Two things happened to VR in the span of a week, and together they change everything. Sony pulls the cover off Project Morpheus at GDC, a VR headset for the PlayStation 4. Then Facebook announces it is buying Oculus for two billion dollars. A Kickstarter project with a scrappy dev kit is now the most fought-over idea in tech, almost overnight.
Two billion reasons to pay attention
Mark Zuckerberg is not buying Oculus to sell game peripherals. He is buying it because he thinks VR is the next computing platform after mobile. Plenty of Kickstarter backers feel betrayed that their indie hero just joined Facebook, and I understand the feeling. Sony putting VR on a console is a different signal: this is no longer a niche product for PC enthusiasts. If PlayStation is involved, it is mainstream.
The trend for the year ahead
The giants are in now, and the money is about to get serious. Expect a platform land grab, with Facebook, Sony, and whoever comes next racing to own the headset before anyone has even shipped a finished consumer product. The window for scrappy startups to define this space is closing fast.
Mixed feelings. The $2 billion validates everything I thought about this technology. Handing the future of immersion to Facebook also makes me nervous about where it ends up. It is exciting and slightly ominous at the same time, and I suspect that combination is going to define the next decade of VR.
Part of Two Decades of XR, my running diary of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality.