Facebook made it pretty clear that it had big plans for virtual reality when it purchased Oculus VR for $2 billion last year. Chris Cox, Chief Product Offer at Facebook, has announced that the company has begun working on apps for VR, but wouldn’t disclose exactly what was being worked on.
Despite a lack of fine details, Cox said that he envisioned apps that would allow users to share their current environment with other people, something that he believes could become the norm for social media in the future. Oculus and Samsung have already shown off some unique narrative VR experiences at the Sundance Film Festival this year, but developing this into a real-time experience is a bigger technological challenge. Furthermore, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg already announced plans to integrate Oculus’ VR technology into the core social experience, allowing users to share “entire experiences and adventures” together online.
However, when asked about how long it might be before we can try out Facebook’s virtual reality experiences, Cox replied that it would be “a while” yet. Not to mention that virtual reality handsets aren’t common pieces of technology available in everyone household yet either.
Do you see any potential in virtual reality based social media?
