Chris Suellentrop for the NYT;

“That is definitely the million-dollar question,” said Levi Miller, an engineer at Valve, a game developer and distributor, when I asked him what experiences would work best in virtual reality. Mark Zuckerberg might say it’s more like a $2 billion question.

“The truth is, we still don’t know what the best applications are going to be,” John Carmack, the chief technology officer of Oculus, said during a speech at the conference.

Virtual Reality’s Potential Displayed at Game Developers Conference

Uh huh. Video games and interactive entertainment are a just avenues to refine the technology, but they are not the future of VR. Console ‘hard core’ gaming is a niche. Interactive fiction is a niche. VR is unlikely to replace television or movie theatres.

I can understand that Mr Carmack is probably not in a position to discuss why Facebook bought Oculus, but the very fact that Facebook bought a VR company should tell everyone what they need to know; VR is the ultimate social networking technology.

That’s the ‘killer app’.

Tags: VIrtual Reality, Media, Games