Facebook F8 Keynote Live Coverage
On March 25 and 26, Facebook will hold its F8 developer conference in San Francisco. At 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET on both days, the company will hold a keynote session. Expect general Facebook updates from CEO Mark Zuckerberg on day one, and developments relating to its Oculus Rift VR headset on day two. Fast Company technology editor Harry McCracken and associate editor Sarah Kessler will bring you live updates from the conference and Fast Company HQ in NYC.
It doesn't seem like it's been a year since Facebook last held its F8 developer conference. Actually, it hasn't been--the 2015 edition comes only 11 months after the 2014 version. It also spans two days for the first time. And both days will feature a morning keynote.
The short interval since the last edition and expanded schedule make sense: Facebook has a lot to talk about. Last year, Mark Zuckerberg's keynote focused on his company's goal of becoming a "cross-platform platform," with developer tools and advertising solutions designed to help third-party companies build apps and services outside of Facebook's own world. Expect a progress report on that front, and more details on Facebook's future vision--which tends to be an ever-evolving work in progress.
Day two's keynote is titled "Why Virtual Reality Will Matter to You," which is presumably a tip-off that it will feature the Rift VR headset from Oculus, the company which Facebook agreed to acquire a few weeks before last year's F8. With luck, we may finally get details on Rift's consumer launch, such as the price and exact arrival date.
Join Fast Company technology editor Harry McCracken at the event and associate editor Sarah Kessler in New York for live F8 coverage throughout the conference!
-
Science fiction writers like Neal Stephenson and Ernest Cline helped Abrash understand what VR could be. But it was THE MATRIX which gave him a deep sense of VR's potential to be real and exciting and reality-stretching. He watched it again recently. A speech by Morpheus does a great job of summarizing VR. "What is real? How do you define real?"
-
Our eyes have lots of limitations. Blind spots. Stuff looks blurry. There are lightwaves we can't see. We don't have enough data to reconstruct the world accurately. Example: "the dress." We don't have enough photons reaching our eyes to resolve that ambiguity.
-
If we're experiencing the real world right now, why don't we see blind spots? Why don't we think about the fact we can only see a thumb-sized slice of the world? Our brains fill in the gaps. "There is--presumably--a real world out there." Our brain is taking in signals and trying to reconstruct it.
-
Another hands-on audience demo. Everyone has dark film they can use to watch a video of a carnival ride with people on swings. It causes a 3D effect. The less light you see, the slower your retina sees things. The dark film slows down one eye, but not the other, creating 3D.
