![]() The headset needed a high-end gaming PC to power it, and its cables snaked everywhere. When the Rift finally came out (with the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR not too far behind), the headset managed to do something no predecessor had: deliver stable and comfortable virtual reality for the price of a game console.īut that delivery wasn’t easy. As it grew, it started working out many of the kinks that had plagued VR the first time around in the ’90s. 2013 brought nearly $100 million in funding. Headquartered in Southern California at the time, Oculus began to grow. That fall, Kickstarter users ponied up nearly $2.5 million to get their hands on the first developer version of the headset. The first Rift prototype showed up behind closed doors at E3 in 2012. Think back to those first few years of the current age of virtual reality. The technology has survived its initial lean years, but going from a few million users to a billion means far more than just adding a couple of commas. From its Luxxotica smart glasses coming later this year to the far-flung future Facebook is imagining in plain view, Zuckerberg has maintained his convictions about AR and VR’s inevitable ubiquity. And as the company looks ahead, those issues-as well as ones yet unsolved-figure prominently. Over those five years, despite everything, Facebook has solved an astonishing number of problems. ![]() Yet all that change has made this week in particular a good time to take stock: It just happens to be the five-year anniversary of the Oculus Rift. What time has been less kind to is public sentiment between its complicity in the disinformation campaigns of the 2016 election, privacy issues that arise from its ad-driven business model, concerns about AI bias, and other issues, Facebook has found itself on defense far more often than any company would like. Facebook has waded deeper into the hardware space with the Portal video-call device, and a year of pandemic lockdown has been very kind to both. The Oculus Quest 2, VR’s multimillion-selling device of the moment, is half the price and far more powerful than the Rift, the company’s first mass-produced dedicated headset. So we can hope to deliver these types of social experiences.To say that a lot of things have happened since then-to Oculus, to VR, to Facebook, and to people’s trust in all three-would be an understatement on the order of “2020 was weird, huh?” All of Oculus’ original founders have moved on, a scrappy team giving way to Facebook Reality Labs, a massive AR/VR division that may constitute as much as 20 percent of Facebook’s entire workforce. And that’s why Facebook is investing so much early on in virtual reality. All these things are going to be possible. Imagine holding a group meeting or event anywhere in the world that you want. Or being able to watch a movie in a private theater with your friends anytime you want. “Imagine being able to sit in front of a campfire and hang out with friends anytime you want. Mark Zuckerberg speaking at the Samsung Galaxy S7 launch event in Barcelona, Spain ![]() But pretty soon we're going to live in a world where everyone has the power to share and experience whole scenes as if you're right there in person," Zuckerberg said. And now we're entering into a world where that's video. "Going back about 10 years, most of what we shared and experienced was text. Facebook paid some $2 billion in 2014 to buy Oculus, which has been working with Samsung on its Gear VR consumer headsets. The Facebook CEO talked up both companies' plans in virtual reality. Zuckerberg made his entrance to the Samsung event in Barcelona by walking through a crowd of journalists all wearing the VR headsets.
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