Starting today, 360-degree videos will begin rolling out in News Feed.
The goal at Facebook is to connect people and things that matter, every single day. People enjoy more immersive content in their News Feeds day-by-day. This is one reason video has been so successful on Facebook, and they take it a step further with 360 video.
To create 360 videos, a special set of cameras is used to record all 360 degrees of a scene simultaneously. This means that when the video is playing on Facebook, it can choosen what angle people want to see it from. On the web this can be done by dragging around the video with your cursor, and on mobile devices by dragging with the fingers — or even just by turning the device. When holding up the phone, the 360 video will follow the turns, and by looking around, one can experience things from all over the world like never before.
In the future, imagine watching 360 videos of a friend’s vacation to a small village in France or a festival in Brazil —it will be possible to look around and experience it as if one was there. Along with updates from friends and family, users will also be able to discover amazing new content on Facebook from media companies, organizations, and individual creators.
There are a number of publishers sharing new 360 videos on Facebook today, including Star Wars, Discovery, GoPro, LeBron James & Uninterrupted, NBC’s Saturday Night Live, and VICE. These videos help show the range of possibilities with this new medium. For example, Disney and Lucasfilm are debuting an exclusive 360 experience from its upcoming movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens, bringing fans inside the beloved Star Wars universe.
There’s also a whole world of video creators and storytellers who are at the cutting edge of exploring this medium, and over the coming days they too will be able to upload their 360 videos to Facebook. Everyone is excited to see more innovative and compelling 360 videos being shared from these publishers.
If you’re using Facebook on the web or on Android, you should be able to see 360 videos in News Feed soon. For iOS it will be rolled out in the coming months.
