Facebook demos personalised avatars for Oculus users based on a 3D scan, VR selfies taken while “visiting” a 360 degree photo
Oculus demos a VR selfie stick — Oculus wants to let you go anywhere in the world instantly, look like yourself, and even take a photo while you're there, and today it demoed how at F8.
Context & Ripple Effects
The F8 demo extends a line that started with Flickr showing 360-degree panoramic photos running on Oculus in 2015 — proof that captured real-world scenes had an audience in headsets. What Oculus added at F8 is the two missing ingredients: an avatar generated from a 3D scan so you look like yourself, and a virtual selfie stick so you can document your presence inside those scenes.
The demo matters because it sketches the pipeline Facebook spent the next two years productizing: the augmented social VR demo with facial expressions and phone calls followed within six months, then the Spaces social VR platform for up to four users, then creator tooling like the 360 Capture SDK to keep the scene supply flowing.
First-order effects
- Oculus users move from generic representations to scanned likenesses, making presence — not just viewing — the product inside 360-degree photos.
- Publishers and creators of 360-degree photos gain a consumption mode where visitors appear inside their scenes and can export selfies from them.
Second-order effects
- The avatar-and-selfie mechanics become the foundation for dedicated social VR: Spaces launches a year later with photo import and News Feed sharing, turning the demo into a hangout product.
- Facebook ships the 360 Capture SDK so creators can produce high-quality 360 content natively, feeding the same scenes users now visit and photograph.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the selfie evolves from a flat image into an embodied artifact — your scanned likeness placed inside captured places — which is the logic behind Facebook later using AI to add depth to ordinary phone photos.
- Identity, capture, and sharing converge into one Facebook-controlled stack spanning phone and headset, raising the stakes on who owns the representation of you across devices.
The trend: Facebook is assembling an identity-plus-capture stack — scanned avatars, 360 scenes, and shareable moments — to carry its social graph from the feed into VR.