Facebook will again invest hundreds of millions of dollars in virtual reality, which so far does not bring a cent

    At an Oculus conference in Los Angeles, chief technology officer Mike Schrepfer said Facebook was again invested in virtual reality technology. He added that in the next decade the company plans to invest even more in Oculus projects. In March 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus for $ 2 billion. At that time, the startup was only 20 months old.

    To bring the Rift virtual reality helmet to the market , you need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, representatives of Oculus estimate.However, in the coming years, the income from the project should more than return on investment. Then Facebook will get billions in profits.

    Virtual reality will be the main way of communication and entertainment, said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Rift sales will begin in the I quarter of 2016. Zuckerberg relies on this technology in the hope that it will pay off in the long run. “Imagine that you can enjoy the match, study with teachers from all over the world or consult a doctor - all this is just by connecting to virtual reality from home,” wrote Mark Zuckerberg.

    Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe complained that Facebook engineers and designers are not yet ready to create virtual reality applications. According to him, he is doing everything possible to inspire Facebook engineers, but the virtual reality market is still small. At the same time, he notes that he does not know another director general of a large corporation, except for Zuckerberg, who would like to immerse himself in work on virtual reality projects. Before Iribe faces a difficult task - to force Facebook to give up the best forces to work on the platform, which is no customer, convey "Vedomosti", with reference to the materials the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal.

    Oculus has its own Toybox project ., which allows two partners to throw the ball or play table tennis. The company will now be able to use the Facebook platform and transfer data about existing people and the relationships between them into the virtual world. The more popular virtual reality becomes, the more and more it will inherit from Facebook, says Iribe.

    Oculus developers believe that virtual reality will be primarily popular among video game enthusiasts and enthusiasts. Deutsche Bank predicts that Oculus will sell about 1.5 million virtual reality helmets next year.

    Last year, Google introduced the Cardboard virtual reality device and became a leading investor in the Magic Leap startup funding round.developing a device that projects three-dimensional objects in a real environment. Korean Samsung Electronics, in partnership with Oculus, plans to release this year a Gear VR device . Japanese Sony created its own virtual reality helmet Project Morpheus .

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