http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/121015/why-bill-gates-says-dont-invest-oculus-rift.asp
The Oculus Rift is a headset that displays a virtual reality for the user. The device provides “90 degrees of horizontal sight and 100 degrees of vertical stereoscopic 3D vision.” The Oculus Rift is a product of the company Oculus VR, which in 2013 raised $73 million in venture capital.
One person who believes in the future of virtual reality technology is Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg purchased Oculus Rift in March 2014 for $2 billion. He believes this technology will soon become a part of people’s everyday lives.
Bill Gates, on the other hand, does not believe that venture-capitalist financed businesses like Oculus Rift make for good investments. In a 2014 interview, Gates stated, “You know, development sometimes is viewed as a project in which you give people things, and nothing much happens, which is perfectly valid, but if you just focus on that, then you’d also have to say that venture capital is pretty stupid, too.”
As a business major, it is certainly interesting to see two of the most successful businessmen of all time disagree on something like this. In regards to the technology, however, it will be interesting to see if this really is the technology of the future.
I think with many technologies, the main issue will be finding a way to make it useful to the common person. By having it in the hands of regular people, they can begin to think of ways that it can be used that the people who originally designed it wouldn’t have thought of. This has happened with the iPhone, computers, and many other consumer goods. There may be a big opportunity here.
Virtual reality is a great concept and definitely has a huge potential and usages in the future. I remember Professor Barton talked about the possibility of the future class – computer can simulate the class environment for us while we stay at home and put on one of this Oculus rift device. One of the biggest advantage of virtual simulation is to reduce environment footprint- just imagine if everyone can work at home and use simulation to do the same type of work as they drive to office everyday, that will save a tremendous amount of gas everyday, reduce CO2 emission, and many people may not even need a car that way . In addition, I think Virtual reality is also the future of gaming industry, because gaming is a much cheaper way to enjoy life compare to pay expensive airline ticket to travel or purchase extremely expensive equipment,boat, or cars in real world. So overall I think Mark Zuckerberg definitely invested on the right technology, but I think Gates also had a good point that Oculus rift may not create good revenues/profits in the short run.
The possibilities of virtual reality is truly incredible. I can really see the possibility for both positive and negative influences. On one hand, we have the advancement of video games thanks to virtual reality technology. Games will be so realistic that it will feel that players are actually in the situation. This could also be seen as a negative though. The popularity of video games has tremendously increased over the years and some like to say that this has led to a less active population (mostly kids). I can see devices like the oculus rift only making this addiction worse despite the awesomeness of the thing.
Virtual reality won’t just help video games and improve those, but it can also help a lot of other people in this world. What about NFL players and play books? That is right, NFL players could use this technology to bring their play books to life instead of starring at pieces of paper with plays written on them for hours. Doctors can view how a surgery can go with this technology. Well, it would be good for medical students to study how a specific type of surgery should go. These are just some other examples, and like I said before, the possibilities are really just sky high.