facebook reality labs

UploadVR covers a Facebook Reality Labs prototype that tracks facial expressions using cameras mounted in a VR headset. The updated version captures subtle micro-expressions for realistic avatars.

Guardian News coverage of Mark Zuckerberg's 2021 reveal of Facebook's metaverse plans alongside the rename to Meta. It shows a glimpse of the VR and AR vision.

A 2018 Facebook UK ad, part of the 'Here Together' campaign, promising to do more to keep users safe and protect their privacy after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Veritasium's Derek Muller argues that Facebook's business model works against pages and creators, because it charges them to reach the audiences they built. He explains how filtering and paid promotion undermine the value of likes.

Kurzgesagt argues that Facebook's claimed 8 billion daily video views are inflated by freebooting, meaning re-uploads of creators' videos. It describes how this harms independent creators.

Veritasium argues that Facebook's ad revenue relies partly on fake likes, after paying to promote his page and gaining tens of thousands of followers in developing countries who never engaged. He shares his experiment and cites other cases.

A clip from Charlie Brooker's BBC show Screenwipe showing how reality TV uses editing to manufacture emotion and narrative. It demonstrates how the same footage can be cut to give very different impressions.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day explains 'Facebook freebooting', where Facebook users re-upload YouTubers' videos natively and the original creators lose views and revenue. He describes his own attempts to get Facebook to act.

Tantacrul analyzes how stock music in reality TV uses blunt, repeated tropes to manipulate viewers, comparing it to nature documentaries. He ties it to ideas of reification and cultural homogenization.

Keiichi Matsuda's short concept film depicting a future where physical and virtual realities have merged and the city is saturated with media and advertising. It shows an augmented-reality-filled daily life as a provocative vision.

A short Magic Leap promo clip of a whale breaching through a gym floor in mixed reality.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day investigates manipulation on Facebook, interviewing the company's team about content moderation. It is the third video in his series on social media manipulation.

A 35C3 talk by Privacy International researchers who captured and decrypted traffic between Android apps and Facebook servers. They show many apps send Facebook device and usage data immediately on launch, even for users without Facebook accounts.

Facebook engineers explain why they abandoned the traditional MVC paradigm for a more functional architecture, introducing Flux and React. They use the unread-message-count bug as a case study of the problems of bidirectional data flow at scale.

Louis Brandy presents the most common and infamous recurring C++ bugs seen in Facebook's huge codebase, including shared_ptr data races and operator[] pitfalls. He explains the surprising complexity behind seemingly simple code.

Julien Verlaguet of Facebook describes applying static analysis and type inference to a very large PHP codebase, using OCaml. The work led to the Hack language.

John Carmack's keynote at Facebook Connect 2021, where he speaks candidly about VR, Quest, and Meta's metaverse plans. He pushes back on hype and discusses retention and latency.

A 1973 AT&T training film made for new employees at Bell Labs' Holmdel Computing Center, when Unix was in its third version and running at 16 computer centers in the Bell System. It shows how users submitted jobs and used the center's machines.

A capture of Second Reality, the real-time audiovisual demo by Future Crew first shown at Assembly 1993, recorded from a 486DX2-66 with a Gravis Ultrasound. It showcases the peak of early 1990s PC demoscene techniques.

Home video from 1993 showing Future Crew members at Mika Tuomi's home finishing the PC demo Second Reality shortly before release.

Tested gets hands-on with four Meta Reality Labs research VR headset prototypes testing resolution, brightness, focus shifting and form factor, plus an interview with Mark Zuckerberg on display technology.

A December 2005 guest lecture by Mark Zuckerberg in Harvard's CS50, discussing Facebook's early days, its technical choices and computer science. It captures him as a 21-year-old founder before Facebook's rise.

A 12-minute demo of the Alternate Reality Kit, built by Randall Smith at Xerox PARC in 1986. It is a simulated physical world in which users manipulate objects and program by direct interaction.

Dodoid gives an in-depth look at an SGI Onyx RealityEngine2, a $250,000 graphics supercomputer from 1993, covering its history, a physical overview, a teardown and some demos and games.

Tom Occhino and Jordan Walke present how Facebook builds JavaScript apps, in the talk where React was first publicly announced at JSConf US 2013.

An F8 2015 talk touring the tool-chain Facebook uses to let thousands of engineers build mobile apps, including its move to Mercurial, an Atom-based IDE and continuous integration.

A one-minute clip of Steve Jobs at the D3 conference in 2005 discussing virtual reality. He compares VR headsets to headphones for video, an analogy later applied to Apple's Vision Pro.

A short satirical Onion News Network segment presenting Facebook as a CIA project. It plays on surveillance and data-collection fears.

A scene from the film Disclosure showing its virtual reality interface, including a 3D file system visualizer.

Anthony Marcar describes lessons from three years of using Clojure at WalmartLabs, including scaling a team and a large multi-project codebase in an enterprise setting.

A short Newsweek clip of White House press secretary Jen Psaki saying the administration is flagging problematic posts to Facebook that spread COVID-19 and vaccine disinformation.

Henry Segerman and collaborators demonstrate virtual reality experiences in non-Euclidean spaces, including hyperbolic and mixed hyperbolic-Euclidean geometry. The browser-based demos let viewers move through these spaces and show how strange the geometry feels from inside.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues in this TED talk that evolution shaped perception to track fitness rather than truth. He uses evolutionary simulations and the Australian jewel beetle as examples.

Rick Roderick's 1993 lecture on Baudrillard, the last in his series The Self Under Siege. It covers hyperreality, simulation and what Baudrillard calls fatal strategies.

Computerphile with Professor Brailsford on how a 1979 Bell Labs team reverse engineered a Linotron 202 phototypesetter over a summer to get high-quality print output. It covers typesetting history and the later 2013 rebuild of the famous vacation memo.

Adam Savage's Tested spends a week with the Magic Leap One developer kit. They dig into the hardware, display technology, user experience and launch apps.

A one-minute demo of Safespaces, an open source 3D and VR desktop built on the Arcan project.

A one-minute demo of Word Lens, an iPhone app that translates printed text in real time by overlaying the translation on the camera view. It was later folded into Google Translate.

Magic Leap's original 2015 concept video, made with Weta Workshop, showing what mixed reality could look like. It was posted to explain the company's goals to outsiders.

The first part of Welch Labs' series on imaginary numbers, presenting them as the natural extension of the number line into two dimensions. It covers the history and the math with strong visuals.