Facebook 360 App

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg already saw VR as the future in 2014 when he bought Oculus for 2 trillion dollars. He continues to invest a lot of resources in VR and expects Facebook to invest a further 3 trillion over the next 10 years so that VR can develop in the mass market.

At the beginning of March, Facebook started to connect the real world with the virtual world on Facebook by launching the Facebook 360 app. The app is set to become the hub for 360° videos and photos.

A huge amount of image and video material

With more than 25 million 360-degree photos and more than one million 360-degree videos published on Facebook to date, the social media giant already has an extremely large selection of material. Facebook has only been giving its users the opportunity to create 360-degree videos and images and publish them on the platform for around a year. So something is growing very quickly.

The app itself is divided into four sections:

Explore: This section contains the most popular content created by companies, organisations and private individuals.

Following: In this area, users can experience 360° content from friends or pages they follow.

Saved: Users can find all the content they have saved from news feeds on their mobile phone or desktop. This means that content saved on the move or in the office can later be experienced in the comfort of your own home with an immersive experience using your headset, for example.

Timeline: In this area, users can find their own 360-degree memories and relive them chronologically, for example.

You can also comment in the app and Facebook has also announced that further social features will be added.

For Gear VR users - and currently only for them - the Facebook 360 application is available via the Oculus Rift Shop. Download ready. It remains to be seen whether the content will also be made available for other headsets.

Until now, Facebook as a platform and VR were still rather separate from each other. With this step, Facebook is now sending its strength in terms of content over to VR.

Source: techcrunch.com / oculus.com