Spoken like an investor who knows nothing about the audience. Sorry, VR was intended for PC gamers. They're not casual mobile gamers. They loathe casual games. They now loathe VR for wedding with Facebook.
I think a lot of the problem is that VR as a means of improving the process of "experiencing interactive content" only really works when the content is presented from a first-person view and there is value in that perspective. Right now, that means FPS and FPRPG games. Amnesia through the Oculus Rift is a genuinely amazing (and terrifying) experience that is improved by the headset (it makes you, the player, feel like you can't step back and escape, which adds to the experience); shopping in a virtual shopping mall is just an impediment to getting what I want.
Remember the VR-32 and VRML? Everyone was super excited that we were going to start doing all the things in virtual reality, and then we figured out that it's a really cumbersome way to present most information.
Sure, I understand that. My point is that perhaps folks who went to the trouble of dedicating their lives to VR might have a larger vision than this.
In 1992, you could have defined the Internet in similarly limited terms -- after all, using the Internet largely meant text interfaces. I'm just positing that the folks who run Oculus are a) smart and b) have spent a lot of time thinking about how best to spread VR.
If VR takes off, by definition it will mean expanding beyond FPS games, because most people do not play those (you could alternatively get VR to go mainstream by increasing market penetration of FPS and FPRPG games by orders of magnitude, which might be harder than putting VR to other uses).
I'm certainly willing to be wrong - I'm not an expert in the space beyond having been an enthusiast gamer for 20 years (and I recognize that doesn't give me domain authority) - but I've been waiting for VR to be a thing for a long time now, and while it's had some neat demos, it's almost never something that I look at and decide that prefer over more traditional interfaces.
Carmack is a ridiculously smart guy who is damned good at squeezing things out of hardware that shouldn't be possible, and if there's anyone that I think could work out the how-to of VR, I think it'd be him, but I'm not sure that I trust his read on what the markets want.
The question isn't so much "will VR take off?" as it is "what could VR possibly do beyond FPS games that could make it take off?" and I just don't have any answer to that at all.
Yes, but first it has to win the gaming market, or it's a non-starter. Games are the Facebokulus's killer, game changing, app. Everything else is just speculation, and will take a while and will build on whatever happens in gaming, because VR gaming is already here.
Now, I understand that in the Kickstarted it was promised only the first developer kit and that it was successfully delivered, but I feel very uneasy knowing that the Facebook platform is geared exclusively to casual gaming. My worry is that Facebook will be happy with a VR technically good enough for a social VR but that can't stand the requirements for gaming. I may be too old to understand, but I really don't feel the urge to interact in 3d with my friends to say hello or to watch their holiday's pictures.
VR, at least as it stands right now, is squarely in the domain of the enthusiast, which has a very broad overlap with PC gaming crowd. Something like the Oculus Rift has no real potential with mobile gaming (power requirements alone preclude that).
What sorts of applications can you imagine? The idea of virtual presence being a killer app is silly, IMO - I've played with both the Oculus Rift and telepresence robots - they're neat, but for meetings/gatherings, I'll take a plain old webcam any day. I can't imagine what Facebook would do with this that I would be interested in.
Isn't that what they exactly did? They got all the PC gamers on fire, got Carmac, got bought by facebook. Now they're reaching for the moon, they became so big that people started hating, you can't avoid that.
I don't think people are upset because they "got big", but because they were acquired by a corporation that signals a core shift in their ideals. If they were bought by Valve, or even Microsoft, I don't think there'd be nearly as much backlash -- because it's not that they're BIG, it's that Valve and Microsoft would not be pushing for a different market with their product (not to say they wouldn't later).
