OCULUS RIFT IS a case of being months, not years away and the the consumer version is all but ready, according to the company’s CEO.
Speaking at the Dublin Web Summit, the CEO of Oculus VR Brendan Iribe said that while they’ll release the product when it’s ready, the product is “months and not years away.”
“We like to say it’s months, not necessarily years away, it’s many months,” explained Iribe. “We’re working on a number of aspects but… hardware wise, we’re arguably there for the consumer product so we are finalising the specifications for that.”
Iribe stated that while they’re developing Oculus Rift, they’re ultimately concerned about the future of virtual reality and have asked other rival companies to not “poison the well,”
Disorientation and motion sickness are currently the main problems that need to be solved and while Iribe is confident that Oculus Rift will solve this, he was concerned about other companies not doing the same.
What we’re worried about is some of the bigger companies who are not quite ready yet, with disorientation and motion sickness, I really view that as something that will solved be two to three years away from now, investment won’t worry about that any more as it will be a solved problem. We feel pretty confident that our consumer product will solve that and we’re reaching other companies as well… [telling them] ‘don’t put out a product until you have solved that problem too.”
While the main application for the device would be gaming, Iribe was most excited about developing face-to-face communications where users could be able to have the same conversation with someone through the headset like they would if they were talking face-to-face, calling it an application that can appeal to billions of people.
“Most people travel, they get on their planes to go and have face to face communications… but if you throw on a pair of sunglasses and now you can have that same conversation with people all around the world, everybody, face-to-face, looking at each other… that’s really transformative.”
“Our whole mission is to make virtual reality successful, not just Oculus.”
The other challenge it’s facing is the issue of input, how you interact with the virtual world among other things.
Aside from that, the technology has found other applications outside of gaming such as helping people with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. By putting them in similar situations to the traumatic events they experienced, those suffering from such problems would be able to confront and learn to cope with
Psychologist Skip Rizzo mentioned that while such an approach may seem “counter-intuitive at first,” it allows the patient to “confront and process difficult memories by putting them through similar situations.”
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