Mark Zuckerberg debuted “Facebook’s Second Act” on Tuesday, which involves creating an “augmented reality” where users can turn their everyday life into Facebook. In other words, they’ll never have to deal with anyone outside of social media ever again.
The plan, rolled out at the company’s annual “F8” conference, involves high tech filters that appear over real world objects when those objects are viewed through your cellphone camera inside the Facebook app. They could involve store deals, GPS directions, even “souvenirs“—things other Facebook users leave in the virtual world that overlays their real world.
Facebook demonstrated the new program by having a group of Facebook staffers stare intently at their phones in front of what appeared to be a blank wall, but that viewed in Facebook was actually an “in-app” contemporary art exhibition.
Eventually, it appears, Facebook wants its users to literally never leave the program, a and use the social network for every need in their daily life. And while they haven’t yet introduced the ability to upload your consciousness directly into their server, they have a “beta” program where Facebook users become avatars who meet and interact in a digital Facebook environment.
That environment is called “Facebook Spaces,” and it’s a fully rendered virtual reality where Facebook users “meet up” and interact with other users, as though they were out in the real world, interacting with other human beings.
Facebook debuted the idea for Spaces at the Oculus conference last year, but Tuesday was the first day the public got a glimpse into a future where they never have to leave the application or, in fact, their homes. 
You’ll need an Oculus Rift headset and a healthy sense of humor about all those apocryphal, dystopian novels you read in college in order to use the application. (Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion last year.)
Facebook—and tech journalism—seems to have missed the irony of building an application that allows people to interact in ways they used to before Facebook was invented. “Facebook is building something incredibly forward-thinking as it rethinks how people experience deeply human emotions in virtual reality,” raved TechCrunch.
There’s not much to do once you’re in Spaces, except chat with your friends and take phone calls from the real world—at least, right now. For Facebook, though, “social VR” is part of a long-term plan to integrate the social network into every aspect of your waking life. According to Zuckerberg, Facebook Spaces is “.1%” of its VR plan, which he says will roll out in stages over the next decade.
