Since acquiring Oculus Rift for $2 billion nearly two years ago, Facebook has been building toward supporting a virtual reality network.
Needless to say, videos are essential toward that goal ... a lot of them.
Having announced enhanced 360-degree video late last year, allowing users to manipulate images and get immersed, Facebook continues to build toward its VR goals.
Part of the process of readying a network for VR is having the robust hardware to support videos with such a heavy load.
In a New York Times blog post Wednesday, Facebook's vice president of engineering, Jay Parikh, said the company is leaning toward using open-sourcing hardware to speed up the process of the social media network supporting VR.
"From our experience, innovation happens faster in the open," Parikh told the Times. "Everything we're doing in video, live-streaming, 360, all the technology we're doing in our network, our data centers — that is all heading towards having these experiences in virtual reality."
Added Jason Taylor, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure and president of the Open Compute Project: "A lot of Facebook's story going forward will be making hardware and software work together with greater efficiency."
Parikh attributes to the growth of video to support VR as a "shift happening in the business," where Facebook started with text, before adding photos, even mentioning cell phones adopting smartphone cameras along the same lines.
The Times blog also revealed that Facebook held an all-day event for video-related companies at its headquarters last week. During the event, which reportedly had nearly 300 engineers present, including those from the likes of Yahoo, YouTube and Netflix, Facebook spoke about enhancing virtual reality video and the overall streaming and artificial intelligence of video as well.
At this rate, don't be surprised to learn of the next step Facebook takes within supporting VR soon.
