All of the news from Facebook’s F8 developer conference

Facebook is partnering with camera maker RED to develop a professional-grade virtual reality camera system that can capture high-resolution imagery in so-called 6DoF, or six degrees of freedom, which allows it to be viewed and explored in real time within virtual reality. The rig, which doesn’t yet have pricing or release date info available, is a culmination of Facebook’s internal efforts on its Surround 360 platform. RED’s upcoming VR camera will now be the one Facebook suggests to filmmakers and other creators who want to make the most high-fidelity, immersive entertainment and art. The news was announced today at Facebook’s F8 developer conference.

“A year ago we set out to find a hardware partner to help us deliver this technology,” says Brian Cabral, a director of engineering at Facebook specializing in computational photography. Facebook needed not just “the image quality we wanted,” but also the workflow that would let creators easily capture necessary photography and video on set, and be able to transfer that to the necessary software that would then stitch it together and help create VR-ready experiences, or what Cabral calls a “photon to photon” experience.

Facebook announced its idea for a dating app today. There’s still a ton we don’t know about how it’ll work, though we know that the platform will live inside its official app and that users will be able to “unlock” individual events or groups that they’re members of to see potential matches. The company says in promotional material: “Just like in real life, the more active you are in the communities around you, the more opportunities you’ll have to meet awesome people.”

This will be essential to the dating app’s success and could potentially position it to usurp Tinder as the go-to dating app for young people. One of the biggest complaints I hear from friends about dating apps is that they never seem to get over the messaging-to-meeting-up-in-person hurdle. They’ll amass tons of matches, chat over an app, maybe move to text, Snapchat, or Instagram, and then... that’s it. There’s even some unofficial math on how hard it is to meet up.

If you haven’t heard, Facebook is getting into the dating app scene. It will soon let users opt into an experience resembling Tinder that lets them browse other profiles with photos and first names. Dating app executives took the opportunity to chide Facebook for its tattered history of data privacy practices and for allowing Russia to meddle in US elections.

Joey Levin is the CEO of IAC, the company that owns a majority stake in Match Group (which in turn owns Tinder, OkCupid, Match, and PlentyofFish). He responded to the news with a very direct taunt: “Come on in. The water’s warm. Their product could be great for US / Russia relationships.”

WhatsApp is getting several new changes including stickers and business-focused app features, its parent company Facebook announced today during the annual F8 developer conference. The messaging platform will also be adding group video calls in the coming months, WhatsApp director Mubarik Imam announced.

Imam didn’t have many details to give about how group video calls will work just yet, but from the example video, we can see that calls will allow four people to simultaneously participate. She revealed that WhatsApp now has over 450 million daily users, and over 2 billion minutes of video and audio calls are made through WhatsApp each day.

Facebook just wrapped day one of its F8 developer conference keynote, which comes at an unfortunate time this year after the Cambridge Analytica data scandal seems to have put Facebook at odds with how it is handling user data within its developer community. Nevertheless, the show had to go on, and Mark Zuckerberg tried his best to keep developers excited about continuing to build on his platform.

The CEO spent a brief moment of the keynote rallying developers to keep building and using their skills to bring people together. To do so, the company unveiled several updates coming to its product lineup, including the core Facebook app, Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp.

Oculus wants people to watch TV in their VR headsets, and later this month, it’s launching a dedicated “Oculus TV” app with partners like Showtime, Netflix, and ESPN. The app is a virtual home theater and a hub for non-VR video apps. That includes existing services like Netflix and Hulu, which have been on the Gear VR since 2016, but also services we haven’t seen on a headset before. The new ESPN+ subscription service, which launched in April, will be launching through Oculus TV, and so will Showtime’s streaming service, Showtime Anytime.

Film and TV studios have experimented with putting both 360-degree and traditional video into headsets, and part of the priority has been to create social experiences so people who don’t live near each other can still watch TV together. Oculus TV is part of a larger push for non-gaming content by Oculus — which is also launching an app called Oculus Venues for live concerts, comedy nights, and sporting events.

AR camera effects are coming to Instagram in a closed beta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced at Facebook’s F8 conference today. Instagram will debut new filters through partnerships with Kylie Jenner, BuzzFeed, Ariana Grande, the NBA, Vogue, and others so you can try on Kylie Cosmetics lipsticks through a face filter or add floating effects to your background through a world lens.

