Facebook shook the tech world last year when they bought Oculus VR for a whopping $2 billion dollars.
Not much has come out of the social media titan since then, but now we’re learned a bit more of the company’s vision for the virtual reality platform, via a Q&A session with Facebook boss and founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaking in Bogota, Colombia, Zuckerberg said that he sees a future where VR tech will become a “more natural” way of communicating between each other, even more than phones have been:
“Now mobile phones are clearly the main way we communicate, but they will not be the last way that we do computing.
I think it’s pretty easy to imagine that in the future we will have something that we can wear that will look just like normal glasses so it won’t look weird like some of the stuff that exists today. And you’ll just have context about what’s going on in the world around you and being able to communicate with people and not have to disrupt your conversations by looking down or be interruptive. I think that’s going to be really powerful.”
Despite his optimism, he did express some concerns with how VR tech is currently “very rough”, and that it’s currently not reasonable to use HMDs like Oculus Rift or Sony’s Project Morpheus in everyday life:
“You all remember the first mobile phones were terrible and that’s kind of the stage we’re at now with virtual reality and augmented reality. It’s just extremely early stage and the early stuff is very rough still. But I think that’s going to be a really important trend.
There will be another platform after computers that becomes the primary computing platform and we’re really excited to build that as well. We’re working on that with Oculus, which is, I think, by far the leader in virtual reality at this point and it’s going to be very exciting to see how that develops.”
I know that I personally can’t wait for the day that VR tech is commonplace. Growing up as an ’80s and ’90s kid, I would daydream about “jacking in” much like Case did with the Matrix. How about you? Are you excited for what VR devices could bring to our lives?
