Virtual reality is a tough sell for a software developer. They have to convince investors that not only are they going to build a good game, which is what they normally have to do, they have to convince them that it's going to be a good game and that virtual reality will be successful.
I'm really familiar with what Cardboard's doing; it's not a novel concept. Cardboard is in many ways a direct ripoff of FOV2GO, a project I helped work on when I was at ICT, and it was fairly well known in the academic VR community.
There are times, especially when I was just getting into PC gaming, where I spent way less time playing than obsessing about the quality of the play.
I was interested in virtual reality for several years even before working at USC, it wasn't an interest that started there at all. In fact, when I started working at USC, I already had prototypes of the Rift that were very similar to the final design.
A lot of people, even if they know what VR is, see it as this tool to go in your basement and play Halo.
Games take years to make, and it's important that when we launch, it can't just be a great launch catalog and then a desert for a really long time. To be honest, for a lot of developers, they'd rather not be competing at launch with all this other software.
When you have more people investing in VR games, whether it's us or Sony or someone else, that means a greater pool of VR developers out there who know how to make VR games.
The Oculus Studio stuff is going to remain exclusive to the Oculus store and platform. That's not to say that you'll never be able to play it on other hardware, but it very much is exclusive to the Oculus platform.
I don't think that VR is going to lead to humanity being enslaved in the matrix or letting the world crumble around us. I think it's going to end up being a great technology that brings closer people together, that allows for better communication, that reduces a lot of environmental waste that we're currently doing in the real world.
If you're having a very high-adrenaline, high-movement experience in virtual reality, and then all of a sudden you're back in your office, that disconnect is pretty notable. Whereas if you're using it for virtual reality teleconferencing... there's really no kind of impact moving back and forth between the real and the virtual world.
VR is going to become something mainstream, but it's not going to happen right away. You just don't have the horsepower to make it happen on a device, much less a cheap enough and comfortable enough device that a normal consumer is going to want to have.
The whole thing with VR is that it doesn't matter, local versus networked gaming. The goal in virtual reality isn't to have people sit in the same room with headsets on.
Don't be afraid to convince yourself that your business is incredible, but don't expect others to be convinced without solid data to back it up. Ideas can be a worth a lot, but they are usually not. Execution is everything.
