Yahoos Flickr reveals preview of virtual reality experience

With the advent of virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMD’s) like the Oculus Rift, photo sharing site Flickr has been experimenting with integrating VR into its service.

Flickr’s plan for immersive photos is similar to the mobile app that Facebook is reportedly planning, where viewers will rotate their phones to look around panoramic 360-degree photos. In this early build users looked down at a pair of pink and blue balls for a few moments to skip to the next image.

Some day you could be flipping through your vacation photos while wearing a VR headset.

Flickr is planning to improve its user experience by adding support for virtual reality devices and is giving early demos of the technology to select publications, including Engadget.

The Flickr VR demo now only works with the Oculus but fans hopes to have it integrated with the other VR headsets as well.

As for whether there are a ton of 360-degree photos out there, he tells me that it’s actually a fairly burgeoning community.

Such photo content is becoming increasingly common as a new generation of 360 cameras such as the Ricoh Theta, as well software like Google’s intuitive photosphere stitching make it easy for consumers to create 360 visuals.

The grand plan of Flickr is to house a dedicated section that will just contain 360-degree panoramic images for VR headset owners and they can directly jump into that section with just a single click.

The feature already includes eye control as a means of advancing through a slideshow of 360-degree VR photos, however, Fan doesn’t want to stop there. He hopes to roll out the initial stages of Flickr VR to the general public by early next year.