WIRED.co.uk continues our lengthy interview with Oculus VR founders Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell, discussing the crossover potential of virtual and augmented reality technologies, the difference between Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus, and the possibilities of bringing VR to mobile.

Don't miss part one, where Luckey and Mitchell cover the company's Facebook deal and where the VR industry is heading.

WIRED.co.uk: The headsets that have been in the wild for Oculus to date remain quite bulky. What do you envision for the final form?


Nate Mitchell: A lot like the kind that's on people's heads right now -- glasses. We want it to be invisible, like you're not wearing it. VR will get there, but it'll take years; decades.

That's just the reality of the situation. If you think about where we are right now with VR, it's like early computers. People didn't think everyone would have a computer in their pocket because they were the size of a room. We're in the same state with VR, very early days. Assuming Moore's Law still holds and we can make the advances we want to make in form factor -- we need to get there to make VR ubiquitous.

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It will be extremely successful long before that, but to get a billion people in VR, the form factor has to be something you can put in your pocket and take anywhere.


That crossover into mobile technology -- where do you see the potential or practical use for VR in that field?

Palmer Luckey: Saying we want to bring VR to mobile doesn't mean we want you walking around like you do with your phone all the time. Your phone is probably more powerful than your PC was ten years ago, so if you look ahead ten years from now, it can run virtual reality applications. Maybe not the high performance gaming stuff but things like communication, watching media, maybe virtual monitors around you at high resolution.

Why would you need to tether yourself to a desktop PC when you can plug into something that fits in your pocket? Or maybe you have mobile chips actually in a headset itself, where the hardware is actually similar to what you have for a mobile phone. That's actually what we're going for right now, where you might not use it in every context that you would a mobile phone. Anywhere you'll use VR, you'll also use your phone. Think of it like a smaller PC.

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Augmented reality might get to the point where you wear it all day and it's constantly updating you with useful information, but that's a long way off.


So something like dual-function lenses -- AR when you're walking around and then VR when you're stationary?

PL: Yeah, maybe something like electronically matted lenses so that you can switch them to have VR. That's a pretty easy part once you have good AR tech. Good VR is actually a lot easier than AR.

Once we can figure out how to have good AR, figuring out how to make it work as good VR is trivial. You black out the lens or have a flip-cover, or just exceed the brightness of the outside world. A lot of the technology that enables VR will also be additive to AR.

Current gen AR is only additive; it can only add things to the world and track motion. They cannot wipe away objects. There will always be a ghostly light-thing around my hand and I can't make it go away. Good, hard AR will also be subtractive so that not only can you add light but you can remove it or add black. Once you can add black, you're well on your way to great AR and VR.

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Do you see potential for overlap with devices like Google Glass?

PL: Glass is not a true augmented reality display. It's a personal information display, like a cellphone in front of your face. If you look years down the road, yes there's a lot of crossover between augmented and virtual reality. They're probably even going to be using the same hardware at some point. Maybe you could produce a pair of glasses that project directly onto the retina.

Sony's Project Morpheus is currently positioned as Oculus' main "rival". What are your thoughts on it?

PL: Project Morpheus is interesting. It's actually one of the better VR solutions out there. If Sony decides that they want to invest into it and make a product, that'll be interesting to see because it means more people getting into the VR ecosystem and making more VR games. They don't even really compete with us because it'll really tie to Playstation 4 and we're not aiming for that -- we're going for PC and mobile. Right now a PS4 is comparable to PCs on the market but even a mid-range GPU outpaces it. Give it five years and even a $300 [£187] "back to school special" laptop will be more powerful than a PS4 or Xbox One.

Consoles with an eight to ten year lifespan will stay at one level for a long time, but PC and mobile will stratospherically pass what's possible. Five, six, seven years down the road you'll have consoles with VR that is cutting edge for 2014 but then there'll be things with higher frame rates and better graphics on other systems.

Are people too focussed on Oculus as a gaming "console", rather than a platform for broader applications?


PL: I don't know that we even have enough consumer visibility to say that. I think there are a lot of average consumers who are just about aware that it exists. I guess people might think of it as a console, which may or may not be accurate at some point down the road, but we think of it more like the PC where it'll be run by chips within the headset itself. That's already starting to be possible today but it's not at the point where we can make it a flagship product. And things are starting to trend towards augmented reality but you can't have something you walk around with every day. That should run on a headset. I guess we'll find out what people think.

To close, what do you think are the wider social implications of VR?

NM: Think about how our digital communication has been optimised for efficiency. It's not about making personal connections so much as what we can do with the technology we have. Virtual reality has the potential to be the most human form of digital communication we have, not just having a small window into where the other person is but really feel like you're with them when they're on the other side of the world. We've never had a technology that really allows you to feel like that.