By “mobile VR”, Luckey is referring to devices like Google Cardboard and Samsung’s Gear VR, the latter of which was developed in collaboration with Oculus.
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Gamers step off the couch and into virtual reality at Paris Games Week. Mobile VR will be successful long before PC VR goes wireless.
Mike Schroepfer, the firm’s chief technology officer, said Facebook is using artificial intelligence software to assist and study those interactions, so it can learn the best responses and eventually perform tasks that now require human assistance. He tweeted, “And I say this as someone who has spent many hours as a cable servant, dancing cables around users to keep them immersed!”
“Eventually, I think if augmented reality and virtual reality technologies are going to converge to align…if they end up merging into hardware that you can either wear all the time or at least you can carry around all the time, then there is no reason to think that it can’t supplant everything we already do with smartphones”. AR, advocated by startups like Magic Leap and by Microsoft’s forthcoming HoloLens product, overlays a virtual view atop the real world.
It makes sense for the company to work on something like this, after all it paid $2 billion to acquire virtual reality outfit Oculus and the company would certainly want to use that technology for purposes other than gaming.
Oculus will release its first commercial product, a VR-visor named Rift, in 2016. Oculus and Facebook are not the only companies dabbling in VR. TrendForce analyst Jason Tsai projects sales of 14 million VR devices in 2016, led by the Oculus-based headsets, the PlayStation VR from Japanese electronics giant Sony and the Vive from Taiwanese manufacturer HTC.
The last challenge is allowing people to create in virtual reality.
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Although Luckey concedes that visiting a city, like Paris, France via VR will never be the same as really traveling there, the technology could democratize that kind of experience.
