Booth, who actively shows great interest in VR on his account, also tweeted this morning “VR is fantastic, but even more so when your friends are in there with you” along with a link to an article about Zuckerberg discussing VR. At the moment Zuckerberg took the stage, Facebook simultaneously announced the creation of a dedicated “Social VR” team.
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Virtual reality is getting a lot of focus at Mobile World Congress. HTC, in partnership with Valve, announced that it will begin taking preorders on the consumer version ofHTC Vive on February 29; the price is $799 for now.
Echoing her comments, Facebook’s chief financial officer David Wehner said there is much that can be “accomplished with virtual reality” but it is still “very early days”.
The new team will work with both Oculus and other teams at Facebook to explore the future of social interaction in VR.
Others said that some negative workplace experiences with virtual meetings in Second Life and other platforms several years ago had given some business managers pause in whether they will embrace VR video for meetings. That’s helped engineers realize a 4x increase in the quality of video while reducing bandwidth consumption by three-quarters, he said.
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Samsung’s $100 Gear VR viewing headset is also powered by Oculus’s technology, which Facebook acquired in 2014 when it paid $2.3 billion to buy Oculus VR. It is bringing its dynamic streaming technology-which it calls a more efficient way of delivering 360 video-to Samsung’s VR headset. “I think about my baby daughter (Maxima) and the way I want to remember when she takes her first steps”, Zuckerberg said at the Barcelona VR demo. It can only benefit from more VR content being created and shared on its worldwide social media platform. “But pretty soon we’re going to live in a world where everyone has the power to share and experience whole scenes as if you’re right there in person”, Zuckerberg said. We use cookies to improve your browsing experience. The Samsung Rewards app will need to be downloaded and the Gear VR activated through the app between 11th and 20th March. Although a promotional video is the farthest thing from a performance benchmark that we can imagine, the clip indicates that the Galaxy S7 should behave normally under water. “That’s because it combines the best hardware, from Samsung, with the best software – from Facebook, with Oculus”.
