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Oculus Rift: a New Communication Platform

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Oculus Rift: a New Communication Platform University of Amsterdam Department of Media Studies Oculus Rift: A new communication platform. New Media and Digital Culture | MA Thesis 2016 Nick van der Meulen Date: June 24, 2016 Supervisor: dr. A. Helmond Second reader: dr. N.A.J.M. van Doorn 2 Abstract In 2016, two years after Facebook announced that with their acquisition of Oculus VR they are creating a new communication platform, the consumer edition of the Oculus Rift is finally available. This research will, from a platform studies perspective, analyze in which ways the Oculus Rift, can be positioned by Facebook as its new communication platform. This will be done through discussing the key characteristics of virtual reality and analyzing the platform from both a hard- and software perspective. After investigating the apparatus and its input devices, I will explore Facebook’s Social VR demo, and review and discuss how the Oculus Rift lives up to being a communication platform. Keywords: Oculus Rift, Virtual Reality, Facebook, Communication Platform, Platform Studies. 3 Table of contents 1 Introduction 4 2 A history of virtual reality 7 3 Facebook and the Oculus Rift 15 3.1 Social, and the degree of social presence 15 3.2 Facebook’s new platform 17 4 Oculus Rift: hard- or software 19 4.1 The characteristics of virtual reality 20 4.2 The use and misuse of the term virtual reality: a medium in flux 23 5 The virtual: worlds, environments and reality 25 5.1 Cyberspace 25 5.2 Avatar: interacting through a virtual body 26 6 Communication through body language 28 6.1 Post-symbolic Communication 29 7 Methodology 30 7.1 Platform studies 30 7.2 Paratexts and secondary media 31 7.3 Layered through hard- and software 31 8 The platform 33 8.1 Operating system 33 8.2 SDKs, APIs and Oculus Home, connecting users and developers 35 8.3 Game Engines 36 8.4 Hardware, the Oculus Rift apparatus 37 9 Case Study 44 9.1 Software, social applications 44 9.2 Facebook Social VR 44 10 Data gathering and privacy 51 11 Discussion 54 12 Conclusion 59 Reference list 61 4 1 Introduction Virtual reality are systems through which users can immerse themselves into virtual environments, and can therefore sometimes be perceived as being relatively isolating. For outsiders, someone else who is experiencing virtual reality might not be in the most approachable position imaginable. Their eyes and ears, fully covered, give the impression that they seem to be zoned out, unable to communicate. But are they? In 2012, a young entrepreneur named Palmer Luckey revealed a $300 virtual reality headset called the Oculus Rift Developer Kit on Kickstarter (Kickstarter). Its goal of 25.000 dollar was surpassed in less than 24 hours eventually reaching near to 2.5 million dollar becoming one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns in history (Kickstarter, Most Funded). Two years later on March 12 2014, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had agreed to acquire Oculus VR, the leader in virtual reality technology, for 2 billion dollar to create a “new communication platform”. According to Zuckerberg: Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. For the past few years, this has mostly meant building mobile apps that help you share with the people you care about. We have a lot more to do on mobile, but at this point we feel we're in a position where we can start focusing on what platforms will come next to enable even more useful, entertaining and personal experiences. This is where Oculus comes in. They build virtual reality technology, like the Oculus Rift headset. When you put it on, you enter a completely immersive computer- generated environment, like a game or a movie scene or a place far away. The incredible thing about the technology is that you feel like you're actually present in another place with other people. People who try it say it's different from anything they've ever experienced in their lives. (Zuckerberg, Oculus VR) With the release of the consumer edition of the Oculus Rift, mass-market virtual reality seems to be on the brink of becoming a reality. Although the Oculus Rift was initially designed to be “the first truly immersive virtual reality headset for video games” (Kickstarter, Oculus campaign), with the acquisition by Facebook early adopters might just as well become able to use the Rift to enhance ordinary social experiences instead of gaming (Perry). Facebook believes that virtual reality has the potential to be more social than any other platform (Newsroom), and virtual reality can even change the way we live, work and communicate (FB Q116). 