

Mark Zuckerberg Says: Virtual Reality the Next Big Thing for Facebook - jadeddrag
http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/mark-zuckerberg-virtual-reality-the-next-big-thing-after-video-for-facebook-1201552797/

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hermanmerman
Good thing he's saying it out loud, but for those who think actions speak
louder than words, it was clear enough when he decided to buy Oculus VR for
$2bn.

It makes sense after all: 75% of Facebook's money comes from a platform
(smartphones) that was nonexistent 10 years ago. In 10 years it is possible
that VR will represent 75% or more of the revenues of Facebook — they'd be
fools not to invest in it early.

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norea-armozel
Well, I think the problem that VR has is mostly trying to make it easier to
build applications for its use. Second Life could've been that platform but LL
just didn't have the talent nor the money to pull it off. If there's anything
anyone can do to make VR attractive to developers is make the development tool
set easy to integrate. Don't make developers depend on a clientside tool like
SL had (barf). And make it possible to bring over existing IDEs and modeling
tools.

After that, it's really up to developers to make compelling applications for
VR. Facebook will have to start down that road themselves to demonstrate the
potential market for it, obviously.

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yellowapple
I'm conflicted.

On one hand, I can see the value in VR in a theoretical sense. I grew up with
quite a bit of fascination over things like Star-Trek-esque holodecks and
Matrix-style simulated universes, and this part of me thinks Facebook's smart
for wanting to be on the leading edge of such a world where people can share
their current experiences and others can also experience them in a similar
manner.

On the other hand, I can't get the images of previous VR fads out of my head,
_especially_ that of the last decade, dominated by projects like Second Life
and Project Wonderland, and thus can't shake the feeling that most people are
going to picture a VRified Facebook as little more than some nerd toy.

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jadeddrag
There is a lot of VR hype right now, but it might be justified now by the big
tech advances of accurate low latency position tracking.

