Mark Zuckerberg envisions a world where you strap on a pair of goggles and, through the wonders of virtual reality, you meet face-to-face with your doctor.
That's why Facebook is paying $2 billion to acquire Oculus, the Irvine, California company behind a virtual reality headset known as Rift. Rift isn't yet available to the world at large, and when it finally arrives in the next year or so, it will merely be a way of playing 3-D games and perhaps watching movies, not holding virtual consultations with your doctor or chatting with distant friends. But in buying the two-year-old company, Zuckerberg says that he and Facebook are looking five to 10 years down the road, towards a future where virtual reality is a common way for us to communicate.
"This is really a new social platform," Zuckerberg said Tuesday afternoon during a conference call with analysts and reporters. "We're making a long term bet that immersive virtual and augmented reality will become a part of people's daily lives." At one point, he even said that Oculus has the potential to be the "most social platform ever."
>But others ask whether the Facebook CEO is venturing into areas where the headset will struggle to find a home.
On one hand, you have to admire this kind of swashbuckling attitude. Things change quickly in today's world, and Zuckerberg is looking to leapfrog rivals not just to the next big thing, but to the thing beyond that. Sitting still doesn't pay in Silicon Valley. Bold bets do. That's why, despite the enormous price tag, Facebook's $19 billion acquisition of mobile messaging outfit WhatsApp made so much sense.
But the Oculus buy looks like a bet too far.
Make no mistake: Oculus has a big future. "It's fantastic for games," says James McQuivey, an analyst with research outfit Forrester who has closely followed the company's progress. And many outside software developers, including an outfit called Arch Virtual, are already building applications that extend beyond the world of gaming, such as virtual tours of college campuses or virtual test drives of new cars.
For people like Arch Virtual founder Jon Brouchoud, Zuckerberg's vision of Oculus as a social tool is just one more step down this same road. "For anyone who has tried on the Oculus Rift, it's obvious," he says. "It's only a matter of time." But others ask whether the Facebook CEO is venturing into areas where the headset will struggle to find a home. Playing a game with a massive set of goggles on your head is one thing. Using them to chat with your friends is another. "It's a little bit like buying a trampoline," says McQuivey. "It's very exciting and exhilarating for short periods of time, but not something you will do every day -- much less several times a day."
What you have to remember is that people have been making the same pitch as Zuckerberg for a good thirty years, and it has never come to fruition. "I didn't hear anything that Zuckerberg said that hasn't been talked about before in the VR community for a very long time," says Brian Blau, an analyst with research firm Gartner was part of hard-core virtual reality community in the '80s and '90s. "It has always been billed as a next-gen communication technology -- something that can provide a more immersive and deeper connection to somebody else." The truth, as Blau points out, is that most VR technology creates a very solitary experience. It's something you do alone, not with others.
Recent history has shown that if you try to make it more than that, it struggles to find an audience. Second Life -- the virtual world that received such hype at the turn of the millennium before falling into obscurity -- is the big cautionary tale. And that's what Zuckerberg and Facebook are eying: A new Second Life. They even talk of selling virtual goods in this world, painting this as a potentially significant source of revenue for the company.
>Transforming Oculus into a device that connects multiple people is a tremendous technical challenge, and even if you can meet that challenge, that doesn't mean people will be comfortable using the thing.
Many argue that in the past, VR technology just hasn't been up to the task -- and that Oculus now has what it takes to make the breakthrough. But even Blau, who very much believes that virtual reality will one day find a place in the world, says the Oculus VR is light years away from the kind of social environment Zuckerberg is looking for. "I have a hard time seeing the connection between social and virtual reality, in the way Facebook is talking about it," he tells us. At the very least, he explains, transforming Oculus into a device that connects multiple people is a tremendous technical challenge, and even if you can meet that challenge, that doesn't mean people will be comfortable using the thing.
The visual experience when you strap on an Oculus headset certainly trumps Second Life. But today's 3-D movies trump what we had in '50s, and people still don't really care for them. They care even less about 3-D televisions. Zuckerberg also talks about using Oculus to enjoy a simulated court side seat at a basketball game or study in a classroom of students and teachers located "all over the world," but even these scenarios may have limited appeal. As Blau says, headsets along the same lines as Oculus have been available for years, and though the technology was technically capable of realizing these visions, it just hasn't happened.
Yesterday's acquisition undoubtedly means the development of Oculus will accelerate. The VR startup is now backed not only by a big name and some big money, but by a company that very much believes in giving engineers free rein to innovate. "The partnership accelerates our vision, allows us to execute on some of our most creative ideas and take risks that were otherwise impossible," Oculus founder Palmer Luckey wrote yesterday. "It means a better Oculus Rift with fewer compromises even faster than we anticipated." That's excellent news for the gaming world. But anything beyond games and solitary virtual worlds is a shot in the dark.
Jaron Lanier, who serves as a kind of patron saint for the idea of virtual reality, says Oculus reminds him of the first VR company, VPL Research, which arrived in 1983. "So many of the stories that come out of Oculus and the bits of rhetoric that emanate from it are similar to VPL," he tells WIRED. "It’s sometimes bizarre for me. Feels like a time warp." It does indeed. And that too may be a cautionary tale.