Instagram has had Snapchat-like AR filters since last year, but it’s the first time partners are teaming up with Instagram to craft unique filters. Now, brands and public figures can build their own AR filters that will be available to use if you follow the influencer offering the effects. You can also try these custom filters if you are seeing them used on your friends’ Instagram stories.

Instagram is upgrading its offensive comment filter today, expanding it to automatically filter out bullying comments “containing attacks on a person’s appearance or character, as well as threats to a person’s well-being or health.”

The comment filter was originally introduced last year, with a focus on toxic and divisive comments, but the update today broadens what gets hidden to include the aforementioned types of comments. Users will also be able to disable the filter if they’d like to see the unedited comments on their feeds as well, but it will be enabled by default.

Facebook is giving Messenger a major design overhaul, promising a much simpler and cleaner user experience after years of jamming the chat app full of superfluous features like games.

“When you’re messaging, you really want a simple and fast experience,” Mark Zuckerberg said during the company’s F8 keynote. “We’re taking this moment to completely redesign Messenger to focus on these ideas.” Zuckerberg again reiterated the “clean” and “fast” nature of the revamped Messenger app before moving on in the keynote.

Instagram is rolling out several new features starting today, including new Stories integration with apps like Spotify and GoPro and a new camera effects platform that will allow celebrities and others to create face filters, text styles, and stickers.

If you’re using the Spotify or the GoPro app, you can tap the respective share buttons to send your content to Instagram Stories. You can then edit and add to your story or send it as a direct message to someone. The Spotify integration allows you to share a sticker of songs, playlists, or albums you’re currently listening to, with a link to play the music on Spotify. Instagram says the new Stories integration will allow third-party apps to post content directly to Facebook Stories as well.

The Oculus Go, a self-contained headset that offers mobile virtual reality without a smartphone, is going on sale today in 23 countries. The headset’s $199 base version has 32GB of storage, and a 64GB version will sell for $249. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it “the easiest way to get into VR,” and in our review, we’ve found that it’s certainly easy to use — but it still has major limitations. Oculus is selling the headset through its own website, as well as Amazon, NewEgg, and Best Buy; potential buyers can check it out at Best Buy demo stations.

The Oculus Go offers an experience similar to the Gear VR: it tracks head rotation, but not full motion, and it uses a remote control with limited pointing abilities. But it works as a standalone product, rather than being powered by a Samsung phone, which makes it accessible to people with other Android phones or iPhones. It supports the Gear VR game and app catalog, launching alongside games like a port of the mobile stealth title Republique, and there’s support for some cross-play experiences, including an adaptation of Settlers of Catan.

Facebook is adding a dating layer to its main mobile app, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today during the company’s F8 developer conference keynote in San Jose, California. The features are a long time coming for the 14-year-old social network, which has allowed users to broadcast whether they’re single or in a relationship since it first went live in February 2004.

The move will likely transform Facebook, with its more than 2.2 billion monthly active users, into a major competitor of Match Group, which owns and operates mobile dating app Tinder and popular dating platform OkCupid. Match Group’s stock plummeted by more than 17 percent as soon as the news was announced.

For the past few years, consumer virtual reality headsets have mostly come in two flavors: tethered headsets that connect to a computer or console, and mobile ones that are powered by a smartphone. That’s starting to change, and one of the major catalysts is the Oculus Go headset, which launches today in nearly two dozen countries. The Oculus Go is one of a few big “standalone” virtual reality headsets, a category that includes the upcoming Lenovo Mirage Solo and Oculus’ own Santa Cruz prototype. It’s not the flashiest or most high-tech headset on the market. But it’s the best that simple mobile VR has ever been, and it gives fledgling VR apps and games space to stand on their own, without having to compete for space on people’s phones.

Unlike the Oculus Santa Cruz, the Oculus Go doesn’t include full motion controllers or futuristic inside-out tracking technology, which lets users walk around rooms with no external cameras. It allows you to rotate your head, but not lean or walk around. You can move its small controller like a laser pointer, but not fully mimic a virtual hand. It’s got basically the same features as Samsung and Oculus’ Gear VR, but as a dedicated piece of hardware, not a combination of smartphone and plastic shell.

