Oculus Rift tech will impact film, says CEO

The Oculus Rift virtual reality technology has a future outside of games, Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe said today at the GamesBeat conference, as reported by GamesIndustry International.

Iribe said the "breakthrough" that is Oculus Rift will cause disruption for many industries, including film. He specially called Alfonso Cuarón's recent sci-fi thriller Gravity as an example of a movie he believes could benefit from virtual reality.

"Gravity was made for VR," Iribe said. "VR is going to have a big impact on film."

What makes virtual reality technology so compelling for games, Iribe argued, is that it enables players to feel a level of emotion not possible through traditional means.

"You have a sense of presence where you're connected to the environment. In VR, you look up and you're still there, you get that sense of scale," he said. "And you'll now have characters that know where your eyes are."

Also during his talk, Iribe said that the consumer version of Oculus Rift is shaping up nicely. "The market will be pretty blown away by how good the product feels," he boasted. "It is a breakthough where you don't have this screen anymore. You have a 360-degree canvas."

Iribe also spoke to Oculus VR's efforts to bring the technology to mobile devices, something the company first spoke about this summer. He explained that since id Software veteran John Carmack joined the company in August, the team has been able to make great strides in this department.

"I was skeptical about how good mobile VR would be," Iribe said, explaining that Carmack has spent his time making "something very exciting that has to do with mobile." No further details are available.