaction. Every time a new app emerges improving on some aspect of remote socialization, it gets devoured by the masses (and then acquired). VR is the ultimate app, in this respect.

Augmented reality headsets (glasses that overlay graphics onto the real world) will have perpetually-present displays and always-ready cameras - meaning whoever owns that experience will have at least 10x more time in front of their user's eyeballs than they do today. They will also collect 10x more user-generated content - much of it live-streamed. The amount of information in need of brokerage will be incredible. That represents a lot of money.