Facebook has created a “social VR” team to explore virtual-reality technology’s potential beyond games, as it prepares for the consumer launch of its Oculus Rift VR headset.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed the plans in a surprise appearance at Samsung’s Mobile World Congress press conference, while talking up the popularity of 360-degree videos on Facebook, and on Samsung’s Gear VR headset – which uses technology from Oculus.
“People have already watched more than a million hours of video in Gear VR,” explained a blog post from Facebook following the event. “Already, millions of people watch 360 videos on Facebook every day. More than 20,000 have been uploaded, with hundreds more added daily.”
Facebook is upping the quality of 360-degree videos on its service, while tasking its new team with developing other kinds of non-games content for VR headsets.
“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,” claimed Facebook.
“They will work closely with Oculus and other teams at Facebook to build the foundation for tomorrow’s social VR experiences on all platforms.”
The company admits that its work in VR is “still early, and there are a lot of hardware and software challenges that we still need to solve”, but Zuckerberg is making the area one of Facebook’s priorities.
“What people care about is interacting with another person,” he told Wired in a profile published to coincide with the Samsung event, which included a demonstration of Oculus VR’s Toy Box application with two-player table tennis and other shared activities.
“The thing that’s really striking is that when you have another person there, the whole thing inherently becomes social,” said Zuckerberg. “It’s not a game. There’s no points. There’s no score. There’s no objective. But people find ways to interact. And they’re novel ways of interacting.”
Virtual reality is already one of the hot topics at this year’s Mobile World Congress conference. Besides Zuckerberg’s appearance, there were announcements from HTC and LG about their VR plans.
HTC has confirmed that its Vive headset will cost $799, with pre-orders opening at the end of February. Meanwhile, LG is launching its own headset, designed to work with its new G5 Android smartphone.
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