INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Most of the people I spoke with at Facebook’s Oculus Connect see the proliferation of virtual reality as a foregone conclusion, one
that’s just a matter of timing at this point
For Facebook, the conference’s “The Time is Now” catchphrase showcased that they feel their hardware is ready for everyone.But
despite the success, they feel like they’ve tapped into when it comes to hardware iterations, the company’s bread and butter social
networking prowess feels like it’s barely improved in-headset in the past several years of VR experimentations.“On the social side,
looking back, it’s kind of embarrassing all of the stages we’ve gone through at Oculus,” Oculus CTO and veteran programmer John
Carmack conceded onstage during his signature rambling annual keynote, noting that his own social APK was followed by Oculus Rooms, Oculus
Venues, Facebook Spaces and now the company’s latest shiny pearl Facebook Horizon.Horizon’s debut this year included a flashy trailer
for what quickly seemed to be the company’s biggest gamble and first potential social hit, a massive multi-player online world
In introducing the software, Zuckerberg talked about people-centric software as Facebook’s “bread-and-butter,” noting, “We build a
lot of the best social experiences for phones and computers, and we want to do this for virtual reality as well.”But Facebook does not
actually appear to hold that much of an advantage over much smaller game studios in terms of understanding how to make social virtual
reality experience take off.
