Samsung may not have the most advanced virtual reality hardware on the market, but of all the current products they were the first to offer a consumer solution with the Gear VR. Although there is now plenty of available content on their platform, one of the first apps that was positioned was Milk VR, Samsung’s home grown VR app that was designed to be used with headset. Milk VR has seen some changes recently as it was launched on the Play Store back in April, bringing with it the ability to be used outside of the Gear VR headset as long as it was on a current Samsung Galaxy device. Today, users can essentially wave goodbye to Milk VR.
The app is not disappearing entirely, rather it is just being reborn under a new name as Samsung will now call the app Samsung VR, a more fitting label that will likely be more recognizable to consumers and users who have yet to experience anything from Samsung’s VR efforts. While the name change was likely something that Samsung envisioned as a necessity, it’s Samsung VR’s new functionality that will be more of an attention grabber, especially for everyday users.
Today at VidCon Samsung announced that user-created content will now be allowed in the Samsung VR app, meaning users can take their 360-degree VR content and upload it to the app alongside other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others, where prior to these changes and in its previous form, Samsung VR only allowed uploaded content from brands and content partners. From a business standpoint, this makes sense for Samsung as it could convince users to stay more engaged with Samsung’s VR ecosystem, which it wants to turn into an end-to-end offering for users. It also ends up bringing more content into the application which could also help to increase engagement and it helps out the user who may be looking to reach as many people as possible with their video content. Whether or not Samsung mentioned when the user-created content would be coming to the Samsung VR app, the name change has already taken root and the what’s new section details that users can upload content as of now. The app also introduces an auto play feature for the next video in the channel currently being viewed.