London, May 22 (IANS): Social networking giant Facebook has hired a team of experts in London to create the first European base for its Oculus virtual reality division, a media report said.

The social network has substantially expanded its British team of engineers and developer relations staff in the last six months after acquiring Oculus for $2 billion in 2014, the Telegraph reported on Saturday.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting heavily on virtual reality for his company's future. The social networking site last year bought a British virtual reality start-up, Surreal Vision, and moved its team to the Oculus office in Redmond, Washington, the report said.

The Oculus team in Britian is led by Mike LeBeau, a former senior engineer at Google who founded the company's voice search software. He moved to London to join Oculus in January this year.

"We're going to build some really cool stuff," LeBeau said in a Facebook post.

Zuckerberg strongly believes that virtual reality will be the next major technology we use to interact with each other.

"VR (virtual reality) is going to be most social platform (and) we've created new teams at Facebook to build the next generation of social apps and VR," Zuckerberg said earlier this year.

Besides Facebook, Google and Sony are also making huge efforts to bring virtual reality into the mainstream. Apple is also believed to be exploring the technology.