The collegian assisting Facebook

Content and photo: Australian Financial Review

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Radford Collegian, Trent Clews-de Castella (Class of 2007), and his Melbourne design studio, Phoria, are a big part of Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of turning Facebook into a metaverse company.

Phoria – which designs augmented- and virtual-reality software used to do anything from sell real estate to help identify endangered frogs or tell the stories of Paralympians, however, they never expected to get the call from Facebook.

“They just came to us. They didn’t say ‘Here’s a bid, submit your ideas.’ They were like, ‘You’re the best in the world at this, let’s do something new together.’

“It was a really uncanny moment. I was like, ‘Do we already have the job?’ and they were like, ‘Yeah’,” Trent says.

Meta (formerly Facebook) recently previewed that new something: Phoria’s Spatial Fusion website, made in conjunction with UK real-time graphics design team Lusion, which Meta demonstrated as part of the launch of its Quest Pro mixed-reality headset.

For users wearing the Quest Pro headset ($2450) over their eyes, the site takes a live feed of their immediate surroundings from cameras mounted on the headset, and then combines that feed with sci-fi content streaming over the internet, to create a single, three-dimensional image that’s displayed on the headset’s 3D screen.

Clews-de Castella says this isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, push by a global company into mixed-reality, and that Phoria is poised for the transition.

“Apple is working hard behind the scenes, too, and when they come to the party, we’ll see a huge proliferation of immersive content,” says Mr Clews-de Castella.

“We would have got there eventually, but with Facebook having joined in, I think we’ll get there faster,” he says.