VR will be “the platform to end all platforms” according to Abrash.
Michael Abrash has become a major player in PC #game #development, working on Quake at id Software and later making the move to Valve to head up its R&D and VR team. Now, he embarks on another journey to #virtualreality as he joins Oculus VR as Chief Scientist, just mere days after Facebook announces its acquisition of the team for $2 billion.
In a post on the Oculus VR blog, Abrash discusses the events leading up to his employment at Oculus VR and the future at hand regarding virtual reality, which he says is “the platform to end all platforms.”
We’re on the cusp of what I think is not The Next Big Platform, but rather simply The Final Platform – the platform to end all platforms – and the path here has been so improbable that I can only shake my head.
The final piece of the puzzle fell into place on Tuesday. A lot of what it will take to make VR great is well understood at this point, so it’s engineering, not research; hard engineering, to be sure, but clearly within reach. For example, there are half a dozen things that could be done to display panels that would make them better for VR, none of them pie in the sky. However, it’s expensive engineering. And, of course, there’s also a huge amount of research to do once we reach the limits of current technology, and that’s not only expensive, it also requires time and patience – fully tapping the potential of VR will take decades. That’s why I’ve written before that VR wouldn’t become truly great until some company stepped up and invested the considerable capital to build the right hardware – and that it wouldn’t be clear that it made sense to spend that capital until VR was truly great. I was afraid that that Catch-22 would cause VR to fail to achieve liftoff.
That worry is now gone. Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus means that VR is going to happen in all its glory. The resources and long-term commitment that Facebook brings gives Oculus the runway it needs to solve the hard problems of VR – and some of them are hard indeed. I now fully expect to spend the rest of my career pushing VR as far ahead as I can.
Oculus VR has been making big moves lately and one can sense that they’re ready to make some breaking ground with virtual reality in the near future.