Today Oculus’ Chief Scientist, Michael Abrash, will take to the stage at Facebook’s F8 conference to expound upon virtual reality. As Abrash puts it, “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday and for the rest of your life—this talk will explain why you’re going to care about virtual reality and what it means for developers.”
Michael Abrash was a former AV/VR researcher at Valve who surprised the industry when he joined Oculus. His new position with the company as Chief Scientist was announced just a few days after Facebook bought the burgeoning VR company almost exactly a year ago today.
Today’s F8 keynote will be opened by Mike Schroepfer, CTO of Facebook, and then lead into Abrash’s presentation. The keynote will begin at 10am PST (your timezone here), and will be livestreamed via Facebook.
Abrash is an excellent orator, capable of conveying both low-level technical details and high-level concepts, even to the layman. His speaking approach is an interesting foil to his old industry pal, John Carmack (famed programmer, engineer, and Oculus CTO), generally choosing to write out his entire presentation word-for-word, whereas Carmack typically speaks right off the top of mind.
When Abrash spoke at Oculus’ inaugural developer event, ‘Connect’, last September, he attributed VR’s resurgence to Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, saying that, “…if [he] hadn’t prototyped the Rift, VR wouldn’t be on the verge of taking off, and we wouldn’t be gathered here today. But Palmer did do that, and VR is about to happen.”
This was part of a greater point about what Abrash calls ‘The Myth of Technological Innovation’, “The idea that, just because technology is possible, it will just naturally happen,” Abrash explains. “In point of fact, the future depends on the actions of individuals, and can follow widely diverging paths depending on those actions.” In the same presentation, Abrash shared a compelling anecdote about what he calls the ‘Existence Proof’.
Further Reading: Michael Abrash: “If Palmer Luckey Hadn’t Prototyped the Rift, VR Wouldn’t Be on the Verge of Taking Off”
Yesterday during the F8 Opening keynote, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be introducing a 360 video player with support for the Oculus Rift. Furthermore, Facebook is experimenting with live VR video, showing it off in a ‘Teleportation Station’ booth at the event where attendees can don a VR headset to see a livestreamed 360 view of Facebook’s Menlo Park campus.