Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg fielded a number of questions from the community in an hour-long online Q&A session recently, touching on everything from net neutrality to his personal tips on how best to learn Mandarin. The longest answer however came from a solitary question: “What is your vision for Oculus?”
After Mark Zuckerberg announced the acquisition of Oculus for $2 billion back in March 2014, the VR community was left in a state of conflict. Despite reassurances from Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe, who stated in an internal blog post prepping the company for integration into the multi-billion dollar social platform that “Oculus will continue to operate independently,” many enthusiasts were left unsure about the future of the homebrew VR company.
Most recently, Zuckerberg had this to say about his vision for the VR tech company.
Our mission [is] to give people the power to experience anything. Even if you don’t have the ability to travel somewhere, or to be with someone in person, or even if something is physically impossible to build in our analog world, the goal is to help build a medium that will give you the ability to do all of these things you might not otherwise be able to do. This will be incredibly powerful as a communication medium as well. Just like we capture photos and videos today and then share them on the internet to let others experience them too, we’ll be able to capture whole 3D scenes and create new environments and then share those with people as well. It will be pretty wild.
More tangibly so, Zuckerberg revealed at last month’s F8 conference that support for the Oculus Rift would soon be coming to the social platform, which will make use of embedded 360 degree video directly on Facebook News Feed.
