Every time I’ve laughed at one of Mark Zuckerberg’s decisions, he’s made me look foolish. I remember being very skeptical of Facebook’s decision to buy up virtual reality headset maker Oculus Rift last year but a new report from Variety is making me understand just how cool Facebook’s plans for virtual reality could be.
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In short, Facebook-owned photo-sharing app Instagram is toying around with making a VR app that will act as a gateway to virtually travelling anywhere in the world.
“I’m fascinated with being able to travel the world via Instagram and just be somewhere different,” explained CTO Mike Krieger at the Structure conference in San Francisco on Thursday. “Teleport yourself somewhere else.”
My issue with virtual reality has been that its applications have typically revolved around gaming headsets. While this is a great application for many people, my wife already gets annoyed enough when she sees me playing Fallout 4 when there are still dishes in the sink. There is pretty much no way our marriage could survive me being plugged into a VR headset for even a day.
But using VR to virtually travel to places, especially if it opens up the possibility of live video? Yeah, that’s a pretty awesome idea that I can see a lot of people — not just gamers — being interested in trying.
Obviously, we don’t yet know what Instagram has planned since Variety’s report is pretty vague on specifics, but it’s exciting to see where Facebook and Instagram are headed.
