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So far, targeted ads don't really seem to work that well (studies have found). I don't think getting the size of my rooms will be that much of an improvement. They can infer maybe how much money I have, but they can probably already guess that from my address and my credit card company also knows. It's not even clear that the data about my rooms is transferred to Facebook.

I don't think making better targeted ads is the play here. I think they want to dominate social networking, and they think a lot of social networking will take place in VR in the future.

Can you link me one of those studies? Assuming it's about modern hyper-targeted social media content based advertising, not last decade's old-school banners.

room shape isn't exactly a killer segmentation for advertising.

The content inside a room would be. But it would costa shittonne in GPU time to do that reliably, so it would cost a boatload.

This is complete nonsense and doesn't pass the face-value check. Why would all the tech companies hire thousands of engineers to fine tune an algorithmn that was proven to be worse?

> Some users report being able to see the boundary from a different room.

This is relocalisation. Two things to note here

1) Facebook don't have enough GPUs to do this properly at scale.

2) For that kind of thing to work it needs either a GPS prior, or much more robust SLAM. the oculus isft doesn't have enough CPU/GPU to make robust multi-room maps (with big occlusions that is)

> This is why FB is so adamant about using FB profiles, even banning users if they make a guest account:

Its far more mundane than that. Its all about branding. The "brand" is all about "One facebook" or someshit so they want everyone to be interoperable. Thats why messenger and instgram are now able to communicate. I assume whatsapp will be added to that as well.

You're assumption is that facebook are a coherent force for evil. They really aren't that well organised. They are a collection of highly paid, naive tech people. Surrounded by some people with experience.

There's no reason to believe this. If facebook was uploading scans of your home for some reason, it has to be disclosed in the privacy policy. If you think the privacy policy is lying, then it's easy enough to find the code responsible and create a scandal.

The Oculus privacy policy indeed indicates that they collect "information about your physical features and dimensions" as well as "information about your environment, physical movements, and dimensions when you use an XR device".

Their information collection is a legitimate concern precisely because they have both the incentives (profiling and advertisement) and legal basis to collect it.

This has the trademark hackernews "why would anyone use dropbox just get an FTP account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem" written all over it. Facebook has been involved in countless privacy scandals so that's the reason to believe this. Why you think it's easy for a random someone to dump a closed source, probably obfuscated piece of closed source embedded software and find a specific piece of code that does a specific thing is beyond me.

As far as I know, despite the scandals facebook has never been shown to blatantly collect data without disclosing it in its privacy policy. It's unreasonable to assume it will start, in a niche product, over what most people probably find more sensitive than most of the data is collects.

It's "easy" for a competent software engineer, yes, not a random person. But I assume that's most of the people on HN.

You seem to live in a magical world where privacy policies matter and laws are enforced against corporations with unlimited legal budget.

The author of that post lives in a world where a) Facebook has actually made the specific disclosures being discussed here, and many more; b) making such disclosures has had, at most, only trivial negative consequences for Facebook; and c) not making such disclosures could provide the sort of evidence used in the legal and legislative constraints on Facebook's operations that are sometimes proposed and occasionally attempted.

The average user does not read privacy policies. Remember Cambridge Analytica?

> Physical Features: We collect information about your physical features and dimensions, such as your estimated hand size when you enable hand tracking.

> Environmental, Dimensions and Movement Data: We collect information about your environment, physical movements and dimensions when you use an XR device.

> We use information we collect when you use Oculus Products for the purposes described in the Facebook Data Policy under "How do we use this information?", including to provide, personalise and improve the Facebook Products (including seamless integration between the Facebook Products); to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads)

https://www.oculus.com/legal/privacy-policy/

It's right there in black and white, they measure the dimensions of the participant and the environment, link it to a Facebook account, and use it to target ads.

As an advertiser, how would I take advantage of this? Can I click a box on Facebook to target my ads to people with small hands?

Your over estimation of how good facebook are at room mapping is cute.

Do you know why those clauses are in the legal agreement? its because otherwise they can't make the slam cameras work. Which means you need light houses.

Also when you submit a bug, I'm pretty sure it uploads the state of the SLAM map, which would be impossible if they didn't have the legal cover.

Now thats not to say that if they had the tech they _would_ use those bits of information. However they don't because they really don't have the tech yet.

Firstly the features that the oculus extracts from the SLAM cameras really arn't great for room mapping. Well, the cameras are fine, the feature extractor isn't. it works short term, but not for long term, or dense reconstruction.

Secondly, streaming 4x slam cameras at 60hz isn't trivial in a lab, let alone on with a battery on wifi on a generic internet connection.

Thirdly, facebook dont have anywhere near enough GPUs do the required classification/mesh generation/segmentation etc.

Finally there isn't a RGB camera.

Everything about the VR investment is a mid- to long-term bet. So "they really don't have the tech yet" doesn't really mean much, since they probably will have the tech in the next few years. Both in a better (data gathering) VR platform and better facilities to analyze the gathered data. Maybe it was built by naive techies but it is a new data stream and FB has shown that if they can mine it, they will.