Facebook’s objective with Oculus Quest is everything about VR video games

I’ve gone on a great deal of experiences in virtual truth, from looking down a Tyrannosaurus rex to diving a shipwreck with a blue whale to shaping neon colored statues in the air with a magic paint brush.

But without a doubt the most engaging experiences have actually been video games, while piloting a spaceship in an impressive dogfight or holding my ground versus crowds of zombies. I’ve likewise played capture the flag in no gravity.

With couple of exceptions, video games are the experiences I talk the most about when talking about VR, and I’m not alone. Which is most likely why Facebook’s Oculus VR department is focusing its marketing muscle on computer game for the spring 2019 launch of its $399 Oculus Quest headset

“It is an audience that is enthusiastic,” Hugo Barra Facebook’s vice president of VR, stated in an interview at the business’s Oculus Connect conference in San Jose, California, onWednesday Gamers, he stated, are “willing to invest both their time and their money.”

That does not indicate there aren’t other experiences, obviously. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg frequently states he anticipates VR will overthrow the method we utilize computer systems, marking a huge shift comparable to the method mobile phones have actually altered tech over the previous years.

But Zuckerberg has likewise stated he desires 1 billion individuals to attempt VR, and a minimum of 10 million individuals utilizing each of his business’s series of headsets. When it concerns the Quest, Barra stated, the group has actually picked to concentrate on video gaming.

The business established mock tennis courts in the San Jose Convention Center, where individuals can complete in video games while using the headset. It likewise established a big video game area where as much as 6 individuals might divide into 2 groups, contending in an Old West- design shootout while concealing behind numerous dog crates and boxes in the space.

Each of the experiences was created to flaunt both the Quest’s all-in-one, wire-free style and the experiences VR can provide.

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But Barra said if you squint a little and think about new technology coming down the pike — like much lighter headsets, better sensors and the ability to use your full hands in VR rather than rely on controllers — you can also get a sense of the future Oculus sees.

“You could very quickly see how that becomes a thing that pretty much everyone on the planet will want to have, because it just make their lives better,” he said. “You’ll have far better entertainment, far better connection with other people, far better communication, far better productivity at work than what you have today. And you actually don’t even have to squint that hard.”

Here are edited excerpts from our conversation with Barra at Oculus’ developer conference shortly after Zuckerberg announced the new Quest headset.

How is the way VR is shaking out different or the same from the way smartphones took off?
Barra: These ecosystems take time to develop. And I think if you were to look back at the smartphone ecosystem, there were things around that you can call a smartphone, like, in maybe 2002. You could certainly see the glimpses of a smartphone with a proper operating system, or at least a way for people to build apps and things that were more than just like a simple HTML web browser.

Yet most people would say that this thing didn’t really start taking off until 2007 or 2008. It’s kind of easy to forget how much you know happened in those eight years from 2000 to 2008.

So I can’t quite place VR in this time frame. I don’t know whether we’re in 2000, or 2003, or whatever it is. Certainly we’re not in 2008. We’re at the very, very beginning of this.

You guys said you significantly increased your investment in augmented reality. What did you mean by that?
Barra: It is certainly an area that we’re investing significantly. We are going to see an absolute shift in computing paradigm. It’s the entire reason why Oculus exists and why it’s part of Facebook, is that we all believe that that’s going to happen.

So you can only imagine what that means. A company of the size of Facebook, with a CEO with the vision of Mark saying this is the most important thing in the next 10 years.

Sure, and Zuckerberg said before he was working on AR glasses. I guess I always considered you guys as focused on VR. But now I get a sense it’s more that you guys will do both.
Barra: You can think of us having multiple product lines going into the future. I think we’ve made a very clear statement here at Connect that we have our VR product lines, and we’re going to keep working with the developer community to make sure that they’re all supported across these platforms.

And at some point, you know, there’ll be other products.

Where are we with smartphone VR? Samsung didn’t mention it this year when unveiling its new phones. And on stage, you showed Oculus Go as an entry-level device, seeming to take the place of smartphone VR. What’s going on?
Barra: Drop-in VR or slide-in VR or however you want to call it was a really important entry point for the industry. It gave developers and consumers a really inexpensive tool and vessel to start experimenting and building apps on. It certainly also inspired us to figure out the starting point for what all-in-one VR was.

It was a very important initiative, for all those reasons. But the user base is super engaged. And I get that they didn’t talk about it at their event, but this thing is still happening.

In many ways it’s still creating awareness for VR. We see a lot of people who try it in our logs, and then are upgrading.

VR is this thing we’ve been talking about for decades. So you ask, “Have you actually tried it?” “Oh yeah, my friend has a Samsung Gear VR.”

So it was a necessary step and I think will continue to be for some time for this industry to keep moving ahead.

Oculus Connect: Everything announced at Facebook’s annual VR conference.

VR’s missing link: You likely haven’t bought a VR headset yet and it’s beginning to show.