Samsung’s Big Surprise is Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg

We were expecting the usual product launch event during the Samsung Unpacked 2016 for the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge. Fortunately for us Samsung made the product launch insanely memorable by upping their event production to a whole new level by incorporating virtual reality (all the chairs for media had Gear VRs) and bringing Mark Zuckerberg, to the surprise of everyone, to the stage. So how did it all happen?

At one part in the program Samsung asked everyone to put on their Gear VRs for a short spiel on the new products. We were instructed to wait until the end because they had a surprise. We were initially thinking that the surprise would be in the VR itself but it turns out the surprise was waiting for us when we took off the Gear VRs.

After removing the Gear VR goggles, Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg was on stage to promote social VR on Facebook. Everyone in the event hall was shocked and in just a few seconds photographers, bloggers, and media came rushing to the stage to be able to take photos of the tech billionaire.

Mark’s short speech focused on virtual reality, social VR, and the partnership between Samsung and the Oculus Rift for Gear VR (Facebook owns Oculus Rift). He laid out his vision for social VR and he made it very clear that social VR is one of the key areas of innovation and growth for Facebook. He even shared that they’ve assigned hundreds of engineers behind it to accelerate the growth of the technology for the Facebook community at large.

The Facebook founder definitely stole of thunder from the event host (Samsung) but his presence on a Samsung stage speaks volumes. It was a pleasant surprise for everyone who attended the event (this writer included) and it looks like we all have to watch out for what Facebook and Samsung have up their sleeves to push adoption of VR.