When people talk about VR, they tend to talk about the high-end stuff. The Oculus Rifts and HTC Vives of the world. Those might be the best the virtual-reality world has to offer, but they're not how most people will experience the new tech. Max Cohen, Oculus's head of mobile, told a group of journalists earlier this week that the company's "goal is to get to as many people as possible." Internally, they talk about wanting VR to be as ubiquitous as GPS. The fastest way there, of course, is through your phone. Mobile VR doesn't get the shine, but it's every bit as important as the more expensive stuff.
Today, Oculus is announcing a handful of new changes to Gear VR, its mobile headset for Samsung phones, along with one big new Facebook feature created with virtual reality in mind. Soon, anyone will be able to upload 360-degree photos to Facebook's News Feed using a panorama app, a photo sphere, or a supported camera like the Ricoh Theta S and the Gear 360. The best of those photos will be collected in a section of the Oculus 360 Photos app, which you'll be able to explore from your headset. 360 video is already supported in a similar way, but photos are dramatically easier to create, and should catch on more quickly.
The team at Oculus seems to be focused on one thing above all: giving you stuff to do in VR. A million people tried the Gear VR last month, the company says, and there are now more than 250 apps available for the platform. Most of the usage is video: 80 percent of people who try on the headset use it to watch video, says Oculus head of video Eugene Wei, and seven of the 10 most popular apps are for video. A new series of VR videos, called Nomads, is launching today on the platform, and another's coming next week from the team behind Deadliest Catch. Later, David Attenborough—yes, that David Attenborough, the beloved narrator of Life and Planet Earth—will be doing a series on ancient species called First Life. Oculus is trying (and occasionally paying) to get as many people as possible on the platform, help them build for both Rift and Gear VR simultaneously, and make the library as big as possible for users.
As new content comes in, Oculus is also trying to make it all easy to find. The too-much-stuff problem plagues, well, everything, from the App Store to Netflix, and Oculus is trying to ward it off early. It's launching a new version of Oculus Home on the Gear VR, which is a little easier to use and a lot more like the Rift's homescreen, and it's tweaked its smartphone app to surface new content. It's meant to make it easier to find what you want, and get into it. Oculus knows better than anyone how much friction there still is in every step of VR, and it's looking for any small way to smooth out the process. And give you some sick nature footage to look at when you're finished.
