Facebook Way’s office building has not yet been completed and piles of materials such as plywood, concrete, and steel. The I-beams supporting the towering walls are also marked with the construction workers' powder notes.
A Facebook spokesperson stated that the company’s headquarters is the largest single building in the world. may be. Anyway, it looks like this. The office building is not square, so it is not obvious at a glance. It is long and narrow. On the way to the meeting with Zuckerberg, you wandered like a IKEA on a painted road. Minimalist desks are tidy. From time to time a map of "You are here" will appear. Then, at the center of the building, Zuckerberg was standing at his desk and told a colleague what to do. Zuckerberg stands tall and straight. Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer and all women’s career women, wrapped up and walked toward the painted road.
If Zuckerberg is sprayed with high gloss white paint and lets him stare into the distance, he is a bust of Tiberius in the first century saved by the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Zuckerberg, a classic scholar, looks like his daughter Maxima according to the ancient Roman custom - this is not the Nissan Motor Company models. At a counter-attack at Google+, he shouted "Carthago delenda est." This is the famous quote of Roman thinker Lagato calling for Rome to destroy Carthage because Carthage poses a threat to Rome. Zuckerberg does not wear ancient Roman robes, but like any iconic figure, he also has his own unique image - a grey T-shirt, jeans and sneakers.
Zuckerberg immediately accepted an interview with this journal. The interview theme is the future, especially the future of Oculus. In 2014 Zuckerberg acquired Oculus, a virtual reality technology device and software developer.
The interview was conducted in a fish tank room in the center of the world's largest single building. The room has a mid-20th century L-shaped sofa, a coffee table and two large black screens. Zuckerberg's eyes stared at the interviewer like a surveillance camera. You can't avoid his eyes and don't know what he's thinking.
Zuckerberg said that for decades he has been thinking about how to present reality in some way. He said: "Since I was a kid, I had dreamed that such a technology could be achieved. I still remember the scenario of writing a code in a notebook during a math class in high school. At that time, there was no computer in secondary school. I was convinced that the final operating system and experience would become The 3D form is basically VR.†Now that Zuckerberg is 32 years old, going to secondary school was still in 1995. A few years ago, Neal Stephenson spoke of computer generated “virtualization†in the novel “Snow Crash†(Snow Crash). Space" concept.
About 20 years later, Zuckerberg offered to the founder of Oculus $2 billion to join. This request is difficult to refuse. First of all, this is 2 billion US dollars. More importantly, this means Zuckerberg's long-term support for Oculus. Zuckerberg controls Facebook through a special stake. Facebook also has many other shareholders, but many of these shareholders do not have the same rights or powers as Zuckerberg. In the first quarter of 2016, Facebook’s cash flow was approximately US$1.8 billion.
Oculus means "eyes" in Greek. The Oculus Rift, launched this year and priced at $599, is an incredible device. By wearing the Oculus Rift to the head, the user can experience a 360-degree view and sound, opening up new possibilities for playing games. Zuckerberg believes that these potentials are the introduction of virtual technology. He also wanted to use the Oculus Rift for watching games, making films, talking to people all over the world, or areas that are still unattended. However, Oculus Rift still has many limitations, such as the resolution problem, the way of motion tracking, how the body responds to the projected content. These problems are not small, and we need to deepen understanding of human sensory mechanisms to solve them. For example, in order for the processor to control the focal plane, how does a pair of eyeglasses follow eye movements? It takes billions of dollars to make the Oculus Rift easy to use.
When asked straightforwardly about this issue, Zuckerberg said without hesitation that he would build a NASA virtual reality technology research park. "Virtual reality technology is only just beginning? It is a long-term technology," Zuckerberg said. "Virtual reality technology is a reasonable candidate for the next generation of major computer platforms and is worth a long-term investment."
Zuckerberg often talks about connecting the world. However, if you use virtual reality technology, the so-called connection will increase exponentially. Zuckerberg said: "We have connected 1.65 billion people through Facebook, but if you want to connect all 7 billion people worldwide, you have to take a big step toward the fidelity of people's communication and consumer content. We don't know how much time it takes to invest in long-term technology... It is not difficult to predict what the world will be like in 20 years. The difficulty is actually to predict or try to achieve it.â€
Ten years ago people mainly shared text content on the Internet. “Later, our mobile phones were equipped with good cameras, and the online world was enriched,†Zuckerberg said. “Now we are in the early stages of the golden era of online video, and the online world is even richer. The picture is richer than text, and the video is much richer than the picture. But it's not over yet, right? It’s like endless infinity to grab a person naturally. Experience and thought process, grab these things directly, and then design it in any way you wish and share it with anyone you wish."
