The DeanBeat: Optimism and despair over VR at Oculus Connect

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, injected a dose of optimism into the crowd at the Oculus Connect event this week at the San Jose Convention Center when he set a goal of getting a billion people into virtual reality. That’s reassuring in a way, since the Oculus Rift, the Samsung Gear VR, and other virtual reality products haven’t set the world on fire since launching in the spring of 2016.

Zuckerberg unveiled a $200 wireless Oculus Go headset, and showed that his company was doubling down on Oculus, which Facebook acquired for billions of dollars in 2014. A year ago, Zuckerberg said that Facebook had invested $250 million in VR applications and would invest $250 milion more in the future. This year, some developers said they had hoped that Facebook would open the spigot even more and invest more money in VR apps. Zuckerberg didn’t do that, but he certainly showed that his company continues to invest in VR, with new hardware prototypes such as Project Santa Cruz, a wireless standalone VR headset with more accurate tracking. I tried out Santa Cruz, and it was a really liberating experience of untethered VR in a virtual world without compromises.