Facebook creates new VR team to explore the future of social interaction in VR

Widely popular social networking site, Facebook has created a social VR team focused entirely on exploring the future of social interaction in VR. The step was taken, in its bid to further explore immersive new virtual reality (VR) experiences that will help people connect and share.

The assigned team will explore how people can connect and share using today’s VR technology, as well as long-term possibilities as VR evolves into an increasingly important computing platform. The team members will work closely with US-based virtual reality technology company Oculus and other teams at Facebook to build the foundation for tomorrow’s social VR experiences on all platforms.

Facebook in a blog post said “We have already helped people connect in a wide variety of ways on mobile devices ranging from Facebook and Instagram to Messenger and WhatsApp and now we want to apply that same approach to the new medium of VR. In the future, VR will enable even more types of connection – like the ability for friends who live in different parts of the world to spend time together and feel like they’re really there with each other.”

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook thinks that “VR is the next platform.”
“Pretty soon we’re going to live in a world where everyone has the power to share and experience whole scenes as if you’re right there’,” said Zuckerberg in an event in Barcelona.

Although the work in VR is still in an early stage and there are a lot of hardware and software challenges that Facebook still needs to solve.
Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg while addressing a gathering at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, said that turning virtual reality into a business is part of the firm’s 10-year plan rather than an immediate action item.