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It has been seven years since Palmer Luckey appeared on the cover of WIRED magazine. The June 2014 issue read: “This child is about to change games, movies, television, music, design, medicine, sex, sports, art, travel, social networking, education and reality.” In 2016, Facebook acquired its virtual reality company, Oculus, for $ 2 billion. It now invests $ 18.5 trillion annually in research and development, and Facebook Reality Labs, the company’s augmented reality / virtual reality division, accounts for 20% of its total workforce. no sign of slowing down. But for many years, despite billions of dollars and a year-long pandemic requiring home entertainment, the results so far have been pretty poor. Headphones are tidier and games are more profitable, but still our minds continue to collectively without turning on.
It’s not just Facebook and Oculus. In May 2016, The cover story of WIRED Magic Leap, a “mysterious startup, a quest for money and a quest to create a new kind of reality,” was presented to readers. Magic Leap was developing a set of semi-transparent “Mixed Reality” glasses that can integrate virtual objects into the user’s physical environment. The company raised more than $ 2 billion among investors in A Silicon Valley. It seemed like the biggest hardware leap since the iPhone. But the real product never experienced a unique mock-up. Company It laid off 1,000 employees In 2020, he hired a new CEO and focused on tighter business applications. The future of mixed reality is the future.
In a way, those not-so-perfect results have had no effect on VR confidence. In fact, Facebook doubled on Monday, announcing a new team Horizons is part of a company dedicated to developing the VR world. Mark Zuckerberg he recently told Facebook staff over the next five years he hopes to “move from what people mostly see as a social media company to a metabersco company”. It seems that Silicon Valley billionaires and venture capitalists are not able to say no to stylish headphones with a big dream. And this is 35 years old: Jaron Lanier was Palmer Luckey in the 1980s and 1990s!
Technology is always there about to turn a corner, about having something more than a play device, about to revolutionize areas such as architecture, defense, and medicine. The future of work, entertainment, travel and society is always on the threshold of a tremendous virtual renewal. VR is like a rich white child with a famous parent: he doesn’t stop failing upwards, always graded a generous curve, always judged by “potential” rather than results.
That’s one reason It offers VR a number of second chances (if you will, the lineage of VR), which has played a very large role in the popular science fiction built around our collective image of the future. William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in his 1984 book Neuromancer. The term later became synonymous with the World Wide Web, but Gibson’s initial rendition was of a virtual realm where “console cowboys” could enter and exit. Gibson and his fellow cyberpunk formed a hard-fought tech culture in the 1980s, before the dotcom boom, before the tech bros.
When Lanier introduced the big screens and datagloves on his head in 1987, he invited tech enthusiasts to see them as the first inhabitants of the virtual future they saw in cyberpunk novels. Neal Stephenson in 1992 Snow Crash and Ernest Cline’s 2011 Ready Player One they were later successful science fiction successors, whose stories were developed in the future of VR fiction.
When Zuckerberg he says that he has been “thinking about these things ever since.” [he] he was in middle school and had just started coding, ”it’s not hard to guess what book he was reading at the time. For Gen X and Millennial tech entrepreneurs who now dominate Silicon Valley, their science fiction stories of their youth have always taken VR as the environment of the technological landscape of the future.
Like the current billionaire space race at least in part, there is evidence that inside every billionaire of technology there is an inner child who dreamed of flying with his rocket ship, it is thought that the massive VR arms race is inevitable to take – a single question is when that future will come. , and which company will get tremendously rich when it gets it.
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