In Facebook’s 3rd quarter earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered some insight to the company’s plans with its acquisition of Oculus Rift, and how it sees VR fitting in with its overall strategy.
Very Long Term Strategy
While Zuck acknowledges that the latest prototype of the Rift is getting closer to being a consumer product, he also stressed that Facebook’s investment into VR is still a long-term play for the company.
He believes that both virtual reality and augmented reality will both be major computing platforms in the future.
“As I’ve said before, with Oculus, we’re making a long-term bet on the future of computing… Every 10 to 15 years a new major computing platform arrives… Virtual reality and augmented reality are an important part of this platform.”
In order to be a meaningful computing platform, Zuckerberg believes that VR needs to scale out to 50-100 million units in the next few years, and then a few more iterations of the device before it truly becomes a successful business.
“And when you get to that scale, that’s when it starts to be interesting as a business, in terms of developing out of the ecosystem. So when I’m talking about it as a 10-year thing, I’m talking about building the first set of devices, and then building the audience and the ecosystem around that, until it eventually becomes a business.”
While no details during the call really describes how Facebook will actually implement VR in its business, it is clear that Zuckerberg believes in the computing platform in general that he is envisioning a 10-year road ahead.
Combined with the upcoming Gear VR product — a mobile version of the Rift, being produced for use with the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, it will be interesting to see if VR actually takes off this time around.
