For over a year now Samsung’s Milk VR service has been offering Gear VR owners access to plenty of 360 degree content. Today, Samsung is sowing the seeds to bring even more elaborate content to the platform with the reveal of an Upload SDK.
The new feature was announced today at the 2016 Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco, California. The Milk VR Upload SDK is integrated directly with 360 cameras, allowing users develop and quickly upload content to Milk VR’s three main platforms. Those include a browser version in which you can drag and pull the video, a mobile app through Google Play on Android and, of course, the dedicated Gear VR app for watching content as it was intended.
Several new features will be included in the SDK, arguably the most exciting of which is the ability to create interactive hotspots. These use gaze-based interaction to allow viewers to travel between spots in a scene. The concept was previously seen in a handful of other Milk VR videos like GONE, which was made and released episodically in partnership with Skybound Entertainment. Of course, the SDK will be hugely important to the release of Gear 360, information for which was recently revealed.
Samsung isn’t stopping there, however. The company is also working on a 360 degree livestreaming SDK, which would greatly expand the capabilities of certain 360 cameras. No dates were given as to when we might see the feature release, however.
The message on Samsung’s VR efforts seems clear; the company still views 360 degree content as perhaps the most important path of the many that VR will travel down in the coming years. Indeed, it’s already been reported that the majority of the content consumer on Gear VR isn’t games but instead these kinds of experiences. Don’t expect Samsung to slow down on 360 video any time soon.
