Facebook Live is coming to virtual reality. Or, more accurately, VR is coming to Facebook Live.
Today, three months after Facebook officially launched its social VR platform Spaces, it is introducing the ability to shoot and broadcast live video from inside Spaces, either to users’ Facebook friends or publicly to the whole world.
The idea is fairly simple. Spaces allows up to four people–each of whom must have an Oculus Rift VR headset–to hang out together in VR. Together, they can talk, chat, draw, create new objects, watch 360-degree videos, share photos, and much more. And now, they can live-broadcast everything they do in Spaces, much the same way that any Facebook user can produce live video of real life and share it with the world.
For Facebook, this is one more move geared toward showing what’s possible in virtual reality, and, hopefully, inspiring more people to try it out and, eventually, buy headsets and VR content. Just this week, for example, Oculus–which Facebook bought in 2012 for what turned out to be $3 billion–announced a temporary $200 price cut on the Rift, lowering the cost of the headset and an included set of Touch controllers to $398.