Facebook Opening Keynote Day 2: Why Virtual Reality Will Matter to You

We’ll update this article as the stream continues – Last updated at 18:01 GMT

The Facebook F8 live stream starts in just a few minutes, where we expect to see Mark Zuckerberg reveal the future of VR and we hope, the next iteration, or at least some hardware details on the now Facebook owned Oculus Rift.

Some items were teased at yesterday and you can check out our coverage of the F8 event so far here.

Tune into the live stream here.

We’re still waiting for the stream to start, but as you can see, there is an Oculus booth at the back, let’s hope we see something very cool from that team!

17:00 – Data centres

Mike Schroepfer, CTO at Facebook has taken to the stage.

Mike started out by discussing how communication has evolved, from the many days it used to take to send a letter around the world, to phones, to how we now share almost everything of our daily lives via social media.

Mike went on to discuss how Facebook are looking to continue scaling their services, building the computers and data centres required to provide the infrastructure for current and future technologies. For example, the four huge data centres that Facebook currently operates. He went on to explain how Facebook have improved efficiency and cost to help scale these services.

17:10 – React

React, Facebook’s open source project, used by many content providers to push content, such as NetFlix. The new version is now fully open source and available to use, officially launching right now. This could be a very powerful tool for developers.

17:11 – Internet

Mike discusses how large parts of the earth don’t have access to internet, how only small areas have 4G, a few more with 3G and again with Edge. Connectivity Labs are looking to solve this problem, satellites, drones and other technologies to help provide access to the world. See the picture of their first prototype drone, which runs on solar power and can provide internet access. Wing span is bigger than a 737 and it weighs more than your average car!

17:15 – AI and Neural Nets

Torch, their open source system for building AI. AI that can detect what is in images is no easy task, but Facebook’s new system using neural nets can detect content in videos, such as identifying which kinds of sports are being played in clips. Of course, it’s not limited to just that and could help curate content without the use of tags. It can also analyse all kinds of data to answer natural form questions, which we’ll explain more shortly.

17:20 – Cats

Mike is discussing how to manage content overload, there’s more data on Facebook than you could reasonably consume. The new AI systems could help better find the things that really matter to you.

17:22 – VR

VR time! They’ve shown a breakdown image of Oculus DK2, let’s hope that something new will be shown in a moment.

An in development game is being shown was being demoed real time using Oculus Rift (no idea which model). The game resolution is clearly higher than DK2.

“You’re going to be able to do this this year in VR” – Mike

17:25 – Crescent Bay Oculus Rift

He’s showing Crescent Bay hardware.

17:28 – More Oculus

Michael Abrash – Chief Scientist, Oculus, has taken to the stage.

“what is real” as said by Morpheus in the movie The Matrix. Something that is close to Michael, as he discusses how we should focus more on the world Reality in the term Virtual Reality.

He went on to say how our own eyes don’t take as much data about our world as there really is, such as the fabled dress that flooded social media recently.

He’s discussing how our brains interpret the world around us, filling in some of the voids the data that our other senses don’t accurately collect from around us and how that can relate to creating a realistic VR experience. If it looks real, how can you tell it’s not?

17:49 – Illusions

A long demo of visual and audio illusions, no doubt to show how reality can be twisted and how you can be made to believe things that are not real.

17:57 – Cresent Bay Resolution and Shipping Soon

5K x 5K resolution would be required for Oculus Rift Crescent Bay to simulate a desktop monitor display resolution at normal viewing distance and 16k x 16x, 200x as many pixels as the current Crescent Bay to simulate or normal vision, so there’s clearly a lot of room for improvement for VR technology.

One billion times more graphics performance in just 33 years!

18:01 – The Key Note has now finished.