UPDATED 14:46 EST / JULY 12 2017

EMERGING TECH

You can now stream to Facebook Live from inside virtual reality

If you don’t think your real life is interesting enough to livestream to your friends, you’re in luck. Facebook Inc. announced today that you can now livestream from virtual reality using the Facebook Spaces app, giving your friends “a window into your VR world.”

Spaces is essentially a VR hangout app that allows users to chat and goof off with their friends using virtual avatars. The app even lets you use a virtual selfie stick for taking pictures that can be shared directly on Facebook.

The new update for Spaces now allows users to stream to Facebook Live from inside virtual reality environments. Users can place their virtual camera wherever they want in their VR world, and their friends can watch, comment and react to the video just like a regular livestream.

Facebook is betting heavily on the future of VR, and the company has invested several billion dollars in the technology through its acquisition of Oculus VR Inc. in 2014. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg believes that VR will change the way people communicate, which is why several of Facebook’s first VR projects focus on social features like video chat and telepresence.

“Virtual reality is the perfect platform to put people first because of presence, because you feel like you’re really there in another place with people,” Zuckerberg said during last year’s Oculus Connect conference. “You have this space where you can do anything you want. You can play a game, you can do work, but more importantly you are free to explore, and you’re probably going to end up doing more things together than if every experience was an app you had to go into separately.”

Facebook is not the only company looking to create more social experiences in VR. In May, Google Inc. announced a number of new social features for its Daydream VR platform. Some of these features included the ability to stream video from a VR headset to a Chromecast-enabled TV, as well as the ability for multiple users to watch a 360 degree YouTube video together. At the time, Mike Jazayeri, director of product management for Google VR, said that the social features “changed individual VR experiences to shared ones.”

Photo: Facebook

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