The development of online video has undergone many exciting and sometimes shocking transitions, and virtual reality may develop on this basis in a way that we have not yet understood: Imagine Facebook Live's noisy scene that is broadcast in a completely immersive manner. When it comes to the future, even Zuckerberg has picked up and fallen into mysticism. Some questions even can't name them. Virtual reality is to create another reality, so that everything that already exists is presented and automated. Then there is the deep problem of how to connect with the brain, which causes Zuckerberg not to oppose the telepathy of the discussion. Zuckerberg said: "I even think that there is no scientific understanding of how people actually experience the world."
In addition to breaking the way of thinking, Oculus will give Zuckerberg the opportunity to make something different from the millions of intangible codes that make up Facebook. Of course, these codes are an achievement, but a tangible thing that people like can still be named after a generation. People don't want to abandon things because they remember how they loved them.
There is also a less romantic reason for moving into hardware: Facebook wants to have virtual reality devices, just like Apple (108.18, 0.25, 0.23%) and Google (783.22, -1.63, -0.21%) have their own smartphones. This means that the virtual reality technology is controlled from software to hardware.
But mass-produced hardware is more ruthless than coding. Bringing one billion or more pairs of virtual reality glasses to people is a huge task. Apple does hardware, but its 110,000 employees don't assemble hardware, but are assembled by outsourcers such as Foxconn. Samsung also has factories and nearly 500,000 workers. Facebook has 13,000 employees. According to Facebook's last-announced data, the Oculus department has about 400 people. Facebook said it no longer announces the number of Oculus employees, but declined to explain why. Perhaps Facebook is trying to create a huge business beyond everyone’s imagination. Even if moderate authoritarians such as Zuckerberg, shareholders will be very uneasy about you starting to get involved in the hardware war. Oculus Chief Technology Officer John Carmack said he is fully aware of what shareholders are opposed to: "I have been a 10-year airline and understand how hard it is to do hardware."
This hardware battle will begin at the old Facebook headquarters across the street from the new headquarters. When employees are going to the old department, they need to ride a new blue bike through a tunnel. The office surrounds a trail that looks almost like Disney's Main Street (96.84, -0.93, -0.95%). There are free coffee shops, playgrounds, arcades, and other shops open to employees. Next to the candy store there is a print shop where employees can create beautiful posters with team slogans and stick them on the office wall.
On the other side of the snack street is the Oculus office, which is lined with tables. The rooms were very cluttered and the idlers were forbidden to enter as if the employees were too busy to sort out. The table is full of helmets, lenses, coils, chips and various boxes, as well as oscilloscopes, mass spectrometers, power supplies, soldering irons, circuit boards for mounting chips, USB cables, independent test platforms with special wide feet, large microscopes, etc. Wait. A three-dimensional camera with a small ball is placed on a table, and a small ball is placed on the needle to keep it in balance. There is also a table with a vacuum pump connected to a small room similar to a pressure cooker. The Rift only uses two lenses. Here are the lenses everywhere, placed on the shelf in front of the test equipment.
Here is simply an "equipment labyrinth" with Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell's offices inside. Leki, now 23 years old, has a baby face and is very inventor. In 2012, Oculus founded by Leki caused a great uproar in the media. Facebook is preparing to rewrite Oculus's entrepreneurial story, transforming it from a boy-built company in a garage into a large group of people who work in the lab all day long. So Leki will only appear in group interviews, not to take pictures. There is no resistance to this change.
29-year-old Mitchell was amiable and wore a gray hoodie. He is the Vice President of Oculus Products and has been working with Legui since the company was founded. Mitchell spends most of his working time on improving Rift's technology. Lecky’s development talent is recruited and his competitors are competing for talent. HTC Vive's virtual reality range is larger than that of Rift, and it also comes with a manual controller. Sony (32.82, -0.22, -0.67%) PlayStation VR will be available later this year in an attempt to transform existing video game players into virtual reality users.
