Rachel Franklin has spent her career at the intersection of technology and psychology
Onstage at Oculus Connect this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that his goal is to get one billion people into virtual reality. Many of them will come to VR for an escape, the chance to step into fantasy realms or explore far-off places they can’t travel to in real life. Games are at the heart of the current Oculus experience.
But Facebook also imagines that much of the social interaction which currently takes place in phone calls, video chats, text messages, and wall posts will someday happen between avatars sharing a virtual world. Right now this kind of social VR is powered by a software platform called Spaces.
Rachel Franklin is the executive leading up the development of Spaces, and we got the chance to chat with her about the work she’s done since joining Facebook one year ago. Franklin shared details of the philosophy that drives her team’s design choices and how her background working on The Sims has shaped her approach to social VR. She shared her thoughts on what the most successful elements of Facebook’s push into virtual reality have been so far, and what went wrong with the recent attempt to marry VR to disaster relief.
So let’s back up a little. What led you to your work on The Sims?
I’ve always had a fascination with the interaction between technology and people. I’ve been in interactive media and games for over twenty years. It was an awesome way to take technology and psychology and kind of mash them up.
When you were starting out in games, how social was it?
Not at all. But there was the ability to forge an emotional connection with a character that wasn’t real. As you’re designing a game, you’re learning what are the cues that make the player care about a certain character. I think you could take a lot from that and help enhance the avatars we have today in VR that do have a real person behind it.
THE ABILITY TO FORGE AN EMOTIONAL CONNECTION WITH A CHARACTER THAT WASN’T REAL.
There is a balance there that we have to strike there. Go too far, and all of a sudden your avatar is making a giant guffaw sound with a big grin on their face and you think, I didn’t do that? You have to have agency over what your avatar is doing, but have it feel emotive, and expressive, without having to push a button each time you want to smile.
I played a lot of SimCity when I was a kid. Farm, RollerCoaster, Tower. I had a few friends, I remember, who were unemployed, playing The Sims ten hours a day, and it didn’t seem right, spending so much time tending your virtual garden. Obviously it was an amazing experience, but what about the aspect of people spending too much time in there.
Well, a couple things. First, cause and effect is obviously fascinating. If I do this, what will happen. Which is why something like SimCity, if I take away all the power, what are all the citizens going to say about it? But there is nothing as fascinating as people. There is nothing as fascinating as social cause and effect, which is why reality TV is so huge. If you put people in a room, and they can’t leave, and there’s cameras, what’s going to happen? Giving people a safe place to play out cause and effect is what makes The Sims so intriguing.
I’m a pretty light Facebook user. My wife is a heavy user and has a lot of people she considers friends who she has never met. Is that one of the places where VR will be impactful. Or do you think having the remove, just a little bit of text and imagery, makes it easier to share deep, dark secrets with total strangers?
Facebook is the ultimate matchmaking tool. If I think about myself, and the interests that I have, there are certain things I’m going to want to share with people who have that in common. As a new mom, I would have loved something like spaces. To not worry that I haven’t showered in three days, and I finally got the baby to sleep for twenty minutes, and i’m not sure if it’s time to start feeding rice cereal. Let me go into my new mom’s group and see if someone is just there to communicate with me. And I can show off cute pictures! That’s special.
So you’ve been at Facebook for a year. How has Spaces changed in that time?
I think what we really honed in on was purpose around the product. We talk about how it should +1 your relationship bar. We could create all kinds of experiences, like I was mentioning. We could create fully fledged games. But if the ultimate result of that is, I’m doing my thing in the game and you’re doing you’re thing, and we’re not communicating, then we’re not doing a service to the experience we’re trying to create.
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Source: The Verge