Oculus chief scientist says we’re all going to care about virtual reality

Mike Abrash said that everybody is going to care about virtual reality and the wonderful illusions that it will create. In a speech at Facebook’s F8 conference in San Francisco, the chief scientist of Oculus VR said that Facebook and his team are thinking about what reality means even as they devise a way to impersonate it with virtual reality, which makes you feel like you’re someplace you’re not.

Abrash joined Oculus VR shortly after Facebook bought Oculus VR for $2 billion last year. He left Valve, the Bellevue, Wash.-based game company that has since unveiled its own Vive virtual reality solution in partnership with HTC. While Abrash didn’t release any real news, he did talk a lot about the research the Oculus team is doing about how the brain perceives reality. Presumably, the point is to design a better experience where you feel “presence,” or like you are really there. Abrash suggested that Facebook’s job in creating a good VR system is to create illusions to trick our brains into seeing something that appears real.