Vanity Fair magazine has a lengthy story on Facebook’s purchase of Oculus Rift, and plans for the future of VR. There’s also more on AR, Augmented Reality, and the leading buzz generator for that, “Magic Leap”.
The potential impacts of VR and AR are ginormous, and will be hard to predict accurately; so what we can do now is just try to stay as informed as we can as things develop. This article emphasizes the personalities of those involved, and what sort of person is playing with what other sort of person to make the future happen.
Notably, there’s no faceless corporate or government institution involved really, just Zuckerberg with his billions and a startup guy with a hot product.
It’s not hard to imagine some similar pairing moving the “learning paradigm” forward in years to come, with breakout and breakthrough hardware and software. And as “media” becomes closer and closer to “reality” we need to understand media more than ever, as Lanier hints at here:
As the V.R. pioneer turned cultural critic Jaron Lanier says, “The most amazing moment of virtual reality is when you leave it, not when you’re in it”—the appreciation of life’s small moments that one experiences after battling make-believe dinosaurs or flying like Superman. “You have really never seen reality until you’ve just come out of virtual reality,” Lanier has said.
We live in a time of sky’s the limit possibilities, which can also seem very unreal at times. OTOH, we look around at what is already happening with communication and AI technology, and it’s hard not to dream big.
Less than a week after shaking hands on the deal, Zuckerberg announced the acquisition on his Facebook page. He sketched a vision of vast possibilities. “Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face—just by putting on goggles in your home,” he wrote. “Virtual reality was once the dream of science fiction. But the internet was also once a dream, and so were computers and smartphones.”
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