Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a surprise appearance onstage during Samsung's keynote at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Sunday.
During his remarks, Facebook's chief executive spoke about the company's vision for virtual reality and praised Samsung for its Gear VR headset, calling it the best mobile virtual reality headset available.
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"One day you’re going to be able to put on a headset and that’s going to change the way you live, work and communicate,” Zuckerberg said.
He cited Samsung's OLED technology as one of the defining factors that makes Samsung's headset better than its competitors. Facebook and Samsung have partnered on their virtual reality efforts for some time. Facebook-owned Oculus provides software for the Gear VR.
Zuckerberg: Samsung is the only company that can deliver the best mobile VR experience because of its oled screens pic.twitter.com/D9QpRvT5Hd— Raymond Wong (@raywongy) February 21, 2016
He also detailed new updates to Facebook's 360-degree videos, which can be viewed in virtual reality headsets like Samsung's. A new feature called dynamic streaming, expected to roll out in the coming weeks, promises to quadruple these videos' resolution while decreasing the bandwidth necessary to stream them by a factor of four, according to the company.
But 360-degree video is just one area of virtual reality the company is exploring. The social network has also created a "Social VR" team that will work to create social applications for virtual reality. Zuckerberg says the team is working "closely" with the Oculus teams and others at Facebook, according to the company.
New Facebook team assembled to build social VR apps says zuckerberg pic.twitter.com/BDJSihjn6n— Raymond Wong (@raywongy) February 21, 2016
While Facebook says these efforts are still early, Zuckerberg's comments offered an interesting look into how the company sees the future of virtual reality as one that's inherently social.
BONUS - First look: Samsung Gear 360 consumer VR camera
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