During his presentation at the Samsung event being held on the sidelines of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision regarding virtual reality technologies. The Social VR team will work closely with Oculus and other teams at Facebook to build the foundation for future social VR experiences on all platforms.
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Facebook, of course, owns Oculus, which next month will be releasing its high-end VR system, the Rift, which tethers to video game-quality PCs.
Zuckerberg also spoke about the potential of user-created virtual reality content, which Facebook has a platform for hosting and Samsung has a device for capturing in the new Gear 360 camera.
At Samsung’s Unpacked event – where the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge were revealed – Zuckerberg explained about his fascination with VR and how he has been dreaming of using the technology since the age of 11.
The technology will be available to owners of Samsung’s Gear VR viewer headsets in the next few weeks. By doing this, the company quadrupled the resolution quality of 360 streaming video in VR by reducing the amount of required network bandwidth by 4x – so videos look clearer and play faster. The company announced today that the new group will research “social VR”, including “how people can connect and share using today’s VR technology” and the long-term possibilities if VR develops as a computing platform. “When my baby daughter takes her first steps, I hope that we can take a 360 video”. “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 just right there in person”.
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. More than 20,000 360 videos have been uploaded, with hundreds more added daily. The Gear VR costs $99 now and is priced at Rs 8200 in India.
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. “That’s because it combines the best hardware, from Samsung, with the best software – from Facebook, with Oculus”.
To counter complaints that he had sold out, Luckey told me that Oculus would stay an independent company within Facebook.
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One recent innovation involves streaming just the part of the video being viewed rather than the entire 360-degree view.
