Ubergizmo co-founder Hubert Nguyen trying Gear VR for S6
While Samsung’s flagships have left little to the imagination due to all the leaks and rumors, what surprised many towards the end of Samsung’s presentation was the appearance of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. This was part of Samsung’s announcement in which they revealed that they would be working with Facebook with regards to virtual reality technology.
Considering that both companies are creating VR products, you would think that they would be competitors, but in the burgeoning industry we reckon that companies probably need to work together to help make VR more popular first, otherwise there would be nothing to compete over. That being said, part of their partnership includes making videos stream for the Gear VR more efficient on Facebook.
According to Facebook, this feature is called dynamic streaming. It involves processing and storing video in multiple resolutions, but it will only show the user the highest resolution for the spot they are looking at. This means that instead of having the entire video load in its highest resolution, only certain areas will be hi-res and will swap accordingly as you pan about.
A Facebook spokesperson was quoted as saying, “By doing this, we’ve quadrupled the resolution quality of 360 streaming video in VR, while reducing the amount of required bandwidth by four times, so videos look clearer and play faster.” Given that the Gear VR relies on smartphones to power it, being able to reduce the amount of bandwidth would no doubt be welcome by users with limited data allowance. Dynamic streaming is expected to begin rolling out in the next few weeks.
Filed in . Read more about Facebook, Gear VR, MWC, MWC 2016, Samsung and Virtual Reality (VR).