Facebook Messenger is adding automated translations to let buyers and sellers communicate when making purchases, the company said today. When users conduct a transaction through Facebook Marketplace and they receive a message in a language other than their default language, Messenger’s M bot will offer to translate it on their behalf. To start, translation features will be available in the United States for translating English to Spanish and vice versa.

Translations were one of several features Facebook announced for Messenger today at its F8 developer conference. Other additions include augmented reality effects for businesses, which let advertisers prompt users to open their camera, which they can pre-populate with filters and AR effects.

Instagram is rolling out a host of new features today, including video chat and a redesigned Explore page.

The Explore page will now feature buttons on the top of the page in a carousel, giving users the option to swipe through subjects like animals, photography, and architecture to see more posts about that particular topic.

Facebook is now reopening its app review process for developers, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today at the company’s annual developers conference. New third-party apps will now be allowed to move forward through the review process.

“Now I know that it hasn’t been easy being a developer in these last couple of months, and that’s probably an understatement. But what I can assure you is that we’re hard at work making sure that people don’t misuse this platform so that you can all keep building things that people love,” said Zuckerberg, “And today, I’m happy to share that we are reopening app reviews so you can all keep moving forward.”

Facebook’s f8.com went down ahead of the developer conference keynote kickoff. It was offline for more than 30 minutes, and the keynote began without the stream.

For those who are interested in catching the live stream, you can also find the stream directly on Facebook’s page, with the keynote featuring CEO Mark Zuckerberg. We’re embedding it below:

Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference kicks off this morning, just roughly a month and a half since the Cambridge Analytica scandal completely redefined the conversation around data privacy and social networking platforms.

That means F8’s keynote address, which in years past has focused on the frontiers of new technology like virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence, will also have to reckon with the hard conversations on responsibility and accountability that have made up Facebook’s biggest existential crisis to date. The whole controversy may have even postponed the company’s plans to reveal its rumored smart speaker, known internally as Portal, at F8 amid fears of Facebook’s overreach and concerns over having the company listening inside consumers’ homes.

Oculus VR is developing an immersive theater experience to debut next year that will feature real-world actors who perform in virtual reality using motion capture. The experience is being billed as indie game Journey meets interactive theater show Sleep No More, according to Yelena Rachitsky, an executive producer of experiences at Oculus who detailed the project in an interview with CNET.

The central idea is to use trained actors who perform live while viewers interact with them from the comfort of their homes, with everyone using Oculus Rift headsets to enter into and experience the shared world. Oculus hopes that blending the benefits of immersive theater with the unique experimental benefits only VR can provide might be a winning combination that could encourage more consumers, developers, and artists to invest in VR as a form of entertainment and artistic expression. “We’re really interested in, how do you create that experience of live actors without needing to be in a site-specific location,” Rachitsky told CNET. “It’s a way to scale.”

Type with your brain. “Hear” with your skin. And in the event of an emergency, here’s a helicopter to the rescue with some free internet access. The marquee announcements of last year’s F8 developer conference found Facebook at the peak of its ambition, as Mark Zuckerberg and other top executives sketched out a vision in which Facebook delivered bleeding-edge technology powered by state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and a thriving developer ecosystem.

Then the person leading the brain-typing and skin-hearing efforts quit the company after 18 months, the Cambridge Analytica scandal caused public trust in Facebook to plunge, and the company scrambled to shut down wide swaths of its developer platform. Plans to unveil a home speaker at F8 were reportedly canceled at the last minute over fears that it would further roil a public already skeptical of Facebook’s data collection practices.

As public outrage over Facebook’s data collection policies continues to swirl, the company has decided to delay the announcement of its upcoming smart speakers, according to a Bloomberg report. The devices were said to have been set for an unveiling at Facebook’s F8 developer conference in May, but as Bloomberg puts it, “now may be the wrong time” to ask people to trust the company with even more personal information by placing always-listening microphones in their homes.

Bloomberg reported details of the products last August. They’re said to include a video-focused device codenamed Aloha (and possibly called Portal) with a laptop-sized touchscreen, along with a standalone speaker that would sell for a lower price. Both reportedly use a voice assistant developed by Facebook, akin to Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. The products themselves were always intended for a release in the fall, according to the report, but Facebook now wants to conduct a “deeper review” of how they collect data before revealing them to the public.