Facebook’s new team will obviously collaborate with the Facebook-owned Oculus group, which developed the Oculus Rift headset and the software that underlies the Samsung Gear VR headset. Zuckerberg made a surprise appearance at Samsung’s Mobile World Congress press event in Barcelona, Spain, yesterday, giving his vision for the future of VR.
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On that note, over the weekend Facebook announced that it has formed a dedicated virtual reality team to create apps centered on social VR, explaining in a blog post: “This team will explore how people can connect and share using today’s VR technology, as well as long-term possibilities as VR evolves into an increasingly important computing platform”. According to Zuckerberg, millions of people will get their hands on a Gear VR this year.
“VR is the next platform, where anyone can create and experience anything they want”, he said.
“In the future, VR will enable even more types of connection – like the ability for friends who live in different parts of the world to spend time together and feel like they’re really there with each other”, it added.
To help with recording VR, Samsung announced the Gear 360, which works with the Gear VR headset.
Facebook has been bullish on VR since it paid $1.9 billion to acquire Oculus in March 2014.
The event was to launch Samsung’s new smartphones along with its new virtual reality offering, the Gear 360 camera. Rather than streaming an entire 360-degree video in high-resolution, 360 video delivers only the section that the viewer can see in high-res. “By doing this, we’ve quadrupled the resolution quality of 360 degree streaming video in VR by reducing the amount of required network bandwidth by 4x – so videos look clearer and play faster”, the blog noted. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks that “VR is the next platform”.
“And more than 20,000 360 videos have been uploaded”. It shows Zuckerberg strutting down an aisle, a sea of VR-headset-clad civilians flanking his left side – an eerie glimpse of a futuristic army of virtual-reality clones, helmed by a billionaire CEO.
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Facebook describes their work in VR as “still early” but Oculus has been working to lay the groundwork themselves with experiences like Toybox and an upcoming social SDK that will allow developers to easily implement key multiplayer and networking features into their experiences.
