Gadgetory

hi everybody i'm adi from the verge and i'm here at CES with oculus founder Palmer Luckey in case you haven't been paying attention the oculus rift just started pre-orders on Wednesday and so it's going to be shipping a couple months from now so I know you probably haven't gotten to see a lot outside of oculus but what's your feel for this year VR at CES is a huge year for it I mean it is a huge year it's not just oculus there's a lot of other people here with both hardware and software in the virtual reality space and that's a big change from a year ago or especially two years ago when basically it was just oculus that was here and you know a handful of other people now you have really proof that this is a whole industry that's moving together to try and make this thing happen not just one company there's mobile headsets their desktop headsets there's all integrated headsets like how is that going to play out over the next few years well it's hard to say over the next few years but in the long run I've talked about this before I think it's largely gonna converge towards all-in-one solutions it's gonna converge towards the render horsepower being on the headset or at least on your body whether it plugs into your phone or it's built into the headset itself that's not to say you won't be able to tether to more powerful devices when you want you know to have higher quality experiences but for many people there's going to be a limit to how good the experience needs to get before you just want the convenience of having something that's you know able to work wherever you go without being tethered to a big box yeah well you've also said that's going to converge with augmented reality and I'm just wondering are there any concrete steps that people are taking towards that yet because they still seem very distinct people are taking concrete steps but I don't think the things you're seeing it's the es today are necessarily showing those steps mmm like what should we be looking for real augmented reality that has a real understanding of the environment is enable and is able to either place objects in that environment well or bring the real world into a digital space and also represented well I don't think that there's much in the way of that going on here at CES I mean how long do you think it might take us to to see something like that can't say but I'm assuming you're working on it I mean we've it's no secret that we've acquired a lot of computer vision companies 13th Labs nimble VR surreal vision Tec we showed off a video at oculus connect that showed some of some of the possibilities of doing real-time 3d world capture and augmentation but we don't have anything to really show around that yet mm-hmm yeah the other thing I'm curious about is when soive mented reality things like the whole lens there are a lot of applications that are not consuming things a lot of applications that are sort of active and more like computing do you think we're going to see that in virtual reality in the near term I mean we are already seeing it used for a lot of things like architectural visualization medical training people who are designing things in CAD in virtual reality I'd argue there's probably a lot more people using VR for productivity and industrial applications than AR right now here are there's a lot of concept stuff there's a lot of you know look this will show you how to install the screw in the place it needs to go but there's very few companies that are actually doing that in real life yeah it was actually the oculus touch is incredibly cool and it's been great to see it is it sort of the ultimate interface for your products it's not necessarily the ultimate interface it's gonna be one one of I think it's gonna be one of the main ways that we interface I mean some applications really you will do want to have like full markerless fingered hand tracking where you can just interact with things that way for others you really do want to have a prop you really do want to have haptic feedback you want to have some form of reliable digital actuation like buttons or triggers I think that touch is going to conflict' I think that touch is gonna evolve over time but that what we ship now and during the near future is going to it's going to be about it as far as you get in terms of big shifts kind of like when the first computer mouse was created the mice we have today are certainly better but they are not radically different than the concept of the first mice they think if you're going to be using VR that requires holding a prop only a controller the things that you do with touch are gonna be very similar to the things you do with those types of controllers in the future you just sort of going beyond that for a long time whenever I would ask about Sony or HTC it would be we're not in competition they're VR space is just trying to grow so when are you going to be in competition you're selling a product now well it's not really about selling a product it's well there's two things first of all Sony is very much targeting the PlayStation 4 market I don't think that there's gonna be a lot of people who would have bought a high-end PC and a rift that decide to buy the decided my place you should be our headset and sent I think people who have PlayStation honestly that's almost certainly what they're going to choose over investing everything in a rift if they do in us everything in a rift it's because they want to have a higher quality experience and they're willing to pay for it but I don't think there's a mass market of people who are necessarily willing to do that it doesn't really become a competition until it becomes a zero-sum game where when you sell a headset that's me not selling a headset to you know at a fair that is something close to a one-to-one ratio right now the more people there are in the VR space the more their VR developers will start making VR games the more people there will be that are interested in VR some have said a lot is that the real battle is not us versus other you know companies that are getting into VR now it's all of us together against the public perception of virtual reality that's been built up over the decades we have to convince people that virtual reality is worth using that they want to use it and they want to wear this crazy thing on their face no matter how slim it gets and that's that's the uphill battle that we're all fighting together and I'm glad Sony's doing that and I'm glad that HTC's doing that I'm glad that Samsung's doing that I'm glad that all of us are taking this taking this pretty seriously do you think that there's a danger in over-promising with VR still a lot of people will talk about VR not just as being there but it's like a teleporter it's like literally being in a place do you think that that's over selling things I think that there is a risk of doing that that is one of the things that hurt virtual reality the last run around you had Hollywood and you had media and you had people in the virtual reality industry hyping and VR up as it's gonna be this amazing thing it's gonna absolutely change the world and I think they were right in the long run but at the time when you needed you know $100,000 SGI workstation and you need this $50,000 VR headset you were getting 10 frames a second at QVGA resolution there was just no way it was ever going to become a consumer ready thing and what was interesting about virtual reality a few decades ago is that the people who were most excited about VR was the ones who had not they could imagine what it was gonna be and that's what excited them once they tried it they realized that it had a long way to go and that's really what caused that whole collapse today I think it's the opposite when people try VR that's usually when they're convinced people who try VR ivory like they'll try it they'll have a realistic expectation they understand what they're getting and they're able to understand how it'll get better but they see that it actually does make sense and that is gonna be a cool thing I think it's mostly people who haven't tried VR who have artificially inflated expectations and the best thing we can do is get VR in front of their eyes as fast as we can so they can see what this is gonna be how it's gonna get better and how it's gonna become part of their lives well it's been great having you on and thank you thank you very much