It seems that the implementation of 360° videos is one of the most popular trends in social media world today.
First came YouTube, that some time ago introduced the 360-degrees navigation function of the videos: essentially, during the visualization of the video, it will be possible to scroll around with the navigation arrows, which will make us explore it as if it was real and all around us. The mode reminds very closely Google Street View.
Just few days after YouTube, comes Facebook announcement: at F8, the annual developers conference, Zuckerberg presented the so-called “spherical videos”; soon 360-degrees videos will appear in the Home Page News Feed. Facebook’s CEO showed a demo of a video that he said used 24 cameras to achieve 360-degree coverage.
Exactly as in the YouTube case, it will be possible to navigate the video by moving the mouse around the window. The immersive video experience will also eventually support live broadcasts, he said.
The reason is simple: looking at the data, videos are the most enjoyed content on the platform, with numbers like more than 3 billion videos on the service each day; on the other hand, Augmented and Virtual Reality are the new advancing trends. To join these two together could be the next winning move by big F.
This new feature of course will be supported also on Oculus Rift and, how easily can be imagined, it will have a lot more progressions as the project goes ahead. In the while, if you want to be part of it, the company is asking third-party publishers to create their own spherical videos for sharing across Facebook.