{"id":22575,"date":"2016-02-22T08:47:47","date_gmt":"2016-02-22T16:47:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/02\/facebook-to-open-new-division-to-build-the-future-of-social-vr"},"modified":"2017-06-04T20:09:24","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T03:09:24","slug":"facebook-to-open-new-division-to-build-the-future-of-social-vr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/02\/facebook-to-open-new-division-to-build-the-future-of-social-vr","title":{"rendered":"Facebook to Open New Division to Build the Future of Social VR"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/facebook-to-open-new-division-to-build-the-future-of-social-vr.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Ever since Facebook purchased Oculus in 2014, Mark Zuckerberg has been speaking to promise of virtual reality as the next communications platform. Yesterday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona he punctuated those thoughts with a big announcement \u2013 the creation of an internal team dedicated to Social VR.<\/p>\n<p>Led by Daniel James and Mike Booth, the team will work closely with Oculus as well as other divisions within Facebook to explore and build the future of social interaction in VR, the company says.<\/p>\n<p>Facebook describes their work in VR as \u201cstill early\u201d but Oculus has been working to lay the groundwork themselves with experiences like Toybox and an upcoming social SDK that will allow developers to easily implement key multiplayer and networking features into their experiences. In fact, Oculus\u2019 dedication to Social VR is \u201cthe reason why [they\u2019re] part of Facebook,\u201d Oculus founder Palmer Luckey told us earlier this year.<\/p>\n<p>Still the idea of a metaverse \u2013 a giant interconnected world like the ones in Snow Crash or Ready Player One \u2013 is something far off.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s not happening in the immediate future,\u201d Luckey said, \u201cwe\u2019d much rather work and get this right over a longer period of time than rush into it at the start and be constrained by the design decisions that we make.\u201d He says that it will take VR reaching a \u201ccritical mass\u201d for there to be enough data to know how best to design how the future of social interaction will look.<\/p>\n<p>While it may take a while for VR to reach that critical mass Samsung\u2019s announcement that they plan to bundle a GearVR with every Galaxy S7 or S7 Edge preorder could potentially accelerate the process. Last year Samsung reportedly received over 20 million preorders for the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge and while Samsung says the GearVR giveaway is \u201cwhile supplies last\u201d if they give away even a tenth of that it would significantly accelerate the growth of VR\u2019s user base, which in turn could accelerate the growth and need for social VR.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/uploadvr.com\/facebook-social-vr-division\/\">http:\/\/uploadvr.com\/facebook-social-vr-division\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ever since Facebook purchased Oculus in 2014, Mark Zuckerberg has been speaking to promise of virtual reality as the next communications platform. Yesterday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona he punctuated those thoughts with a big announcement \u2013 the creation of an internal team dedicated to Social VR. Led by Daniel James and Mike [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1512,1879],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mobile-phones","category-virtual-reality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22575"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68298,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22575\/revisions\/68298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}