Oculus: Virtual Reality Will Spread "Like Wildfire"

Oculus VR, maker of the upcoming Oculus Rift headset, has major ambitions for its virtual reality, saying in a new interview that the technology will spread "like wildfire" and could end up in "almost every household." The comments from from Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe, who spoke to GamesIndustry International about virtual reality's mainstream appeal in response to a question about how he thought parents might react to technology that does not allow them to watch what their children are playing.

"I'm not worried about it, " Iribe said. "We'll put all kinds of parental management and security and privacy features in the system. We're very aware of that and we're going to try to build a platform that really caters to parents. This is a technology, it's one of those things where some people [say,] 'But yeah, aren't you worried that X, Y and Z could hold this back?' You cannot hold back VR. You can't hold back cellphones. You can't hold back the PC. It's going to happen. It's either Oculus or it is somebody else."

"There's no holding this back. This is going to take off like wildfire..." -- Brendan Iribe

The other major player in the virtual reality space right now is Sony with its Project Morpheus headset for the PlayStation 4. While there's no word yet on when Oculus Rift or Project Morpheus will be available publicly, Iribe said he's confident virtual reality in general will explode in popularity.

"There's no holding this back. This is going to take off like wildfire and it is going to be, within some number of years, almost every household out there will be enjoying VR," he said. Everybody will have experienced VR just like they have experienced the computer or the mobile smartphones. It's going to be that powerful that fast and there'll be sensational topics that show up just like there are around computers or around console gaming or around the mobile phone. I mean, hey, we all walk around in a mobile phone zombie world, and we all look like we're staring at these phones all the time. Is Apple or Google concerned about us staring at our phones the whole time?"

Not everyone is as excited about virtual reality as Iribe is. Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Grand Theft Auto parent publisher Take-Two Interactive, previously said he's enthusiastic about the technology for hardcore gamers, but questions its mainstream appeal. He, along with iconic Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto, also contend that virtual reality technology can be somewhat anti-social.