Those who receive this early development kit will soon get the consumer version of the Rift for free.
As a rule, you don’t spend $2 billion on a company like Oculus without expecting the technology to eventually reach some kind of world-changing scale. However, in an earnings call earlier this week, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it may take some time for virtual reality to become a market force that could represent the kind of “new big computing platform” that only appears once in a while. ten or fifteen years.
“[Oculus] has to get to a very large scale, 50 million to 100 million units, before it will really have anything of significance as a computing platform,” Zuckerberg said during the call to investors and analysts. We still have a few more years to get there. … That takes a few cycles of the device to get there, which is pretty much what I’m talking about. And then when you get to that scale, it becomes interesting as a company to develop the ecosystem.”
Even with 100,000 development kits already distributed worldwide, Zuckerberg sees the first few consumer versions of the Rift, expected in the coming years, as just the tip of the spear for VR as a platform. “So if I’m talking about 10 years, it’s building the first set of devices and building the audience and ecosystem around it until it finally becomes a business.”
In an interview with Ars in June, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe said he expects the first consumer version of the Rift to sell “north of a million units.” He also prefaced Zuckerberg’s comments by saying that the second version of the consumer unit, coming a year or two after the first, would be a truly scalable moment. “Hopefully you get many millions of people into VR, playing great games and other things.”
Elsewhere in that interview, Iribe said he thinks virtual reality “could become the last computing platform… this collaborative social experience where my brain actually believes we’re in a virtual place together and you’re even standing here in front of me.” if you’re not, this is the ultimate platform and this is what we’ve envisioned for so many years. The holy grail.”