Designer Jony Ive and OpenAI’s Sam Altman Discuss AI Hardware ProjectRead more

An attendee at an Oculus conference in 2019 trying out the Quest virtual reality headset and controllers. Photo by Bloomberg.

Inside Facebook’s AR/VR Strategy: The Information’s Tech Briefing

Photo: An attendee at an Oculus conference in 2019 trying out the Quest virtual reality headset and controllers. Photo by Bloomberg.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed how much he is focused on the future, rather than on current-day topics like disinformation and content moderation, in an extensive interview he gave The Information about augmented reality and virtual reality. His ambitions sound grand—“one day I want people to be able to teleport around.” But they seem inspired, at least in part, by a more workaday instinct: to circumvent the control that Apple and Google exercise over the mobile ecosystem.

In the interview, Zuckerberg refers to the “rigid rules” of app stores that prevented him from creating “better social experiences.” Facebook wants to “make sure that we can design the next system so it can actually create the kind of social experiences that we would like there to be.”

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Former Apple design chief Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Photos by Getty.
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