Facebook Spaces

» see facebook.com/spaces as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

facebook spaces is a thing i read about in techcrunch in april 2017 and then never again until the obituary in 2019. i did not own a rift or a vive in 2017. nobody in turkey i worked with had bought either headset since neither product was officially distributed here, and the use cases that mattered to our edge-ai work did not justify the import. so spaces is one of the cleanest examples in inventory of a product i can describe completely from press coverage and that i was never going to be a user of.

facebook announced spaces at f8 on april 18 2017. the beta dropped that day for the oculus rift, with htc vive support coming a few months later. you opened the app and picked one of your facebook photos. the system generated a cartoon avatar that vaguely resembled you. up to four people could share a single virtual room. you could draw with a marker in midair or pick up a 360-degree photo and stand inside it. selfies taken in the room posted back to facebook proper. you could also place a video call from inside vr to friends who were not in vr, which was the feature that everyone wrote about and almost nobody used.

by the second half of 2017 the press coverage had already cooled. spaces never got out of beta. the oculus quest launched in may 2019 as facebook's first standalone vr device that actually sold in volume, and spaces never got ported to it. on october 25 2019 facebook posted a short blog notice that both spaces and oculus rooms would shut down that day. the official line was that the team's focus was moving to facebook horizon. horizon would not enter closed beta until august 2020 and would not open publicly until december 2021.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

spaces had the kind of launch that f8 keynotes were built for. mark zuckerberg showed off the avatar system on stage and walked through a 360 photo with his cartoon. press coverage in april 2017 was uniformly positive. for the small set of people who actually owned an oculus rift in 2017 it was the first social-vr product from facebook itself, with the brand recognition that altspacevr lacked. the early demos read like a working prototype of what facebook had been promising since it acquired oculus in 2014.

~ the unraveling ~

the cracks showed up about three months after launch. the daily user count was low because the install base for rift + vive in 2017 was low. updates to spaces slowed by mid-2017 and went silent for long stretches in 2018. the most-promoted feature, vr-to-non-vr video calls, was clunky in practice since the non-vr person ended up watching a cartoon avatar try to make eye contact with a webcam. the press eventually stopped covering the app entirely. by early 2019 a facebook spaces search returned mostly articles asking whether it was still alive.

~ how it actually ended ~

the october 25 2019 shutdown was clean. one blog post, one date, both spaces and oculus rooms gone the same day. neither product made it to the oculus quest, even though the quest was the first vr device facebook actually sold to a mass audience. the official replacement was facebook horizon, announced at oculus connect 6 in late september 2019. horizon's own arc has since become its own story, with the rebrand to meta horizon worlds in 2021 and a low-engagement reputation that persists into 2026. spaces is the early prototype the company prefers not to talk about anymore.

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