Twitter's Periscope launches 360 video

It's not exactly virtual reality, but Twitter's Periscope has a new update that could make the service a lot more immersive.

On Wednesday, the company announced that 360 videos are now viewable in Periscope right in your Twitter stream.

Using an Insta360 camera that attaches to a smartphone, a user (see below) showed off how the 360 videos work, a post Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey promptly retweeted.

One particularly noteworthy detail is the fact that, for now, Twitter says the 360 broadcasts only work using the Insta360 camera (could this be Twitter's hardware beta product answer to Snapchat's Spectacles? Seems unlikely, but it's as good a Hail Mary pass to boost Twitter's fortunes as any).

Viewers will know when a live Periscope video is 360-enabled because a red "live 360" tag will appear on the video. However, when we looked at the video in its archived state, the tag did not appear and there was no discernible way of differentiating it from a normal Periscope video (other than the accompanying text message).

Although we were able to use it in the Periscope app on iOS, when we tried, the 360 video didn’t work in the Twitter app for iOS (we used iOS 10.2 on an iPhone 5S). The video played on the app (in a stretched out, panoramic view), but it wasn't scrollable as it is on Periscope.

Luckily, these little quirks will only affect a small portion of users as Periscope is only making the function available to "a small group of partners," with plans to roll it out widely in coming weeks.