In the past, before phones and the Internet, all communication was face-to-face. Now, most of it is digital, via emails and messaging services. If people were to start using virtual reality, it would almost come full circle.
Palmer Luckey
Virtual reality is inevitably going to become mainstream - it's only a question of how good it needs to be before the mainstream is willing to use it.
The Arab Spring is kind of a perfect model for how people are going to use technology to act collectively in their own interest in the future. There's never been a revolution that was coordinated by social media to the degree that the Arab Spring was.
Any real virtual reality enthusiast can look back at VR science fiction. It's not about playing games... 'The Matrix,' 'Snow Crash,' all this fiction was not about sitting in a room playing video games. It's about being in a parallel digital world that exists alongside our own, communicating with other people, playing with other people.
VR is going to be defined by the content that is designed explicitly for virtual reality.
Once you have perfect virtual reality, what else are you supposed to perfect?
I don't think that VR is going to lead to humanity being enslaved in the matrix or letting the world crumble around us. I think it's going to end up being a great technology that brings closer people together, that allows for better communication, that reduces a lot of environmental waste that we're currently doing in the real world.
If you have perfect virtual reality eventually, where you're be able to simulate everything that a human can experience or imagine experiencing, it's hard to imagine where you go from there.
If I grew up in 'da hood,' it would make my story so much more interesting - if I had something to escape from. I had a pretty good life. My parents weren't rich; they weren't poor. I wasn't trying to escape from anything. It was always just the pursuit of something cooler.
Games take years to make, and it's important that when we launch, it can't just be a great launch catalog and then a desert for a really long time. To be honest, for a lot of developers, they'd rather not be competing at launch with all this other software.
As a PC gaming enthusiast, a significant chunk of my time and money was spent building and upgrading my rig, always in pursuit of a better gaming experience. At some point, I decided to take a look past my three 3D monitors and figure out what the absolute best theoretical gaming setup would be.
Ever since I was 15, I've tried to act and talk as if I was a public figure because I was sure that I would be one day and wanted to be prepared.
I don't think that technology is going to allow for greater subjugation of people. I think it's gonna give them more freedom.
I'm the most optimistic guy about VR out there. I have crazy visions of what we'll be doing in the future.
I wanted to play games in the best way possible, a way that was better than anyone else would have access to. As time went on, it became clear that VR was actually feasible on a large scale at a low cost, and at a quality far beyond what I had been hoping for.
Focus comes a lot more easily when you desperately want the results of your own work - nobody else is going to do it for you.
It's going to be so obvious when something isn't well made for VR. People are going to use the best VR content. That's the stuff that's going to get shown to people. That's the stuff that's going to get demoed. That's most of what people are going to buy.
I've been a bit of an electronics enthusiast and maker for a long time. I actually started the forum called ModRetro. It's an electronics enthusiast community that focuses on modifying vintage game consoles, and it's actually one of the larger game console modification forums on the Internet.
I started attending community college when I was 14 or 15, just doing general education stuff like history and mathematics. Then I went on to California State University Long Beach to pursue a degree in journalism. And then I ended up dropping out to found Oculus.
I think probably the majority of political actions don't go the way people are going to go. Just because there were unexpected consequences and maybe not the resolution people would have liked to have been seen doesn't mean it was less valid of an action.
I'm a huge fan of online communities. I think that asynchronous internet-based communication forums such as Reddit and other discussion forums are one of the best things that could possibly have happened to collaborative invention. The Rift certainly would not exist without forums.
Virtual reality is a tough sell for a software developer. They have to convince investors that not only are they going to build a good game, which is what they normally have to do, they have to convince them that it's going to be a good game and that virtual reality will be successful.
I'm a huge gamer. I'm very excited, and the idea of the Rift was as a headset that was designed around the specific uses of VR gaming. But I'm excited about a lot of stuff that's outside of it, because I was a VR enthusiast. I want VR to be the thing that we all live in, that we all use for everything, not just games.
I'm really familiar with what Cardboard's doing; it's not a novel concept. Cardboard is in many ways a direct ripoff of FOV2GO, a project I helped work on when I was at ICT, and it was fairly well known in the academic VR community.
There are times, especially when I was just getting into PC gaming, where I spent way less time playing than obsessing about the quality of the play.
I was interested in virtual reality for several years even before working at USC, it wasn't an interest that started there at all. In fact, when I started working at USC, I already had prototypes of the Rift that were very similar to the final design.
A lot of people, even if they know what VR is, see it as this tool to go in your basement and play Halo.
When you have more people investing in VR games, whether it's us or Sony or someone else, that means a greater pool of VR developers out there who know how to make VR games.
The Oculus Studio stuff is going to remain exclusive to the Oculus store and platform. That's not to say that you'll never be able to play it on other hardware, but it very much is exclusive to the Oculus platform.
If you're having a very high-adrenaline, high-movement experience in virtual reality, and then all of a sudden you're back in your office, that disconnect is pretty notable. Whereas if you're using it for virtual reality teleconferencing... there's really no kind of impact moving back and forth between the real and the virtual world.
VR is going to become something mainstream, but it's not going to happen right away. You just don't have the horsepower to make it happen on a device, much less a cheap enough and comfortable enough device that a normal consumer is going to want to have.
The whole thing with VR is that it doesn't matter, local versus networked gaming. The goal in virtual reality isn't to have people sit in the same room with headsets on.
Don't be afraid to convince yourself that your business is incredible, but don't expect others to be convinced without solid data to back it up. Ideas can be a worth a lot, but they are usually not. Execution is everything.
