Facebook says it has created a team dedicated solely to researching and developing virtual reality for social networking.
"Going back about 10 years, most of what we shared and experienced was text," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a surprise appearance Sunday at a Samsung event at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. "Then it was photos. And now we're entering into a world where that's video. But pretty soon we're going to live in a world where everyone has the power to share and experience whole scenes as if you're just there, right there in person."
The announcement follows Facebook's 2014 acquisition of virtual reality headset maker Oculus and its 2015 purchase of British VR startup Surreal Vision.
In order to make the user experience more realistic, Facebook also announced plans to improve the resolution and load time of virtual reality videos.
