Facebook / Oculus Will Win the Rat Race on Facial Recognition in Virtual, but not alone on hardware.

There are many developments in the Virtual Reality space that every day bring us closer to allowing this technology to better connect us, interact with each other and explore places and play games like never before. Facebook’s Oculus is creating the most technically advanced Virtual Reality user to user experiences where it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between you and your avatar, but can it develop the best hardware given its resources?

The day the first DK1 development prototype was available to the market, I immediately placed an order and I knew this was like bolting electricity into to the Frankenstein that was long haunted the days or Virtual Boy or those horribly cheese VR games in arcade shops. I knew this was the start of something that will forever change our world. So I played around with the Development Kit and signed up for CES to go see the first consumer version Oculus was launching and got to meet Palmer Lucky, the co-founder of Oculus Rift, where we had a chat regarding how great this tech was but also mentioned to him that the visual clarity was trash. Palmer told me that the screen they were using was the best thing they could do at the moment for the money and I felt sad and walked away knowing that I was not sold by Oculus and maybe one day I would come back. The best way for a user to connect in a virtual reality world is to have perfect clarity. High visual fidelity and refresh rate is key to creating an environment where the world is completely clear, as in no pixilation and a refresh rate fast enough not to cause motion sickness. I knew this would be one of the biggest obstacles Oculus had to overcome, but I was surprised that it was not Oculus who found solutions to these issues first.

The best way for a user to connect in a virtual reality world is to have perfect clarity.

Fast forward to now, a Finnish company called Varjo recently released an Enterprise aimed VR headset that completely killed the dreadful screen door effect that has long plagued VR. I was very surprised by reading their specs on how they did it but more importantly how Oculus did not come out with this first. Sure, in Oculus’s conference they talked about focal lenses and eye tracking which is excellent but for a small company to be the first to come out with a headset such as theirs was a shocker to me. The company is also a startup with over 150 employees and is aiming to release to the public a headset version that will be significantly cheaper (probably around $1,500) in 2 years’ time. It would seem logical that Facebook might be interested in acquiring Varjo depending on where Oculus’s progress is with its optics.

Another recent development was the creation of the Valve Index. A big surprise for everyone in the VR community, Valve’s own VR system and what a success it was. Valve has not only developed a screen that is high refresh rate which is excellent against motion sickness, but also controllers that track users finger movements, particularly useful in applications where you must grab objects. Innovations like this led Valve being the most highly desired headset in the VR space, completely selling out in the PC market and beating Oculus and HTC because of the interactivity with the controllers. Originally Valve has partnered with HTC to bring to the market the HTC Vive and has developed the platform a while back. However, now that Valve can produce their own headsets, we see HTC’s innovation stalled completely. With the recent release of HTC Vive Cosmos Elite, consumers are getting the same headset with older generation controllers and absolutely no reason to why they should buy HTC’s product now that Valve is no longer developing headsets with HTC. It is interesting to see where HTC will be putting their development efforts in this tight market with companies like Varjo and Valve dominating.

In conclusion, following Oculus’s press conference on future VR, Facebook is positioned to develop the most highly advanced avatar mapping of human being faces and expressions in VR. This will forever change how this technology will allow us to connect to each other in virtual environments, and while the company showed prototypes of optics developments, we clearly see that there are other companies that are ahead of Facebook. This level of innovation is insane and just to think of it got restarted back in 2013. I believe that Facebook is in a great position to bring VR to the public and its userbase with the recent developments of other tech companies out there eagerly awaiting funding and resources in the areas Oculus is behind.