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Facebook now lets you livestream through its virtual reality app Spaces. People who use Spaces can now position a virtual camera and stream a feed of themselves to others live on Facebook.
The video interacts just like any other livestream video on Facebook would. People can react and comment in real time.
Mark Zuckerberg announced the feature during his own Spaces livestream today. Watch the videos below. The stream cut out in the middle, so there were 2 videos posted today.
Of course, streaming in virtual reality isn’t just like streaming on Facebook Live. Since the Spaces app allows users to meet up with friends virtually, they can be in the same livestream at the same time. Streamers can also drag comments from the chat around the video and use them as props for their stream.
In the videos above, Zuckerberg is live from The Moon in virtual reality via his avatar, testing the boundaries of the VR streaming capabilities. He and his co-streamer take comments from the video and drag them around as props.
Zuckerberg also demonstrated being in VR in the 3D videos that are sometimes offered on Facebook through outlets like The New York Times. He and his co-streamer traveled to Puerto Rico virtually to see the damage from the recent hurricanes. He said that it feels like they were really in Puerto Rico, which is a hard place to get to right now.
Through transport orbs, streamers are able to change their stream in a moment. Zuckerberg’s stream went from Puerto Rico to OC3 to the moon, back to California.
Since Spaces is only available for Facebook’s Oculus Rift right now, this isn’t a feature that a large amount of people will be able to use. It won’t work on Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Headsets, and it won’t work on the lower-end Oculus, the Gear VR.
In the long term, Facebook hopes for this to be available to more augmented reality platforms. This is the first time Facebook has launched a feature like this. Facebook is going to focus on getting people to see VR as an integral part of its service when right now it just seems like an experiment to most.
