Tuesday 23 February 2016

NDM News Story 46: Facebook sets up 'social VR' team to explore virtual reality beyond games


Facebook has released the news that a social VR team would be hired to explore the potential of virtual reality technology beyond games. Facebook will work closely with Oculus and other to explore this possibility. The company admits that its work in VR is “still early, and there are a lot of hardware and software challenges that we still need to solve”, but Zuckerberg is prioritising this as one of the most important areas in need of research.

  • Already, millions of people watch 360 videos on Facebook every day. 
  • More than 20,000 have been uploaded, with hundreds more added daily.
  • HTC has confirmed that its Vive headset will cost $799

This has great potential to become a very popular form of communication and social interaction as it will make on line relationships a lot more realistic. However this may eventually lead to a greater moral panic, as people will decreasingly become less social outside their virtual reality lifestyle. This is already proving to become a great issue with young people in particular being addicted to the internet and social networking sites, but by including virtual reality into the picture will make people more likely to stay home in order to communicate with someone.

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