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Facebook says it’s developing its own apps for Oculus

Oculus Rift

Image Credit: Oculus VR

Over the past year, as Oculus has gotten closer and closer to its consumer release, we’ve seen company after company unveil applications for the virtual reality system. From Super Bowl parties to utility company training tools to movies, everyone is developing for Oculus. And that includes Facebook.

On Tuesday night, Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox told attendees at Re/code’s Code/Media conference that the social networking giant — which bought Oculus last year for $2 billion — has been working on its own apps for the VR technology.

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“Virtual reality is pretty cool,” Cox said, according to Re/code. “We’re working on apps for VR. … You realize, when you’re in [virtual reality], that you’re looking at the future, and it’s going to be awesome. When you’re in Facebook, you’re just sending around these bits of experience — a photo, a video, a thought,” Cox said. But by using Oculus, the Facebook experience could be “a fuller picture.”

Facebook clearly has grand ambitions for Oculus. The acquisition of the VR technology was led by former Facebook vice president of engineering Cory Ondrejka, who left the company in December after four years to help launch a new startup. Ondrejka was formerly the CTO of Linden Lab, the developer of the virtual world Second Life. There can be little doubt that he brought a lot of knowledge about how to build applications inside virtual reality to Facebook.

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Now, although Cox said it’s way too early to talk about any of the apps, and that it will be quite some time before they will come to light, he did allow that some of them will be so simple to create that almost anyone can build them. “You’ll do it,” Cox said. “Beyonce will do it.”

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