Ever since Zuckerberg stated that VR is the future (he even bought Oculus Rift you know?), people have been speculating about whether the world’s largest social network will boast similar functionality of sorts?
Perhaps VR remains a far cry for social media purposes (at least for now), but that hasn’t stopped Mark from taking us one step closer to that dream. Facebook features support for 360 videos (as seen here) – videos that can be rotated in any plane or dimension you want, and still see all the action. Think how cool it will look if we were to explore a Star Wars setting in 360 degrees of freedom.
Hey they actually got some Star Wars in my Facebook Feed – 360 Video Style!
Facebook Rolls out 360 Videos and Support Guide
In order to make more people get into making 360-degree motion videos for the social media platform, Facebook has already got a guide in place for 360 content creation. This will be enough to provide best practices, FAQs and uploading guidelines for aspiring 360’ers.
What does this mean for Consumers, Advertisers and Facebook
In September of this year, Facebook already got 360 viewing support for web and Android. The format is now open for advertisers, allowing many brands to create ‘immersive stories’ for their consumers. Basically, this is something that Facebook wanted to do to make its users experience more dynamic content. We all know how long it took animated gifs to come to Facebook, but its good to know that the social giant isn’t skimping on next-generation multimedia formats. It’s betting that the 360 videos make ads feel more natural and ready for mass consumption since the traditional internet user have sophisticated tastes and usually avoids corporate content that’s too self-promotional.
Sounds like a win-win for all stakeholders involved. Let’s see if these 360-degree videos make Facebook take the lead from competitors like Snapchat with their 6 billion video views daily.
