Photo storage and sharing giant Flickr is taking a step into the virtual soon if early plans for VR integration on their service reach fruition. According to Engadget, the site plans to introduce a VR button, which allows the viewing of immersive photography (i.e. 360 photos) in your favourite virtual reality headset.
Founded in 2004, Flickr quickly became one of the biggest names in the burgeoning business of storing and sharing your every day life through photography on the web. The company is still one of the largest purveyor of such services, despite the market now awash with competition and they have plans to expand their technical scope soon, leveraging virtual reality technology.
According to an article at Engadget, the company is demonstrating a prototype service using the Oculus Rift DK2 headset, at the XOXO Festival in Portland Oregon, which allows the viewing of 360 images on the headset. Engadget’s Nicole Lee went hands-on with the demo:
I tried it on and indeed I was able to look all around me in 360 degrees to view an entire scene. To flip through the slides, I looked down at a pair of pink and blue balls for a couple of seconds, which triggers the next photo to load.
It seems as if this functionality is very much alpha for now, and there’s no indication of when or even if the feature may make it into the live product, but it’s interesting and heartening to see such an established brand dipping its toe into the immersive qualities of VR for such an every day application.