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Why Facebook’s $2 Billion Bet on Oculus Rift Might One Day Connect Everyone on Earth
Mark Zuckerberg made a $2 billion bet on a virtual-reality headset called the Oculus Rift, brainchild of 22-year-old Palmer Luckey, who sold his Kickstarter-funded breakthrough to Facebook this spring.
The first time Mark Zuckerberg put on the awkward headset he knew. This is ready, he thought. This is the future.
On the outside, the Oculus Rift didn’t look like much: a matte-black box, roughly the size of a brick, that hung from his face like giant ski goggles, a tangle of cords running from the back of his head to the back of a small desktop computer. It looked futuristic, but not pretty—the kind of thing a teenager might create to approximate his vision of the future, which, in fact, is exactly how this particular device had come into being. The Rift’s creator, Palmer Luckey, was a 17-year-old sci-fi geek when he started building the prototype in his parents’ garage, in Long Beach, California. He took it to the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, where he raised an astonishing $2.4 million, and then to Silicon Valley, and now, just four years later, here it was sitting on the face of the most powerful man in the technology world.
For years, Zuckerberg had pushed, almost single-mindedly, for growth. With Sandberg’s help he had transformed Facebook into a communications platform that hundreds of millions of people essentially keep open on their phones all the time. “When you get started as a college student you limit your scope,” he says. At first, “it’s like, ‘I’m going to build this thing for the community around me.’ Then it’s ‘I’m going to build this service for people on the Internet.’ But at some point you get to a scale where you decide we can actually solve these bigger problems that will shape the world over the next decade.”
Lately he’d been thinking about what should come next. What, he’d been asking, is the next great computation platform? What comes after the smartphone? Zuckerberg believed that the answer was headsets that provide “immersive 3-D experiences”—movies and television, naturally, but also games, lectures, and business meetings. These headsets would eventually scan our brains, then transmit our thoughts to our friends the way we share baby pictures on Facebook today. “Eventually I think we’re going to have technology where we can communicate our full sensory experience and emotions to someone through thought,” he told me in an interview in his office. Then he added, helpfully, “There’s a lot of interesting research into that, where people have some band on their head…. You can look into it if you’re interested.”
It sounded a little bit insane, but Zuckerberg wasn’t joking. “There are certain things in the future that you know will happen,” he continued. “The real challenge is figuring out what’s possible now and how exactly do you make it.”
And now here it was: the Oculus Rift, which Facebook will begin shipping to customers early next year. It isn’t the first virtual-reality (V.R.) headset to hit the market, but at around $1,500 for the device and the computer you need to run it, it will be the first that is both sophisticated and relatively inexpensive. (Oculus helped create a much cruder $200 face mask to be used with Samsung cell phones.) It’s also the first headset that doesn’t give users motion sickness.
In March 2014, Zuckerberg announced that he would buy Oculus VR for more than $2 billion, and suddenly the question of what is possible now was not so hard to predict. The top two manufacturers of video-game consoles—Sony and Microsoft—are both preparing to release their own headsets in the next year. And just months after the Oculus acquisition was announced, Facebook’s chief competitor, Google, unveiled a virtual-reality-on-the-cheap offering, Google Cardboard, which involves slipping a smartphone into a headset made of a few dollars’ worth of corrugated paper. The press called it “Oculus Thrift.”
As the Oculus Rift is about to hit the market, Zuckerberg is cautious. “It’ll ramp up slowly,” he says. “The first smartphones … I don’t know if they sold a million units in the first year. But it kind of doubles and triples each year, and you end up with something that tens of millions of people have. And now it’s a real thing.”
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