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Facebook Preps Its Infrastructure For a Virtual Reality Future (datacenterfrontier.com)
1sockchuck writes: Facebook is building a new generation of open hardware, part of its vision for powerful data centers that will use artificial intelligence and virtual reality to deliver experiences over the Internet. At the Open Compute Summit, Facebook shared details of its work to integrate more SSDs, GPUs, NVM and a "Just a Bunch of Flash" storage sled to accelerate its infrastructure. The company's infrastructure ambitions are also powered by CEO Mark Zuckerberg's embrace of virtual reality, reflected in the $2 billion acquisition of VR pioneer Oculus. "Over the next decade, we're going to build experiences that rely more on technology like artificial intelligence and virtual reality," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "These will require a lot more computing power."
meet your friends, associates or colleagues in a VR land. Some foxy minx approaches you and tells you she's in your area and looking for lurve, and if you don't like her, there are 100s of others nearby.
The computer IS reality. "Virtual reality" is a legacy concept from when computers were so damn new and complicated that everyone assumed the ideal would be to make the tool as un-tool-like as possible.
But nobody expects or wants a hammer to look more like a rock just because rocks have been around for longer and can look prettier. A hammer is fine.
After all these years, VR is still a technology desperately looking for a problem that it is actually needed for. Sure, Oculus headsets are nifty things: but outside some niche applications, actually useful they are not.
Either Mr. Zuckerberg has a vision that no one else is capable of seeing yet, or they are going to waste an enormous amount of money on what amounts to a buzzword frenzy.
Where is the extended use usability study, I am still waiting for those reports where a bunch of people use VR over an extended time period. What are they like after the first hour, then the second hour and then the third, fourth and fifth hour, can they even make it psychological intact to twelve hours (not unrealistic as they are claiming it as a work tool and those people are entitled to some time off so four more hours). Seriously, WTF, they have invested billions and could not afford to pay for a volunteer based extended use usability study. You would think, do to the nature of the device and severe consequences of harm, reductions in visual acuity, some health department or other would have mandated tests by now or investors would have demanded public tests. I can not understand people who would buy it with out knowing the physiological limits on it's use. What would a worker be like after 8 hours a day, five days a week for over a month, is it even possible?
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I would LOVE to buy me a shiny new VR headset (and accompanying shiny new graphics card), but I have to pay off my debts for my shiny new 3D TV first.
A lot of people who use facebook a lot seem to use a phone and casually post what they are doing. There may be some people who want to cut themselves off in a VR headset, but this is not the way my kids use it and I don't think they'd want to really
It seems a reboot of an already-seen movie.
Virtual Reality - where IT celebrities go to die. The eternal hype. It's been "the next big thing" for as long as I know computers, and I'm fucking ancient.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
No, just you. Considering you could have looked anywhere for similarities, that's pretty poor. Are you lazy, or just stupid? Go find more.
FB should worry about becoming irrelevant in that timeframe. Younger generation does not find their offering compelling (and decidedly stays out). Average user age on FB keeps going up.
In the meantime, the ex-timeline is less and less useful. Without intervention mine tends to bring up the least interesting, most annoying posts (though perhaps FB is trying to keep my interest by an equivalent of automated trolling?). It takes a daily effort to keep pruning out posts I don't want to see and explicitly visit pages/posts I am interested in.
How is it, with all the problems in the world, our current technological leaders fail at solving any of them?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I think VR offers something that is incredibly valuable in today's modern world - escapism. That is why we read novels, go to movies, drink alcohol, and travel the world - to escape from our normal existence. Most of the people I have talked to who are skeptical about VR have interesting jobs, good social lives, and enough money to entertain themselves with gadgets or travel on demand. But the reality is that the masses don't have these things. They mostly work in boring repetitive jobs, and can't afford to do much more than watch TV. VR offers them a taste of the things wealthy people can do at a potentially very cheap price (in the future anyway). I don't think you should ignore the push and pull of this. Being able to go live inside a big house, or travel to the other side of the world, or race in the Gumbal rally, or hook up with AI models. I think as capitalism continues to fail the middle class, VR will become a huge outlet for people who have enough money to keep their bodies fed and warm, but get nothing else from life.
It's kind off sad in a way, but the future being a sort of social dystopia doesn't mean it isn't going to happen.
Some of the comments make me laugh. There's always a peanut gallery, ready to ridicule and pronounce doom upon anything new.
They're the same people who said in 1982 that "home computers" were a solution in search of a problem. You spent thousands of dollars on that thing, and it can do what? Keep your recipes? Or you can type into a "word processor" and then print out ugly-ass documents on a dot-matrix printer, instead of just using a typewriter? This overhyped fad will surely burn out soon.
They're the same people who said the iPod and iPhone were going to flop. The iPod doesn't have as much storage as a whatever-whatever gadget that only a few geeks know about, and Nokia has already perfected the smart phone while Apple blunder into a market they don't known anything about, etc., etc.
Oh, and these "Tesla" electric cars are all going to catch fire, if they can even find anybody dumb enough to buy one.
Nuclear fusion: It's forty years away and always will be.
Virtual Reality? Didn't the Nintendo Virtual Boy already prove that doesn't work? Not to mention the Power Glove. Hahaha!
(That last one especially irks me. The only connection Virtual Boy had with VR was the word "Virtual" in its name.)
This new crop of VR headsets really does remind me of the early days of home computering, though. They're expensive and awkward, and they do things that seem amazing, but exactly how they're going to be used is not completely clear yet. Aside from playing games, of course. We used to have Apple, Atari, Commodore, TI, Tandy, etc. . . Now we get Oculus, Valve and HTC, OSVR, Sulon, Playstation VR, etc. . .
It's going to be chaos for a while, but something good will come out of it.
In many areas of the world, including shamefully plenty of parts of the USA, you struggle to get much past dial-up speed.
My whizz-bang latest cellphone included; outside perfect conditions even viewing a low-res video on Youtube can be painful.
So, how will the FB servers pump VR-quality output to us?
Grand plans indeed. Is this the same company that still has its infrastructure in php? Why does the "myspace" word pop into my head?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.