Social media platform Twitter is now also getting into the virtual reality and augmented reality industries, as it builds a team dedicated to the two relatively new but lucrative technologies.
Leading the charge of Twitter will be Alessandro Sabatelli, a former designer at Apple who has been tapped to become the company's Director of VR and AR.
Twitter has confirmed the hiring, adding that the augmented reality team will be under Twitter Cortex, the company's division focused on machine learning.
Sabatelli, who used to work at Apple as a user interface designer, is credited with his contributions to the iTunes visualizer. He spent more than five years at the company, and then went on to become the CEO of VR startup IXOMOXI, which is focused on music experiences.
One of the projects of IXOMOXI is Lucy, an app for the Samsung Gear VR headset that uses a smartphone's passthrough camera to view trippy filters similar to the ones seen on Snapchat. According to the startup, the app targets millennials who go to music festivals.
Twitter has had a focus on being able to capture ongoing events in its platform, as seen in its Moments initiative. Through the feature, users can search for all the related tweets concerning a certain event or topics, including connected images, videos, GIFs and Vines. Users can interact with the tweets found in Moments, and can also choose to share the entire Moment by tweeting it to their followers.
However, Twitter has fallen behind in terms of boosting user-generated content from events. The hiring of Sabatelli could see if Twitter can succeed other companies that have made headway in the coverage of live events, such as Snapchat, or Twitter could be looking at developing new ventures in virtual reality and augmented reality for its platform.
The latter could be a good guess, as Twitter also recently acquired Magic Pony for $150 million. The startup is focused on machine learning and visual processing technology, and its acquisition by Twitter will expand the machine learning capabilities of the company's social media platform.
The expertise of Sabatelli on visual interfaces, combined with the data compression patents held by Magic Pony, which can transform low-quality videos into ones with better quality through the recognition of patterns and textures, could lead to more immersive and sharper content on Twitter. One such application would be a virtual Twitter client or the ability to stream 3D Periscope videos, without draining the data allocation of users on their monthly mobile subscriptions.
