“If you’re a veteran game developer experienced in building multiplayer online 3D games, come help me build the future of Social VR!”
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It will be immersive, it will be bring people closer together, and it will happen sooner than you might think, he said on Sunday in Barcelona.
Zuckerberg first talked about how “VR is the next platform where anyone can create or experience what they want”, using capturing his daughter’s first steps as an example. Game developers and content producers have been providing more than enough VR content to keep early adopters happy, but as VR makes the shift to mainstream, the next wave of content is right on the horizon: homemade 360 degree video. At the time, some questioned Facebook’s purchase of Oculus, but now the reason for it is clear. It collaborated with Samsung on the popular Gear VR headset (which needs a Samsung Galaxy Phone to work) and ported 360 videos to the Gear VR.
Facebook, which bought virtual reality firm Oculus for two billion USA dollars in 2014, has since partnered with Samsung to create the Gear VR headset, which can be bought for less than £100 and works by slotting a Samsung Galaxy smartphone into it to use as a screen.
Virtual reality is a major initiative inside Facebook.
On Facebook alone, Zuckerberg explains that “already over a million people are watching 360 video on Facebook, more than 20,000 of them have been uploaded, and hundreds of new ones are added every day”.
In addition to Facebook’s new video streaming tech, Zuckerberg announced that the company had established a new internal working group that will research “social VR”.
Facebook has struggled with how much to steer its own VR ambitions.
Scientists have been experimenting with VR for years, but it’s only been in the last couple of years that computing and telecommunications has gotten to the stage where it’s possible to do in good quality on reasonable hardware and networks.
Despite the increase in resolution, dynamic streaming also reduces the bandwidth a video consumes by up to four times.
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Zuckerberg said Facebook and Oculus are committed to VR “for the long term” and new VR games are among the new experiences coming this year.
