YouTube VR is a software application which offers an interface for

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

made for VR headsets.

Features

YouTube VR allows for access to all YouTube-hosted videos, but particularly supports headset access for 360° and 180°-degree video (both in 2D and stereoscopic 3D). The interface shows videos behind two floating panels, with the video description and comments showing on the left panel and related videos or playlists showing on the right panel. Since September 2023, the app interface allows for both immersive and 2D panel modes. The immersive mode retains a surrounding virtual background, while the 2D panel mode allows for use in

augmented reality Augmented reality (AR), also known as mixed reality (MR), is a technology that overlays real-time 3D computer graphics, 3D-rendered computer graphics onto a portion of the real world through a display, such as a handheld device or head-mounted ...

passthrough. The interface is accessible with

hand tracking In the field of gesture recognition and image processing, finger tracking is a high-resolution technique that is employed to know the position of a user's fingers in three-dimensional space. It was first developed in 1969. Finger tracking can be ...

Support for 3D and 360 video

Since 2009, viewers have had the ability to watch 3D videos. In 2015, YouTube began natively supporting

360-degree video 360-degree videos, also known as surround video, or immersive videos or spherical videos, are video recordings where a view in every direction is recorded at the same time, shot using an omnidirectional camera or a collection of cameras. The term ...

. Since April 2016, it allowed live streaming 360° video, and both normal and 360° video at up to 1440p, and since November 2016 both at up to 4K (2160p) resolution. Citing the limited number of users who watched more than 90-degrees, it began supporting an alternative stereoscopic video format known as VR180 which it said was easier to produce, which allows users to watch any video using virtual reality headsets.

History

Releases

In November 2016, YouTube released YouTube VR, a dedicated version with an interface for VR devices, for Google's Daydream mobile VR platform on Android. In December 2017, the app was released on

Steam Steam is water vapor, often mixed with air or an aerosol of liquid water droplets. This may occur due to evaporation or due to boiling, where heat is applied until water reaches the enthalpy of vaporization. Saturated or superheated steam is inv ...

for

HTC Vive HTC Vive is a line of Virtual reality, virtual and mixed reality Virtual reality headset, headsets produced by HTC, HTC Corporation. The brand currently encompasses headsets designed for use with Personal computer, personal computers as well a ...

. In November 2018, YouTube VR was released on the Oculus Store for the

Oculus Go The Oculus Go is a discontinued, standalone virtual reality headset developed by Meta Platforms, Meta Reality Labs (formerly Facebook Technologies) in partnership with Qualcomm and Xiaomi. It is in the first generation of Facebook Technologies' v ...

headset. YouTube VR was updated since for compatibility with successive

Quest A quest is a journey toward a specific mission or a goal. It serves as a plot device in mythology and fiction: a difficult journey towards a goal, often symbolic or allegorical. Tales of quests figure prominently in the folklore of every nat ...

devices, and was ported to

Pico 4 PICO 4 is a virtual reality headset developed by ByteDance. It is designed for virtual reality games and is only available in Europe and East Asia (China, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore). It is currently not available in the United ...

. Starting with the

Oculus Quest The first-generation Oculus Quest is a discontinued virtual reality headset developed by Oculus (now Reality Labs), a brand of Meta Platforms, and released on May 21, 2019. Similar to its predecessor, Oculus Go, it is a standalone device, tha ...

, the app was updated for compatibility with mixed-reality passthrough modes on VR headsets. In April 2024, YouTube VR was updated to support 8K SDR video on

Meta Quest 3 Meta Quest 3 is a standalone virtual reality (VR) headset developed by Reality Labs, a division of Meta Platforms. It was unveiled on June 1, 2023, and released on October 10, succeeding the Quest 2 as the third generation of the Meta Quest l ...

. Prior to the release of the

Apple Vision Pro The Apple Vision Pro is a mixed reality, mixed-reality headset developed by Apple Inc., Apple. It was announced on June 5, 2023, at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) and was released first in the US, then in global territories thr ...

, YouTube announced that neither YouTube VR nor YouTube's

IPadOS iPadOS is a mobile operating system developed by Apple for its iPad line of tablet computers. It was given a name distinct from iOS, the operating system used by Apple's iPhones to reflect the diverging features of the two product lines, suc ...

app would be ported to

VisionOS visionOS is a mixed reality operating system derived primarily from iPadOS and its core frameworks (including UIKit, SwiftUI, ARKit and RealityKit), and MR-specific frameworks for foveated rendering and real-time interaction. It was develope ...

upon launch of the headset, and suggested that Vision Pro use a web browser to access YouTube videos in-headset. However, the company later clarified that native support on visionOS was "on the roadmap".

Release history

References

External links

YouTube VR
on

Meta Quest The Meta Quest, initially the Oculus Quest until August 2022, is a line of virtual reality headsets with augmented reality capabilities developed by Reality Labs, a division of Meta. The first-generation Oculus Quest was developed by Oculus (the ...

{{YouTube navbox Meta Quest games Virtual reality works YouTube