Facebook Will Begin Testing Advertisements into Virtual Reality on Their Oculus platform  

On Wednesday, Facebook announced, they’ll soon begin testing advertisements in virtual reality on its Oculus platform.  For their first roll-out, Facebook will be testing ads inside Blaston which is a single gaming shooter title from Resolution Games. The interesting part is that they are not rolling this out with a first-party title, but we all know that integration with Oculus Studio titles is inevitable.  

A company blog post reads, “For now, this is a test with a few apps — once we see how this test goes and incorporate feedback from developers and the community, we’ll provide more details on when ads may become more broadly available across the Oculus Platform and in the Oculus mobile app.”  

To make these advertisements less invasive, users will be able to mute, hide, or see information on why they are being served that particular ad. 

Also Read: Facebook Will Enable Users to Turn-off Algorithmic Ranking 

Nevertheless, this social media giant realizes that there are going to be plenty of privacy questions in the future. So, they have addressed plenty of them head-on.   

For instance, Facebook cleared the biggest admission that is they will not be using any data stored locally on the Oculus headset to target ads. They also said that they don’t have any plans to use movement data to target ads.  

Facebook is realizing that they should have probably clarified that they are indeed not using smartphone microphones to monitor conversations and target ads a blog post years ago before those narratives took off. So, the advertisement giant has specifically noted that they don’t use audio conversations for ad targeting.  

Virtual reality is a child of futuristic minds at Facebook. The company has spent billions of dollars bankrolling the ecosystem since the beginning. This move seems to signal that they are nearing the time to start monetizing it more aggressively.