Facebook is testing what it calls spherical videos, part of a new breed of online video you can “move through,” much like a 3D game.
Company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the technology on Wednesday morning, during his keynote at Facebook’s annual developer conference in San Francisco, saying these videos are shot with 24 cameras working in concert. “You can move around inside the video,” he said, “and view it from different angles.”
The company is demonstrating these videos for attendees at this week’s conference—showing off a 24-camera-view of the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California—and the plan, Zuckerberg says, is to eventually get this kind of “immersive, 360-degree video experience” into your Facebook News Feed.
According to Facebook, the more than 1.3 billion people its on social network view more than 3 billion videos on the service each day, and now it hopes to push these users towards this new breed of video. Beginning today, the company is asking third-party publishers to create their own spherical videos for sharing across Facebook.
The move is a small taste of how Facebook plans to push into the world of virtual reality in the months and years to come. The company describes its spherical videos as a “first step” towards even-more-immersive videos that we’ll view through virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift, which strap over your eyes and provide the illusion of stepping inside a digital environment. “You’re going to be able to put on your Oculus headset,” Zuckerberg said, “and view spherical videos there too.”
Last year, Facebook acquired the maker of the Oculus Rift, a headset built for VR games, and chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer is expected to discuss the progress of the Oculus during his keynote on Thursday. Much like Google, with its Google Glass eyewear, and Microsoft, with its Hololens headset, Facebook believes the future internet will rely heavily on virtual reality and “augmented reality”—where the digital enhances what we see around us here in the real world.
The difference with the “spherical video” demonstrated by Zuckerberg is that it doesn’t require a headset. It runs inside standard browsers and on standard phones. That will limit how “immersive” it will be. Plus, as Gartner analyst Brian Blau points out, the specialized hardware needed to produce these videos will limit how prevalent they are. “Is this for consumer creators or professionals?” Blau asks. And he adds that similar videos can already be uploaded to services like YouTube.
Video will likely play a role in our VR future, Blau tells WIRED, but in the beginning, the Oculus and the Samsung Gear VR will be used primarily for games. This morning, at today’s conference, Facebook began demonstrating the Oculus and the Samsung Gear VR for conference attendees and press, and the demo did not involve video. It showed off games and digitally-created virtual worlds—a gothic hall where a 3D dinosaur turns the corner and walks toward you, a city street where soldiers of the future battle some sort of angry robot.
The next step is video, where you digitally step into real places filmed by real cameras. That’s still a ways away, but it’s where Zuckerberg is looking. “We’re starting to see real video merge with virtual reality and augmented reality,” he said.
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