Techies divided on future of virtual reality
FACEBOOK CEO Mark Zuckerberg hailed virtual reality as the “future of computing” when he announced an agreement to buy Oculus VR for $2-billion (about R21-billion) this week.
It seems an ambitious statement. Ubisoft, the French game developer, for one, is not so sure.
Ubisoft, which makes titles such as Assassin’s Creed, has no plan to develop a product for Oculus’s virtual-reality headset.
Lionel Raynaud, a vicepresident of Ubisoft, said he was waiting to see sales success of the technology before he would divert resources from the company’s mobile and console efforts.
Although virtual-reality headsets are “exciting”, they “would need to sell at least a million units to be viable for development”, said Raynaud.
Ubisoft’s approach to virtual reality underscores the hurdles Facebook faces in making Oculus’s nascent technology mainstream. Oculus has only a prototype of its headset, called Oculus Rift, and has not set a date for launching the product.
Even then, the device may not take off if developers do not create games for it. The current version also requires users to be tethered to a personal computer, and consumers will have to adjust to wearing a gadget that blots out real-world situations.
Zuckerberg, who was criticised for shifting too slowly to mobile from desktop computers, might be betting too early this time that virtual reality would dominate, because the trend might take another 20 years to materialise, said Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner. He worked in the virtual-reality gaming industry in the 1990s without seeing a consumer product succeed.
“Virtual-reality technology has seemed imminent since at least the late 1980s. I think Zuckerberg is being a little unrealistic with what he can do in the short term.
“We don’t really know how developers are going to take these really advanced tools and make them into something that consumers can use.”
Tucker Bounds, a Facebook spokesman, declined to comment. — Bloomberg