Facebook's Acquisition & Launch of Oculus Rift Led by Second Life Co-Founder Cory Ondrejka, The Verge Reports

The Verge has a massive feature on the history and rise of virtual reality which includes this interesting interview with Cory Ondrejka, confirming a belief I had earlier this year:

Cory Ondrejka, the creator of Second Life, is now VP of engineering at Facebook. Ondrejka introduced Mark Zuckerberg to Oculus, and spearheaded Facebook’s acquisition of the up-and-coming company. Now, it’s Ondrejka’s job to help Oculus build out its virtual reality vision as quickly as possible, and distribute it to millions upon millions of people. He spent a few minutes telling us about his virtual dreams — and how they’re being turned into reality.

Cory actually co-created Second Life with Philip Rosedale (along with their small team during Linden Lab's early days), so that's somewhat off. (Source: Some book a guy wrote.) That said, we now it is, as I said, this way: The original vision for Second Life conceived nearly 15 years ago is now coming together at the Internet's largest company.

Here's Cory telling The Verge his vision for VR:

We are evolved to operate in 3D spaces. You can name and locate 1,000 things scattered around an apartment, but you can’t remember the file structure on your computer or the files on your desktop. We are very good at remembering spatial environments. VR has the advantage of being able to plug into that... What’s exciting for us is between Oculus and Facebook we have the opportunity to make it available really broadly. When you think about all the content created and games invented, having a larger, more available audience is critical for this expansion. What’s going to be the killer app? While we don’t know exactly what it’s gonna be, we’re confident there will be a bunch of them. And that killer app is gonna be so much better than anything you can experience on a screen or phone.

Read the rest here.

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Comments

[Amanda Dallin]

Your Read the rest here link is wrong. The links earlier in the piece are fine.

feel free to delete this after fixing it.

[melponeme_k]

LOL

I love how the whole series is about VR but acts as if there is no VR as of yet. Meanwhile Second Life is the only successful VR in existence.

The propaganda (what is mentioned and what is in news Siberia) is truly enlightening.

[Hamlet Au]

Thanks for the heads-up, Amanda, fixed!

[adec]

read the rest here still broke for me ...

[c3]

actual as stated vr has been used in business and manufacturing since the early 90s. and never stopped. the only failures have been "entertainment" applications which usually were not due to tech issues, mostly creative and control- of money issues.

[RULosingHair]

The "Developers Develop for Developers on their Sandboxes (let's play with tools)" approach is risking a Sustainable Nosedive again... as long as you don't include Market Delivery and Client Procurement (use case) issues.