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VIRTUAL REALITY DEVICES will eventually become more commonplace than smartphones today as more people choose it as their main device, says the founder of Oculus VR.
Speaking at the Web Summit, Palmer Luckey said that there’s no reason why it or similar technology couldn’t end up replacing the smartphone as we know it, either as a wearable device or something we carry around with us, although it’s something that won’t happen immediately.
“I’m really biased but I think it’s going to be more ubiquitous than a smartphone”, said Luckey. “If they end up converging into hardware that we wear all the time or carry around with us, there’s no reason to expect it can’t supplement everything we do with smartphones”.
[We've] got a long road of smartphones left and a lot of other advances going on in computing, but I’ll be very surprised if 50 years from now, we’re all still carrying around slabs.
For now, the barriers that are blocking VR from becoming popular are the cost of the technology, the applications for such hardware (Luckey says it a case of industries catching up with the technology), and the specific hardware you need to power VR applications.
It’s still early days for the technology but while gaming is the obvious application for such hardware, Luckey believes it could have positive benefits in areas like teaching as it’s a versatile and cost-effective method of experiencing different things.
“Kids don’t learn best by reading textbooks” said Luckey. ”I’m generalising, but there’s clearly value in real world experience. That why we have field trips, that’s why we send kids to places like museums and sometimes foreign countries when we can”.
The problem is the majority of people will never be able to do the majority of those experiences… where they can’t go down the road and see those amazing things. VR has the potential to make those experiences available to everyone, not just things that exist in real-life, but things you can’t do in real life like see molecular structure or chemical structure. Being able to visit recreations of things that don’t exist in real-life… it has the potential to help people learn in much more real ways.
Luckey feels the changes brought by virtual reality will make us look back at photos and videos now the same way we treat old black and white photos. While it gives us a snapshot into the past, it will be seen as a limited method of documenting things.
“If we look back a few decades, we have a lot of black and white photos showcasing many events in history. It’s really incredible… [for past events] all we have are very limited black and white pictures.
Video recordings, like what we’re talking about today, will feel similar to black and white photos in a few decades. I wouldn’t be surprised in twenty to thirty years time we look back… and say “Wow, can you believe we shared experiences through teeny tiny rectangles”.
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I wouldn’t trust a man who wears flip flops and shorts in Ireland, in November.
I really like VR, much prefer it to just plain old R.
Personality I have only one functioning eye so VR is wasted on me!
I give up. Move to the country, read books, walk the dog, teach your kids the science of nature. There has to be a better world than being a dairy human following the line
POV porn is gonna get a WHOLE lot better
Hole, I think, would fit that statement better.
In the late 1980′s, a philosopher called Vilem Flusser had a vision of the future… “in a crowded and polluted world where people will live in a virtual reality most of the time and don special ‘diving suits’ to visit the real world.
Palmer Luckey is only 22 and is, according to Forbes, worth $500 million. Fair play to him.
So, he turns up to an international conference wearing flip-flops. He’s either lazy or immature.
A lot of tech entrepreneurs wear hoodies & casual clothing. It’s nothing new.
Lazy or immature? or maybe someone who will be a billionaire before he is thirty doesn’t give a shite what a few stuffy suits think of him.
didn’t he exploit members of the public by getting them to invest in his product through kickstarter and then sold the company to facebook without giving and return or credit to the original investors.?
That’s what kickstarter is all about LOL. They may have got a free T-shirt or a $25 voucher depending on how much they pledged. I think backers should be offered a small stake in the company though.
VR is really cool, it’s definitely one of those you need to see it to believe it technologies. That said, any world in which it’s more ubiquitous than smartphones is a disconnected nightmarish dystopian hell
I tried oculus rift recently and I noticed a few things. It’s like having an LCD right against your face where you can see each and every pixel. Also, you do most of your looking around with your eyes and not by turning your head, so to look over your shoulder you move your head slightly and your eyes a lot. Not so with VR. You will need to turn your head a lot and unnaturally so. Wasn’t bad but I’ll stick to TV for now
Maybe in the future we will be able to have the Web summit in Dublin again. Now that’ll be real VR
How much did it cost to see him on a stage and hear him spout that bull? Is that really what all the fuss of websummit amounts to?
He would say that….
Fair play to the guy for his success but he dresses like an absolute bell end.
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