In the past, before phones and the Internet, all communication was face-to-face. Now, most of it is digital, via emails and messaging services. If people were to start using virtual reality, it would almost come full circle.
The Arab Spring is kind of a perfect model for how people are going to use technology to act collectively in their own interest in the future. There's never been a revolution that was coordinated by social media to the degree that the Arab Spring was.
Virtual reality is inevitably going to become mainstream - it's only a question of how good it needs to be before the mainstream is willing to use it.
Once you have perfect virtual reality, what else are you supposed to perfect?
If you have perfect virtual reality eventually, where you're be able to simulate everything that a human can experience or imagine experiencing, it's hard to imagine where you go from there.
It's going to be so obvious when something isn't well made for VR. People are going to use the best VR content. That's the stuff that's going to get shown to people. That's the stuff that's going to get demoed. That's most of what people are going to buy.
I don't think that technology is going to allow for greater subjugation of people. I think it's gonna give them more freedom.
I wanted to play games in the best way possible, a way that was better than anyone else would have access to. As time went on, it became clear that VR was actually feasible on a large scale at a low cost, and at a quality far beyond what I had been hoping for.
I'm a huge gamer. I'm very excited, and the idea of the Rift was as a headset that was designed around the specific uses of VR gaming. But I'm excited about a lot of stuff that's outside of it, because I was a VR enthusiast. I want VR to be the thing that we all live in, that we all use for everything, not just games.
Ever since I was 15, I've tried to act and talk as if I was a public figure because I was sure that I would be one day and wanted to be prepared.
VR is going to be defined by the content that is designed explicitly for virtual reality.
Focus comes a lot more easily when you desperately want the results of your own work - nobody else is going to do it for you.
As a PC gaming enthusiast, a significant chunk of my time and money was spent building and upgrading my rig, always in pursuit of a better gaming experience. At some point, I decided to take a look past my three 3D monitors and figure out what the absolute best theoretical gaming setup would be.
Any real virtual reality enthusiast can look back at VR science fiction. It's not about playing games... 'The Matrix,' 'Snow Crash,' all this fiction was not about sitting in a room playing video games. It's about being in a parallel digital world that exists alongside our own, communicating with other people, playing with other people.
I'm the most optimistic guy about VR out there. I have crazy visions of what we'll be doing in the future.
I started attending community college when I was 14 or 15, just doing general education stuff like history and mathematics. Then I went on to California State University Long Beach to pursue a degree in journalism. And then I ended up dropping out to found Oculus.
I've been a bit of an electronics enthusiast and maker for a long time. I actually started the forum called ModRetro. It's an electronics enthusiast community that focuses on modifying vintage game consoles, and it's actually one of the larger game console modification forums on the Internet.
If I grew up in 'da hood,' it would make my story so much more interesting - if I had something to escape from. I had a pretty good life. My parents weren't rich; they weren't poor. I wasn't trying to escape from anything. It was always just the pursuit of something cooler.
I think probably the majority of political actions don't go the way people are going to go. Just because there were unexpected consequences and maybe not the resolution people would have liked to have been seen doesn't mean it was less valid of an action.
I'm a huge fan of online communities. I think that asynchronous internet-based communication forums such as Reddit and other discussion forums are one of the best things that could possibly have happened to collaborative invention. The Rift certainly would not exist without forums.
