Unreal’s CEO on the Political and Philosophical responsibility of building VR “we need a protocol and a codebase, not a company” Godelbrot Follow Nov 4, 2016 · 2 min read

As far as I am concerned, this is the most important talk ever given on the subject of VR.

Choosing which VR platform to support is, in the long run, probably the most politically charged decision you will ever make.

There are benefits that having a corporate entity be in control of a VR platform offer.

But they all are benefits of time and speed.

You will have a HMD of a certain weight faster than the competition, you will have better quality visuals here faster than the competition, you will have a larger content library faster than the competition.

And I believe that Facebook`s PR team is already working on this, in Conn3ct, they made a point at several occasions to say that ‘technology is not inevitable (ie, it isn’t just ‘a matter of time’)”

It’s essentially a philosophical issue, but I disagree. I think that for example if Google was wiped off the face of the earth tomorrow that Microsoft’s Bing would reach the same strength as a search engine with 3–4 years. I think that if you went back in time and killed the first Sumerian who invented the wheel, that we would still have the wheel today.

I think technology IS inevitable, and I think that it is worth not giving in to the allure of having shiny new tech at the soonest possible instant, and waiting in order to have a VR platform that stands a hope in hell of being somewhat democratic.

That platform is certainly not going to be SteamVR any more than it is going to be Oculus, I am leaning more and more towards what Mozilla is doing. But I think that Valve is pushing in the right direction more than anyone at this time.

For one thing, there is no way in Hell you would hear a talk like this at a Facebook event…