Think of the first Apple II being shipped in 1977. It took almost a decade for it to land in my school where I could see it.
The elephant in the room has always been simulator sickness and disorientation. That's one of the biggest challenges.
There's going to be all different price points, and you get what you pay for. There's certainly low things made of cardboard that you don't put on your head, you just hold up little viewers that give you this glimmer of what VR could be.
We imagine that some people will jump into the AR and VR space that are complementary. We look at Google Glass. It's very complementary. It's not competitive. It's a different experience. It's used for different purposes.
Essentially, we're always trying to reduce latency. As you try to reduce the latency of the experience, you can only get it down so far before we start running into the limitations of game engines, computing, the intensity of the experience you're trying to compute.
The product cycle for the Oculus Rift will be between the rapid six-month cycle of cell-phones and the slower seven-year cycle of consoles. It's rare to see a phone not coming out every year.
We designed a number of features from the ground up, like custom display and optics technology with very high refresh rates and pixel density. We added integrated 3-D audio, a built-in microphone so you can speak to friends inside virtual worlds, and precise mechanical adjustment systems.
Windows never planned for a VR device. When you plug a HDMI cable into the computer, Windows thinks it's a new monitor. The desktop blinks. It tries to rearrange windows and icons.
Ultimately, going into the consumer market, we really need outstanding content. That was the goal: if we can get the developer kit out at a low enough cost point, then hopefully a lot of developers would show up and start creating content.
There are millions of sci-fi enthusiasts in the world, not just gamers.
At Oculus, we're now looking at eye specialists, people who really understand how the human eye works, and how that affects human emotion.
We've been working with Paul Bettner and the Playful team since the beginning of Oculus. Paul was one of, I think, seven $5,000 Kickstarter backers.
As people are showing the Rift to friends, word will spread that VR can be that good. So I'm not so worried in terms of adoption of the Rift.
We've spent a lot of time on ergonomics. That was something we found to be really important as we iterated on the headset, from developer kits to Crescent Bay to the Rift.
There's going to be a lot of collaborative social experiences with Rift and Touch.
Most big companies work in stealth until they think they have a consumer product ready to go.
If you don't have content, you don't sell hardware. We need a suite of content of really fun, compelling experiences that aren't just hardcore game-oriented, and when that's good enough, it'll be an easy decision to go to the consumer market.
You put on this set of goggles, and within seconds, your brain is convinced you're now in a different, virtual environment. You're somewhere else, and that somewhere else may be a video game, it may be in a real-time movie, a museum exhibit, or a medical surgical training app.
If you look back at when things like tablets and smartphones were first invented, or the Newton at Apple, that was the first attempt at VR. We didn't even have 3D GPUS, or were just getting them.
When you put on the headset, you want to be tricked; you want your mind to believe you are actually teleported to this new virtual place.
