Facebook is finally showing off its 3D-posting technology after its initial announcement last year.
A few months after introducing 3D posts to the public at Oculus Connect conference, Facebook’s mixed reality technology has finally made its debut. On Tuesday, LEGO, Jurassic Park, Sony, Wayfair, and other known brands have released posts containing rotatable 3D objects.
In a blog post yesterday, Facebook’s Product Manager Aykud Gönen said that the 3D objects utilize “industry-standard glTF 2.0 file format” so artists and creators can share richer, and higher-quality 3D content on Facebook.
“People build communities by sharing things they care about — through photos, videos and, increasingly, more immersive media types. We recently introduced 3D posts, which let people see and interact with a digital object from all sides in Facebook News Feed,” Gönen wrote.
According to Gönen, the 3D content is responsive to scroll and touch, making the object appear to pop off the screen. The Facebook executive also believes that it could open new doors for people to “bring interesting objects and experiences with them across AR, VR, mobile and web — whether it’s your favorite game and movie characters, architectural models or museum artifacts, all the way to fully interactive scenes.”
Meet Facebook’s 3D Posts
The new Graph API endpoints would enable developers to build 3D modeling apps or even 3D cameras that they can directly share to Facebook’s News Feed, making websites that will show up as 3D posts.
Users will then be able to drag and drop the 3D objects into their own feeds. People can also pick a background color and texture to set it on. Aside from that, the 3D posts can also be brought to the social network’s VR hangout rooms, the Facebook Spaces.
“We’re trying to make 3D a native part of the Facebook ecosystem. Stage 3 is getting these 3D objects into AR,” Ocean Quigley, Facebook’s creative director for social VR, said in a statement. “We’re trying to lay the foundational steps so Facebook can go with users into their 3D worlds of VR and AR.”
However, Facebook made it clear that once the 3D content has been uploaded to News Feed, it can no longer be downloaded. This ensures that the content won’t be used in any non-Facebook app. A far cry from Google’s Poly service that allows anyone to download its 3D objects and be used on other platforms.
Some believe that this 3D feature is just Facebook’s way of marketing the Oculus Rift and encourage people to invest in virtual reality. Apparently, providing VR-friendly materials will entice people to share more 3D posts on a regular basis and get Rift for a more immersive experience.
Despite these claims, no one can deny Facebook’s aggressive efforts to adopt new content, like the 360 photos, Live videos, and GIFs, to ensure that the network remains appealing to the younger generation.
“In the future, we envision a seamless digital world where people can share immersive experiences and objects like these across VR, AR and Facebook News Feed,” Gönen went on to say. “This is only the beginning, and we look forward to seeing the ecosystem of 3D content grow on Facebook as people, developers and artists contribute their creativity.”
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