Facebook新使命：在VR环境中社交

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2020年07月16日

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Facebook新使命：在VR环境中社交

将来，我们可能无需再使用FaceTime或Skype与远方的朋友交流，或许只需要带上虚拟现实头盔，瞬间就让你觉得好像与朋友身处一室中。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

multiplayer 多人游戏['mʌltipleiə]

mingle 混合；交往['mɪŋg(ə)l]

spherical 球面的['sferɪk(ə)l]

videoconference 可视会议['vɪdɪo,kɑnfərəns]

zombie 行尸走肉['zɒmbɪ]

阅读即将开始，建议您计算一下阅读整篇文章所用时间，并对照我们在文章最后给出的参考值来估算您的阅读速度。

Facebook creates ‘social virtual reality’ team（509words）

By Tim Bradshaw in San Francisco

* * *

Facebook has created a new “social VR” team, led by two video gaming executives, ahead of the launch of its Oculus Rift headset next month.

The unit, unveiled on Sunday, is the first time that Facebook has begun to consider how to bring its core social networking service into virtual reality, two years after acquiring Oculus for $2bn.

The team is led by two executives from the video games industry, Daniel James and Mike Booth, who both have backgrounds in creating 3D multiplayer experiences.

That implies that Facebook’s vision for its VR community could look something like Second Life, the online world that saw a brief surge of popularity 10 years ago, or the science fiction concept of the Metaverse, a vast online community where digital avatars mingled on a virtual-reality high street, created by author Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash.

At the same time as announcing the social VR team, Facebook said that users had uploaded 20,000 videos in VR-friendly 360-degree format, after it added the feature to its website and apps late last year. Millions of people watch these 360 or “spherical” videos, which let the user pan around a scene to look in any direction they choose, every day on Facebook, it said.

Facebook-owned Oculus has already experimented with bringing communication and social networking features through a “Social Alpha” for its Gear VR headset, which lets small groups of people chat as they watch online videos together on a virtual cinema screen, and with Toybox, a Rift game which lets two people play table tennis and other games in a small room together.

On Sunday, Samsung unveiled a new 360-degree camera for taking spherical photographs that can be viewed in its Gear VR headset, alongside new versions of its Galaxy smartphones.

On stage at Samsung’s press conference at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said that VR was the next step in online communications after text, photos and videos.

“VR is the next platform, where anyone can experience and share anything they want,” he said, suggesting that friends and colleagues will gather around virtual campfires, watch movies in a private theatre or hold group meetings using the technology. “VR is going to be the most social platform.”

He added that Facebook had dedicated “hundreds of our best engineers” to VR, to help create experiences that make “you feel like you’re actually there” with friends.

Facebook’s social VR team, working closely with Oculus’s engineers and designers, will compete with several start-ups that have already tried to bring videoconferencing and social networking into VR, such as Silicon Valley’s Altspace VR and vTime by UK-based digital studio Starship. Google is also investing heavily in VR, with a new smartphone-based headset said to launch later this year.

“We’ve already helped people connect in a wide variety of ways on mobile devices — ranging from Facebook and Instagram to Messenger and WhatsApp — and now we want to apply that same approach to the new medium of VR,” Facebook said in a blog post.

请根据您所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：

1. When Oculus was acquired by Facebook?

a. 2016

b. 2015

c. 2014

d. 1992

2. Who created the concept of” Metaverse”, as a vast online community?

a. a director

b. an author

c. a video gaming executive

d. the CEO of Facebook

3. What lets people chat as they watch online videos together by Oculus?