Facebook has introduced a new app into its growing catalog. Facebook 360 is the company’s first dedicated VR app that provides a single destination for its users to experience immersive 360-degree photos and videos they may have missed throughout their day. It’s available for download from the Oculus Store and designed for the Samsung Gear VR. At launch, it will feature four feeds from which you can view 360-degree content. The Explore feed allows you to see content from media companies, organizations, and individual creators, the Following feed is full of content from your friends and Pages you follow, while the Saved feed features items you have saved from your News Feed. Finally, the Timeline feed shows your own photos and videos. The Facebook 360 app also allows you to react to the content you see and share it on Facebook, the company revealed.
Facebook reportedly created the Facebook 360 app in order to take advantage of over 25 million of 360-degree photos and more than a million of 360-degree videos that it claims have been posted on its social media service. It also makes sense that its first official VR app would be built for the Samsung Gear VR as the headset was built in collaboration with Oculus, a company that is owned by Facebook. The Menlo Park-based social media giant is also looking to expand its portfolio of VR products and services in the future. The company is reportedly in talks to bring one Major League Baseball game a week to its service and has recently secured a deal with Univision to broadcast some Mexican Soccer League games.
The launch of Facebook 360 marks yet another move in Facebook’s efforts to insert itself into the online video segment. In April, the company released Facebook Live to all of its users, and soon after, the tech giant started showing interest in scripted and unscripted programming. In fact, it was only last week that Facebook released video apps for both Samsung and Apple TVs. The company stated that more social features will be added to its offerings in the future, adding how it also wants to bring its VR app to as many headsets as possible.
