Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) Collaborates With Samsung Electronics Over Its VR Efforts

According to USA Today, Zuckerberg made a surprise appearance at Samsung’s Mobile World Congress press conference on Sunday and suggested that virtual reality’s use in the future will represent the “most social platform”.

“Pretty soon, we’re going to live in a world where everyone has the power to share and experience whole scenes, as if we’re there in person”, said Zuckerberg.

Speaking of Oculus Rift, which Facebook bought for $2 billion almost two years ago, CEO Brendan Iribe tells the Wall Street Journal’s Jack Nicas that its partnership with Facebook will be a big help against looming competition with headsets from Sony and its PlayStation and HTC, which is partnering with the gaming company Valve.

The process, he continued, quadruples the resolution of 360 streaming video in VR by reducing the amount of required network bandwidth by four times.

Facebook has also created a Social VR team to explore ‘the future of social interaction in VR.’ The team will work with Oculus and other Facebook teams ‘to build the foundation for tomorrow’s social VR experiences on all platforms’.

“At Facebook we think about giving people richer tools”, he said.

Zuckerberg also explained that while his parents logged him taking his first steps as a child by writing it in a baby book, and his siblings have used photos and video, he wants to capture his daughter’s using 360 video, which can then be viewed in virtual reality. And while we’re sure that’s not the image Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was going for, that’s sure how it came across. Zuckerberg likes to boast that his 3-year-old effort to connect the developing world to the Internet has reached millions of people in some of the world’s poorest nations.

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”.

Details were sparse at that time, but now during MWC 2016, it looks like Facebook has confirmed that the game will be arriving for the Oculus Rift platform.

Meanwhile, LG is launching its own 360 VR headset, which will compete directly with Samsung’s Gear VR – albeit by only working with LG’s new G5 smartphone.

More than 20,000 360 degree videos have been uploaded to Facebook so far.