Facebook boss compares current VR to first "terrible" mobile phones
Mark Zuckerberg is convinced that VR headsets will become much easier to wear in the years ahead
Virtual Reality continues to gather momentum, and no one wants it to succeed more than Oculus owners Facebook, which invested $2 billion in acquiring the company last year. While the potential is certainly there and many in the development community are excited, the fact is a consumer product isn't available yet, and when it does hit the market it will be somewhat clunky. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg fully acknowledged that fact in a recent "town hall" meeting (via The Verge).
Noting that the existing VR hardware is "very, very rough," he remarked, "I think it's pretty easy to imagine that in the future we will have something that we can wear. It will look just like normal glasses - it won't look weird like some of the stuff that exists today."
Zuckerberg may have been alluding to Google Glass, which some have said looks too weird, but certainly the Oculus Rift has a long way to go in terms of its own design evolution. Zuckerberg said that the Rift is still at an "extremely early stage," and he compared all of the VR headset field to the first "terrible" mobile phones.
In the long run, Zuckerberg believes something - possibly VR - will become the new platform that ultimately makes a PC obsolete. "I don't know if it's going to be ten years, or 15, or 20 but there will be another platform after computers that becomes the primary computing platform and we're really excited to build that," he said. "We're working on that with Oculus, who we think are by far the leader in virtual reality at this point, and it's going to be very exciting to see how that develops."