Every year Facebook has an annual developer conference, where Mark Zuckerberg discusses the future plans of the company in San Francisco. This year Zuckerberg announced that the company’s first steps into Virtual Reality will be happening very soon by integrated spherical video, or video that users can click and scroll to control on mobile devices, or VR gadgets.
Facebook debuted a video demo on stage where they showed a clip of footage shot using a 3D Camera Rig. The footage was stitched together to create spherical video that will be experienced in 3D.
Photo Credit: Emanuel Maiberg
The team at Facebook has setup an area for Demos, which they titled, the “Teleportation Station”. Zuckerberg admitted on stage it was a bit of a comical exaggeration. The difference with these demos however was that instead of displaying a VR demo, with a video-game like 3D environment, this actually show displaying a live video feed from Facebook’s Menlo Park office. There’s a 24-Camera view which allows for the immersive 360 degree video experience.
Facebook says there are more than 1.3 billion people that view more than 3 billion videos every day. Facebook is asking 3rd party publishers to begin creating their own spherical videos for sharing on the social media platform. The move is a little taste of how the brand is planning to move forward into a world of VR in the years to come. Users will be able to access Spherical Videos through Samsung’s Mobile Products, Oculus Rift as well as Facebook.
What we think is really cool about this technology is that Spherical Video doesn’t necessarily require a headset. This technology can be used not only by your virtual reality headsets, but also with your stand browsers and standard smartphones. Sharing real live experiences with your friends and family in 360 degrees will become the new standard on Social Media. We are really excited to see how we can begin to use these technologies for events, the possible marketing applications for this technology will be endless.
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