5 Facebook bought Oculus because according to Zuckerberg it is essentially a social company, and that it will form the next fundamental computing environment. On the majority of Facebook’s platforms and products such as its social network, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, computer mediated communication is done verbally. The Oculus Rift platform will provide the traditional benefits of computer mediated communication by bringing people together across space and time and will in addition enable users to have real-time nonverbal- and face-to-face communication, which is generally recognized to be the ideal form of interpersonal communication (Palmer 290). This may be one of the reasons Zuckerberg thinks that, first there was the PC, then the web, and the next big step after the smartphone will be virtual reality. Even though this is a future vision from a listed company, with the acquisition by Facebook, the Oculus Rift is one of the first virtual reality technologies to receive a substantial investment to become a communication medium. However, to understand how a virtual reality technology as the Oculus Rift can become Facebook’s new communication platform, the question arises of what virtual reality exactly entails. Just as any medium, a primary purpose for virtual reality is the communication of content or ideas (Craig et al. 34). But what makes the Oculus Rift inherently different than more ‘traditional’ media and what makes it a communication medium? Although virtual reality has been discussed in academia in length since its inception in the early 1960s (Rheingold, Sherman and Craig, Heim, Biocca and Levy, Laurel), the term itself has been used across different fields such as cinema, computer science, the medical and pharmaceutical industry, the military, the digital entertainment industry and the communications industry. In addition, it has had various purposes such as ‘multisensory experiences’, ‘as a way of immersing users into computer generated environments’, to ‘amplify human perception and cognition’, for ‘training related technologies’ and as a ‘communication medium’. The term is loosely used in discussions everywhere ranging from the internet to immersive experiences, 3D technologies, computer animations and the transformation of old media into digital ones (Lister 388). Many researchers try to avoid giving virtual reality a solid definition and therefore instead describe it according to a set of characteristics (Heim, Laurel, Sherman and Craig). Like Heim, Laurel and Sherman & Craig, I also think that creating an understanding of virtual reality is best done by exploring a set of characteristics. However, since these characteristics were generally established in relation to older virtual reality technologies, I think that it is important to pay attention to the new developments which the Oculus Rift enables and how they are positioned by Facebook as a new communication platform. Up until now, most of the virtual reality technologies were developed for research purposes only and no coherent platforms were available to the public. The majority of research into virtual reality as a communication medium, has been conducted before the late 1990s. Since then, development of virtual reality technologies (especially in relation to a 6 communication medium) seem to have stagnated. Because of the mass market consumer availability of the Oculus Rift platform, virtual reality can now be researched as a communication platform that can have a global impact on culture and society. This research will therefore investigate new development in the field of virtual reality and, at the same time, research one of the first virtual reality technologies as a communication platform. It would thereby contribute to the field of platform studies as Bogost and Montfort consider the platform to be one of the most neglected levels in the analyses of digital media (147). This research will therefore consist of a platform study which aims to answer the following question: In which ways can the Oculus Rift, through its hard- and software, be positioned by Facebook as its new communication platform? In order to answer the research question, the first part of this platform study will focus on the key characteristics and understandings of (social) virtual reality as a communication medium in a theoretical framework. To get an understanding of virtual reality and the Oculus Rift as a communication platform, I will first explore the history of virtual reality and discuss how different technologies preceded the Oculus Rift. Second, I will introduce the concept of social virtual reality and compare it in relation to José van Dijck’s notion of the ‘social’ in social networks. Subsequently, I will discuss how the degree of social presence differs for certain platforms based on Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein’s ‘Classification of Social Media’. Next I will look at Oculus’ position within Facebook and investigate (social) virtual reality according to the key characteristics and understandings of virtual reality discussed by virtual reality researchers Michael Heim and William Sherman & Alan Craig and VR pioneer Brenda Laurel, such as immersion, presence and the virtual. In the last part of the theoretical framework, I will explore which forms of communication virtual reality makes possible and how they are enabled.
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