Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe wants to make an MMO with a billion simultaneous users.
If there’s one thing to be said of the Oculus Rift, it’s that the team behind it are “go big or go home” kind of people, and CEO Brendan Iribe is no different, announcing incredibly lofty plans for his vision of a billion-player MMO made possible by the device and its partnership with Facebook. “This is going to be an MMO where we want to put a billion people in VR,” he told attendees at a Tech Crunch disrupt event.
Iribe does say that his vision is “going to take a bigger network than exists in the world today,” but claims that Facebook’s network makes a great place to start, and suggested it could be a Metaverse that joins disparate virtual worlds. Furthermore, he admits the company’s alliance with Facebook was partly due to this reason – so it can reach as many people as possible, particularly those in the “non-gamer” crowd.
“Do you want to build a platform that has a billion users on it, or only 10, 20, or 50 million?” asked Iribe, noting that dedicated game systems such as the Nintendo 3DS don’t sell nearly as well as mobile devices like the iPhone in the grand scheme of things. “Do we want to be a Game Boy or an iPhone?”
While we’re not quite out of the “uncanny valley” of computer graphics, Oculus hopes to soon be able to convince players that they’re having a “real conversation” with another person. “[I]f you let go, you can have a real conversation with a person. That’s the holy grail we’re trying to get to,” said Iribe.
Certainly some very ambitious dreams for an equally ambitious company. Basically, it looks like Oculus is trying to build “the Matrix 1.0,” which i’m not sure how I feel about…
Source: The Verge
