I guess Zuckerberg is convinced that VR is the next breakthrough that has the potential to displace Facebook. I wonder if this is a good way to deal with that threat, though? Even with this level of investment, if there's a VR breakthrough based on fundamentally novel ideas, it will probably come from somewhere else, and Facebook will be bogged down by their existing entrenched players attached to ideas that went nowhere. It might be smarter to keep investment minimal, or only invest in hardware, until you identify the conceptual breakthrough and can follow it up quickly.
Assuming Zuckerberg is smarter enough to think of this, maybe he believes that the breakthrough in VR won't be a conceptual one, but will be the result of a massive investment of effort towards presenting existing data for VR consumption. This is essentially what the posted article suggests. Or maybe he thinks he can force his existing VR workforce down the right path when it appears, and that's less naive of an idea than it appears to me.
Assuming Zuckerberg is smarter enough to think of this, maybe he believes that the breakthrough in VR won't be a conceptual one, but will be the result of a massive investment of effort towards presenting existing data for VR consumption. This is essentially what the posted article suggests. Or maybe he thinks he can force his existing VR workforce down the right path when it appears, and that's less naive of an idea than it appears to me.