Back to News for Developers

Richer 3D Posts on Facebook and New Ways to Share

February 20, 2018ByAykud Gönen

People build communities by sharing things they care about — through photos, videos and, increasingly, more immersive media types. We recently introduced 3D posts, which let people see and interact with a digital object from all sides in Facebook News Feed. It's instantly responsive to scroll and touch, making content pop off the screen. It also opens the door for a future where people can bring interesting objects and experiences with them across AR, VR, mobile and web — whether it's your favorite game and movie characters, architectural models or museum artifacts, all the way to fully interactive scenes.

Today we're rolling out support for the industry-standard glTF 2.0 file format for Facebook 3D posts. This means artists and creators can easily share even richer, higher-quality 3D content on Facebook from an even greater variety of sources.

Richer 3D Posts

With glTF 2.0 compliance comes support for textures, lighting, and realistic rendering techniques — so from rough to shiny, metallic to soft, beautifully detailed 3D art can now come alive on Facebook. 3D posts also support unlit workflows for photogrammetry and stylized art.

More Ways to Share 3D Posts on Facebook

With glTF 2.0 support we're opening up even more ways to share 3D content on Facebook from more creation tools and platforms. We're introducing new Graph API endpoints with 3D Post support so developers can build seamless 3D sharing into any app — letting people share interactive objects or scenes directly to Facebook with just a click. Using our new Open Graph tag, developers can enable 3D content from their website to automatically appear in 3D when shared on Facebook. And artists using 3D authoring software can directly drag/drop their 3D files to Facebook to create a 3D post.

Our early partners have already implemented some exciting new ways to share 3D content on Facebook. For instance, people can easily share 3D memories captured with an Xperia XZ1 phone via Sony's 3D Creator app. On the web, people can share objects directly from the Oculus Medium web gallery and soon from Google's Poly as well. And 3D modeling software Modo has added the ability to generate Facebook-ready files, with support coming to more 3D programs soon.

A 3D Ecosystem Across Platforms

We hope these new tools will help more artists, developers and businesses to share their creations, so people can discover and explore rich 3D content right from their News Feed. We've already seen some incredible interactive objects uploaded to Facebook today — including a LEGO parrot, a Jurassic World dinosaur, a virtual living room from Wayfair, a handbag scanned with a Sony phone, and the new Magic Archer character in Clash Royale by Supercell. People can enjoy this content in News Feed, or bring it into Facebook Spaces to share with friends in VR.

In the future, we envision a seamless digital world where people can share immersive experiences and objects like these across VR, AR and Facebook News Feed. To get there, we'll work on supporting even higher quality 3D models, enabling interactive animations and bringing 3D content into the real world using AR. This is only the beginning, and we look forward to seeing the ecosystem of 3D content grow on Facebook as people, developers and artists contribute their creativity.