Facebook's 'VR Memories' F8 Announcement Sounds Creepy as Hell

Facebook Memories notifications are daily reminders of pretty much everything you should delete from your profile. But now the social media platform wants to use your old pictures to produce some even more frightening content, this time in virtual reality.

During the company’s F8 developer conference in San Jose, California CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced yet another experimental VR feature the company has been cooking up. This time, Facebook wants to use your childhood pictures to create a VR rendition of the home you grew up in. The demonstration was anything but a comforting version of a family residence, it was a lot more like a nightmarish Georges Seurat painting.

“If you have some photos from your childhood home we can now use computer vision to fill in the gaps with this pointillism effect and recreate the rooms of your childhood homes where you grew up,” says Zuckerberg. “This work of mapping out immersive spaces is just another important step on the path to creating this real feeling of presence.”

This feature, which doesn’t have a release date as of yet, takes your two-dimensional prom photos to create a version of your childhood home using multicolored dots. The result is like some kind of fuzzy memory you pushed to the farthest recesses of your mind. The head of social VR at Facebook, Rachel Franklin, compared it to a “Facebook album that has come to life.”

Both Zuckerberg and Franklin did not offer any concrete details of when this might be released. But the showcase of this feature came directly before the announcement that Facebook’s next virtual reality headset, the Oculus Go, would be shipping to stores on May 1.

VR Memories could have been a way to get the crowd hyped about its new hardware release. Instead, it left a lot of people looking like the thinking face emoji and sent a shiver down this writer’s spine.