Facebook has created a new “social VR” team, led by two video gaming executives, ahead of the launch of its Oculus Rift headset next month.
The unit, unveiled on Sunday, is the first time that Facebook has begun to consider how to bring its core social networking service into virtual reality, two years after acquiring Oculus for $2bn.
The team is led by two executives from the video games industry, Daniel James and Mike Booth, who both have backgrounds in creating 3D multiplayer experiences. That implies that Facebook’s vision for its VR community could look something like Second Life, the online world that saw a brief surge of popularity 10 years ago, or the science fiction concept of the Metaverse, a vast online community where digital avatars mingled on a virtual-reality high street, created by author Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash.
At the same time as announcing the social VR team, Facebook said that users had uploaded 20,000 videos in VR-friendly 360-degree format, after it added the feature to its website and apps late last year. Millions of people watch these 360 or “spherical” videos, which let the user pan around a scene to look in any direction they choose, every day on Facebook, it said.
News.Az