Facebook is working on virtual reality versions of its apps
Facebook is building versions of its apps in virtual reality, according to Chris Cox, the company's head of product. Speaking at Recode's Code Media conference in Dan Point, CA, Cox told interviewer Peter Kafka that Facebook VR is on its way.
Context & Ripple Effects
At Code Media in 2015, product chief Chris Cox told Peter Kafka that Facebook was building VR versions of its apps — an early signal that the company viewed virtual reality as a surface for its core social products, not just a hardware bet. The months that followed turned that intent into structure: a standalone 360-degree video app was in the works by September 2015, and by early 2016 Facebook had spun up a dedicated team led by Daniel James and Mike Booth to explore social interaction in VR.
The payoff came in stages. Spaces launched in beta on Oculus Rift in 2017 as a four-person VR hangout, then grew richer when users could bring their own photos and videos into it and share creations to News Feed. By 2021 the same thread had extended into work: Horizon Workrooms brought avatars, spatial audio, and a whiteboard to Oculus Quest 2 — Cox's 'VR versions of our apps' thesis playing out first in socializing, then in meetings.
First-order effects
- Facebook's own roadmap shifts from porting individual apps to building dedicated VR social products, starting with the Spaces hangout app on Oculus Rift rather than a direct copy of News Feed.
Second-order effects
- Oculus hardware gains a software reason to exist beyond gaming: Spaces and later Workrooms give Rift and Quest owners social and workplace uses that tie headset ownership to the Facebook account graph.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — social app, then shared spaces, then virtual meetings — the company's endgame is a persistent VR layer where its existing identity, content, and connections carry over, which is effectively the destination the Meta rebrand later formalized.
The trend: Social platforms are migrating their core products — sharing, hanging out, meeting — from flat feeds into immersive VR environments, one app at a time.