Facebook has been making serious inroads in the 360-degree content game for months, taking on YouTube with rich, immersive photos videos that put viewers right in the center of the action. To date, users have posted more than 25 million photos a million Facebook 360 videos to their feeds, showcasing a wide array of people, places, events. But there has never really been a great way to view them until now.
Facebook has finally released an app for viewing its 360-degree movies photos. wered by Oculus, the app works exclusively with the Samsung Gear VR through the Oculus site, lets you explore view Facebook 360 content in all its glory. No longer will you need to hold tilt your phone to see what’s happening. You need only launch the Facebook 360 app, pop your Galaxy phone into your Gear VR headset, you’ll be transported to faraway ls breathtaking lscapes.
At launch, the app will feature four sections: Explore, where you can discover new videos; Following, which lets you see any content posted by your Facebook friends pages you follow; Saved, for the 360 videos you’ve bookmarked in your News Feed; eline, which lets you relive your own 360 uploads.
The new app is a boon for Samsung as it battles for VR supremacy. st last week at Mobile rld Congress, Oculus announced that the Gear VR will now include a Daydream-like Gear VR Controller that “has been tuned to make it easy to navigate to your favorite videos perform a number of actions within a game, while the trigger lets you select, grab, take aim, fire.”
Additionally, the company promised that more than 70 controller-compatible titles are on the way for the Gear VR. ile Facebook didn’t specifically say whether the controller can be used with its 360 app, presumably it will be one of the first to showcase the new feature. Currently, the Gear VR is only compatible with the Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S6 S6 ge, Galaxy S7 S7 ge phones.
A dose of virtual reality: Facebook has long touted the Gear 360 even supplied a detailed GitHub manual for building your very own surround 360-degree camera for video creation, but the new Gear VR app is the company’s first foray into a true consumer solution for viewing 360 videos. ile it’s no surprise that Facebook is limiting its app to the Gear VR at launch (since it owns Oculus), Facebook did say that it plans to bring the 360 app to more platforms over time.
