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'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 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.
A lot of people, even if they know what VR is, see it as this tool to go in your basement and play Halo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think that technology is going to allow for greater subjugation of people. I think it's gonna give them more freedom.
