Facebook’s vision for social VR, Facebook Spaces, launched in early open beta this week, and reactions around the web have been mixed. You can always count on Jimmy Kimmel to find the hilarious pessimism in the news, though, and he hasn’t disappointed on this front.
Kimmel featured Spaces on his show this week, spotlighting the more cynical side to the platform that we’ve all joked about in the past. The video below brilliantly pokes fun at the idea of meeting up with virtualized friends when you’ll really be standing in a room by yourself. Fair warning: The dialogue is a little NSFW.
While it’s definitely funny, Kimmel’s words do point towards the harsher truth about mainstream acceptance of VR technology and its undeniable clunkiness. Personally, we’re quite fond of Spaces in it’s early state, but both it and the VR technology that supports it have a long way to go before they could ever possibly be the definitive new way to interact with the social network. Shaping this software to become something that audiences beyond tech enthusiasts can interact with will be one of Facebook’s biggest challenges in the months and years to come.