When asked if he was worried about Oculus being defeated, Leki replied: "I never worry. I know this line well. For the development of this technology in 10 years, 20 years and even 30 years, some companies are contemplating their Long-term vision, but many of us here are reading science fiction. We all know that virtual reality exists in the world of science fiction. Even if our existing products are not products that we hope will last a decade or two, everyone wants to achieve this goal. Therefore, our goal is very clear, that is, there is no limit to the development of realistic technology, so that it is as true as real life."
Leki's science fiction novels include not only "Avalanche" but also "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline. "First Player" imagines a Facebook-style Oasis world in which all social networking relationships occur in virtual reality. Klein often communicates with Oculus employees, and new employees enter the company to send out a "First-Class Player."
Let Mitchell and Leigh co-operate with Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe. Eriba is 36 years old, confident and calm. Eribe has a lot of responsibilities, but his main responsibility is to ensure that the Oculus products made now are beautiful, intuitive, and comfortable, and don't let people throw it away. Dizziness is a problem with virtual reality technology.
For many years after the development of virtual reality technology, Eriba is also thinking of bigger problems. He wondered if Oculus would go further than Google Earth, what would happen to 3D in the world, or how would the eyeballs be properly tracked.
Erib grew up in Maryland and studied at the University of Maryland for one year before dropping out of school to work on software development. In April of this year, he attended the groundbreaking ceremony of the foundational computer science center of his alma mater, which he donated for US$31 million. He and a Senate, Maryland governor, and Oculus executive Michael Antonov wear virtual reality glasses to pretend groundbreaking. In 2004, Ereb and Antonov jointly created Scaleform, a software tool for video game production companies, and was acquired by Autodesk (61.83, 0.12, 0.19%) for $36 million in 2011.
Eribe recalled that a friend called him on a product show in 2012 and told him to see Legui because he had a great prototype and virtual reality technology might eventually work. So Eribe and a group of people ate at the STK restaurant in Los Angeles, including Mitchell and other colleagues who worked for Erib. Eribe said at the dinner table that Leki was wearing a short hoodie. I used to call him but I didn't know how old he was. Leki was 19 years old.
Oculus is a product of Kickstarter crowdfunding. Eriba tried to promote Oculus. He said that if Oculus represented the dawn of the new computing era, then the situation was just like Steve Wozniak's Apple computer should be an ordinary person, not just an engineer's computer. But at that time Leigh had another job opportunity. "I'm thinking about a lot of different options," he said. "We met and I talked to Eriba. He actually persuaded me."
Oculus chief scientist Michael Abrash spent a lot of time studying consciousness. For Abrilashi, the battle for the "blue, black, and white gold" skirt of the 2015 explosion network is a time-consuming meme dispute, but the fundamental problem is the processing content and processing methods of the brain. Abbilash believes that Oculus will not stop playing games and fancy immersive experience applications. It should be like reality. It should be reality.
For research teams that are aligned with real-world reality, the problem is that many aspects of Oculus fail to meet the standards of actual reality. Oculus lenses are currently designed to have a 90 degree field of view, not the human eye's 110 degree. And there is no way to adjust the sense of depth, with the depth of the eye can focus on a look at the hair to see it, without high-precision eye tracking can see things in the distance. "The only solution is to build," Abbilash said. "This is just a matter of perceptual psychology. The key is that your experience is built in the brain."
For example, eye tracking does not mean tracking the pupils—the pupils will change size, and perhaps they will also be asymmetric. Each blink blinks and the iris shifts. "If you take a video of a spectacles motion and slow it down, you will find it very disturbing," said Abbilash. Finally, Oculus has to track the movements of the mouth and hands. This tracking will be even more difficult, but it is essential for people to communicate in virtual reality chat applications in the future.
Initially, Oculus promised 20% of the budget and recruiters were assigned to the research department. Abirazh spent most of his time trying to find talents who actually studied the problems that the company was trying to solve. In the field of technologies such as nano-manufacturing, nano-etching and waveguide technology, Abrah was said that only a few people in the world are available for consultation. And virtual reality experts have no place to continue their studies.
To some extent, Oculus's future depends entirely on Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg records personal and professional goals in a nearly pedantic manner. He will remember how many miles he ran for a year and how many books he had read in a year. Once interviewed in the office, when asked if he was prepared to do so for a long time, Zuckerberg looked around and quipped. "I think we haven't met before." Afterwards, if he had nothing to say, "We are a completely target-oriented and long-term company."