Speaking Wednesday at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit, Zuckerberg was asked if the company was working on augmented reality. “Yeah,” he said, adding that “it’s a bit farther out.”
“Augmented reality will be here but it’s a long road to get there,” said Michael Abrash, chief scientist of Oculus VR, who was on the panel with Zuckerberg. The challenge with AR, Abrash said, is that it’s more difficult to present it in a consumer friendly format.
The company unveiled the consumer-ready version of the Rift earlier this year. It will come with an Xbox One controller but the company is also working on its own controller called Oculus Touch. Still in a prototype stage, the controllers will allow people grab and manipulate things inside virtual reality.
Echoing comments made by Facebook’s engineering head last month, Zuckerberg said the web has evolved from a text based platform to photos and video and that virtual reality is the next step.
Zuckerberg spoke at length about the opportunity of virtual reality for Facebook. “Every 10 or 15 years there’s a new computing platform,” he said. “Mobile is the first platform that’s really natural, but it’s not the end of the line.”