Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivered some comments about virtual reality as part of the company’s quarterly earnings report.
Some comments about the Oculus Quest standalone VR headset are included in the broader update covering Facebook’s performance over the last three months. You can read the full document posted to Zuckerberg’s Facebook page. The $400 all-in-one VR console started shipping in May — just about five years after the acquisition of Oculus VR. The head-mounted display includes everything needed to have a wireless VR experience with dual hand controllers and access to some of VR’s most popular games, like Superhot and Beat Saber.
Here’s what Zuckerberg said about VR and AR:
“This quarter, we shipped Oculus Quest, our first all-in-one headset with no wires and full freedom of movement. It has gotten great reviews and we’re selling them as fast as we can make them. More importantly, we’ve delivered an experience that people keep using week after week, and buying more content. There’s still a lot of work ahead to develop this ecosystem and deliver the future VR and AR products we dream of, but this is an important milestone. In a few years, we’ve improved the state of the art from the original Rift, which cost $600 and required to be tethered to a $1000 PC, to now Quest, which costs $400 all in, and is a superior experience in many ways. There’s going to be even more innovation over the next few years, and we now have the platform we’re going to build on going forward.”
“The reason augmented and virtual reality deliver a qualitatively better experience than traditional computing platforms is that they deliver the feeling of presence — that you’re actually there with another person or in another place. The feeling of presence is so important to social interactions and how we’re wired to interact as people. Even if it has taken longer than we expected to deliver this at scale, I continue to believe that this will be one of the most important contributions we make to the way we all use technology over the long term.”
