Facebook outlines virtual reality vision with the creation of ‘social VR team’

During the Samsung Mobile World Congress press event, Mark Zuckerberg made a surprise appearance to talk about the social future of virtual reality. According to the Financial Times, both have backgrounds in the creation of 3D multiplayer experience.

The team will also will work closely with Facebook-owned VR headset company Oculus and other teams at Facebook to “build the foundation for tomorrow’s social VR experiences on all platforms”.

One technological advance with VR, he said, is that Oculus technology has provided “dynamic streaming” that allows a 4x reduction in network bandwidth of a VR stream.

Facebook has been bullish on VR since it paid $1.9 billion to acquire Oculus in March 2014.

His rift on VR as “the next platform” might have seemed a bit presumptuous to anybody expecting VR to appeal mainly to gamers.

Facebook is now working with Samsung on its Gear VR consumer headsets. Called the Gear 360, the little sphere is created to sit on a table or tripod or even hung from a drone and capture 360 degrees of video, the Techcrunch reported.

Samsung’s virtual reality device Samsung Gear VR, which is powered by Oculus was launched in November.

Users have also uploaded 20,000 videos in 360-degree format to Facebook after it introduced this feature in 2015.

“This is not going to be an overnight sensation, but the appeal of VR goes certainly beyond gaming, and tonight Zuck was smart in his focus on a more emotional and private part of VR – shooting your kid’s first steps”, said Carolina Milanesi, chief of research at Kantar WorldPanel.

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”.

The partnership between Facebook and Samsung can only bring good to the two companies as of now. And that’s why Facebook is investing so much early on in virtual reality.

Gear 360 is compatible with select Samsung smartphones including the newly released Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge, Galaxy S6 edge+, Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S6 edge and Galaxy S6. Gear 360 will automatically give users the option to view and save footage on their smartphone, or share it directly to their favorite social channels, while performing a quick and easy stitch of the content to fuse together the two fields of view. Shoot me an email at Adam.