Facebook announced the creation of a team dedicated to virtual reality – Le Figaro

A month before the official release of the Oculus Rift, Facebook says its ambitions in virtual reality. At the Mobile World Congress, the largest international exhibition of mobile Barcelona, ​​Zuckerberg announced the creation of a team dedicated to “social virtual reality” in his business. It will aim to accelerate the integration of virtual reality in the social network and consumption of content, including by improving the quality of video streaming. The announcement comes two years after the acquisition of Oculus, which develops virtual reality headset Oculus Rift, for two billion dollars.

“Virtual reality is the next platform on which everyone can experience and share all he wants,” said Mark Zuckerberg Sunday evening, invited to the conference of the Korean manufacturer Samsung. “One day we simply can put a helmet on our head and completely change the way we live, how we work and how we communicate.”

The CEO of Facebook said that “hundreds of our best engineers “is now working on virtual reality. This new team will work closely with engineers and designers Oculus. It is conducted by Daniel James, known for developing the multiplayer game “Puzzle Pirates” and Mike Booth, former two major players in the PC game, Blizzard and Valve, in which he had participated in the development of “Left 4 Dead” .

Zuckerberg speaking on the sidelines of the presentation of Gear 360, the new Samsung camera that can shoot videos at 360 degrees. The Korean manufacturer has already launched in 2015 the Gear VR, a virtual reality headset that works with a smartphone. He partnered with Facebook in this context, to upload and view videos at 360 degrees on the social network. Since then, 20,000 videos of this “spherical” format have been posted online. According to Mark Zuckerberg, over a million Facebook users watch videos filmed at 360 degrees each day

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other projects led by Oculus, already allow to discover social virtual reality. This is particularly the case of Social Aplha, which allows multiple people to come together in a virtual room, through the Gear VR (virtual reality Samsung headset) to discuss and watch videos on one screen, Virtual too. It is also possible to play several small games with Toybox, which brings two people in a room and offers them based on collaboration activities.