Oculus Looks To the Future of a Billion-User VR Environment

 Virtual Reality  

At this year's TechCruch Disrupt conference, Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe spoke about how his company's merger with Facebook represents an opportunity to build a massive online virtual reality community.

When Facebook recently purchased Oculus VR, many were left wondering what the social networking giant would want with a virtual reality start-up. Some analysts suggested that Facebook would have a chance to lead the next big computing platform. Now, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe just told an audience at TechCrunch Disrupt about one lofty possibility for the merger: building a massively multiplayer experience (MMO) for one billion simultaneous users.

"This is going to be an MMO where we want to put a billion people in virtual reality, and a billion-person virtual-world MMO is going to require a bigger network than exists today. Why not start with Facebook and their infrastructure and their team and talent that they've built up?"

While Iribe suggests that a billion-person MMO is "going to take a bigger network than exists in the world today," he says Facebook's network makes a great place to start, and suggested it could be a Metaverse that joins disparate virtual worlds.

Image Source - TechCrunch

"This is going to be an MMO where we want to put a billion people in virtual reality, and a billion-person virtual-world MMO is going to require a bigger network than exists today."

The Oculus CEO says that the company's new Seattle offices — headed by Valve veteran Michael Abrash — will become an R&D lab that will engage with universities and work with students on virtual reality. "We think this is going to be one of the most researched areas in decades to come," says Iribe.

Growing to one billion users may also have been the reason Oculus decided to join up with Facebook instead of a traditional gaming company. Iribe says Oculus is still as committed to games as ever, the company realized that a focus on games could artificially limit its reach. "Do you want to build a platform that has a billion users on it, or only 10, 20, or 50 million?" asks Iribe, noting that dedicated game systems don't sell nearly as well as mobile devices in the grand scheme of things.

"With Oculus ... if you're putting on this pair of glasses and you're going to be face-to-face communicating with people and you're going to be jumping in and out of this new set of virtual worlds, this was going to be the largest MMO (massively multiuser online community) ever made," Iribe said.

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Obviously, the billion-person MMO is a long ways off, but the company has its eye on a stepping stone: Oculus hopes to convince players that they're having a "real conversation" with another person. For now, the uncanny valley of imperfect video game graphics will keep people from having photorealistic faces, but even cartoony ones might be enough to get us to the tipping point.

According to Iribe,"[I]f you let go, you can have a real conversation with a person. That's the holy grail we're trying to get to." Essentially he is talking about the future of videoconferencing, or what will replace it entirely.

This statement seems to echo Ray Kurzweil's predictions on the advancement of virtual reality:

These are not just sort of places to play although we’ll do that as well but these would be places to interact with other people and it will be an extension of real reality just the second life is today and for some people it’s a game, for some people it’s quite serious, it’s a place to be and this place to be, a virtual reality will become more and more realistic, more and more full immersion, more and more detailed and more and more imaginative.

Along with talking about the Facebook merger, Iribe also demonstrated a mind-blowing new generation of virtual reality coming in the future from Oculus that will challenge people's perception of what's real and what's not.

"This avatar you're looking at, your brain will be convinced it's a person, because it is," he said. "It's just the virtual representation of a person ... (but) you'll be there going, 'I know that's you. It doesn't quite look like you -- you're a cartoon or you've changed your hair -- but I can tell it's you.' And your brain will be convinced."

You can watch the full video of Iribe’s talk here.


SOURCE  The Verge

By 33rd Square

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