Facebook announced it will begin featuring 360-degree panoramic VR-style videos in its newsfeed for Android and web users. While Facebook led development for 360-degree capability, the team collaborated with its Oculus division in order to create Facebook’s first consumer-facing VR product, the company’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, told The Verge. Vice, Discovery and NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” are among the publishers now making such videos, the release said.
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Rumors that Facebook would be launching the new video feature popped up last week, though it was suggested then that the feature would be launched through a standalone app.
CNET noted that Star Wars started publishing its video entitled, “The Force Awakens“.
Through desktop access, users are able to rotate the view by moving the cursor around the screen, while mobile devices manoeuvre as the phone is turned.
“In the future, imagine watching 360 videos of a friends vacation to a small village in Franceor a festival in Brazil youll be able to look around and experience it as if you were there”, video engineering director Maher Saba wrote in the release. Facebook’s “360 Videos” is a radical new way to experience media, indicating how close we are to seeing virtual reality turn into an everyday affair.
Facebook’s foray into this space isn’t surprising and definitely not new.
Facebook news feeds are continually changing, and the latest upgrade sees 360-degree videos become the new talking point. YouTube does support 360-degree videos, but what’s unique about this for Facebook is that it plays well into the teleportation stations that were unveiled at the company’s F8 developer conference earlier this year. In less than two hours, the Star Wars 360 video gained over 6,000 likes and almost 7,000 shares.
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This article was written by Ken Yeung from VentureBeat and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
