A job listing on Glassdoor from Amazon reveals that the company is working on a “platform and interface for immersive storytelling.”
Amazon is looking for a software development manager to lead its VR team in this effort. The listing mentions that the ecommerce and media giant is interested in going beyond passive 2D content, so it’ll be interesting to see what the company has up its sleeve.
Netflix and Hulu have plans for apps for watching their video content on VR headsets, but it doesn’t seem like Amazon is looking to merely follow their lead. Instead, it seems like the company is gearing up to deliver the next generation of content.
That makes sense to me. After seeing for myself what sort of experiences the HTC Vive is capable of delivering, it’s clear to me that VR will play a major role in entertainment. And as our own Ben Woods noted, unlike 3D TV, the virtual reality trend is about ushering in devices not only for content consumption, but also content creation — crucial for the technology to last beyond a single season.
Interestingly, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings dismissed VR as purely about gaming and seemed more concerned about delivering videos with 4K resolution and high dynamic range (HDR). That’s all well and good for 2016, but I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before VR goes mainstream.
Last month, Amazon made its game development engine Lumberyard available for free. It’s slated to get support for building VR experiences in a future release and will work with the company’s GameLift service for deploying and maintaining online multiplayer games.
While devs aren’t obligated to connect their titles to Amazon’s cloud, Lumberyard makes it easy to do so and could prove to be a gateway to the company’s VR platform.
We’ve contacted Amazon to learn more and will update this post when we hear back.
➤ Amazon Video is Building a VR Platform [UploadVR]
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