Most of the people I spoke with at Facebooks Oculus Connect see the proliferation of virtual reality as a foregone conclusion, one thats just a matter of timing at this point.
For Facebook, the conferences The Time is Now catchphrase showcased that they feel their hardware is ready for everyone.But despite the success, they feel like theyve tapped into when it comes to hardware iterations, the companys bread and butter social networking prowess feels like its barely improved in-headset in the past several years of VR experimentations.On the social side, looking back, its kind of embarrassing all of the stages weve gone through at Oculus, Oculus CTO and veteran programmer John Carmack conceded onstage during his signature rambling annual keynote, noting that his own social APK was followed by Oculus Rooms, Oculus Venues, Facebook Spaces and now the companys latest shiny pearl Facebook Horizon.Horizons debut this year included a flashy trailer for what quickly seemed to be the companys biggest gamble and first potential social hit, a massive multi-player online world.
In introducing the software, Zuckerberg talked about people-centric software as Facebooks bread-and-butter, noting, We build a lot of the best social experiences for phones and computers, and we want to do this for virtual reality as well.But Facebook does not actually appear to hold that much of an advantage over much smaller game studios in terms of understanding how to make social virtual reality experience take off.