Ever since Facebook bought Oculus back in 2014, we’ve been expecting with some fascination the company’s next move. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Mark Zuckerberg talked about this next move – Social VR, and how Facebook will be investing in it to make it the next big medium.
Also Read: Facebook Rolls Out 360 Video To Ads And iOS
Mark Zuckerberg’s presentation was part of Samsung’s Unpacked event, and it seems that the Korean company will be playing a major role in this. The main takeaway relates to the effort that Facebook is putting into bringing “Social VR” to the platform.
In a blog post entitled “New Steps Towards The Future of Virtual Reality” a lot more is explained.
Facebook then goes on to say that the response to VR has been unprecedented – with over 200 games and apps available for the system. Also, people have watched more than one million hours of VR video on Gear VR.
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Dynamic Streaming Coming To Mobile VR
360 video on Facebook was just the beginning. The company is now developing tech that will make VR video a lot better – The sky is the limit with this new technology and it seems we haven’t really even started scratching the surface. As a nascent medium, it is certainly picking up fast! Facebook says that “more than 20,000 [360 videos] have been uploaded, with hundreds more added daily.”
Facebook is now taking a big step towards improving VR with dynamic streaming technology – delivering only the pixels that a user is actually looking at and not the entire 360 video in HD. To make this work
The process essentially quadruples resolution of the 360 streaming video and reduces the amount of required network bandwidth by four times. Dynamic streaming will be coming to Gear VR “in the next few weeks”.
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Facebook Invests In Social VR
Facebook is investing in providing much more “immersive new VR experiences that will help people connect and share”. It’s obvious that the company sees VR as a new medium, just like mobile was. Just as the platform “helped people connect in a wide variety of ways on mobile devices” it is now excited about doing the same on VR.
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