What Is Virtually Going On, Specifically?

A lot has happened in the last three weeks.

I've ordered a Oculus Rift Devkit 2, for one, after finally convincing myself that it would be a great investment. But like a shooting star coming down from the sky, the following day, a certain company, Facebook, decided to invest a little bit more than me. Like, a 2 Billion Dollars worth investment. Thus acquiring the entire Oculus Rift team, whom previously were dependent on the support and crowd funding from their kickstarter.

How do I feel about that? Well, with my superior powers of actually reading articles, rather than rage at the sight of their titles, I must say I feel pretty darned good. I'm not one of the guys who found these news as a bad thing. Mostly because I make myself aware of the facts, before I make judgements.

I can't recall the amount of times my pupils lodged themselves in the upper corners of my eyes after reading countless raging comments stating that Facebook is going to make Farmville for the Oculus Rift. But I can say, it gave me a headache knowing there are so many ignorant unimaginative people out there. What do these people think a kickstarter is? It's name should make it obvious it's there to help small companies with promising ideas get off the ground, which it did in this case.

Now they have the funding to hire the right people, to produce a better product, even faster than anticipated before. But not only that. Virtual Reality just got 2 BILLION DOLLARS attached to it's name. Everyone knows now, and will find out what we are on the brink of. Facebook's investment kicked us five years into the future.

Investors and larger companies are scavenging the web, looking for clues, trying to understand what the fuck just happened. The ones who have been paying attention have made their marks already. (Sony revealing their Project Morpheus, Valve test screening their own Virtual Reality tech). And not to mention the people who finally found out that augmented reality is the renaissance of marketing and advertisement. Even at the airport where I work, there is a friggin HOLOGRAM LADY welcoming people.(Which is creepy).

I have never been more convinced that science fiction is becoming reality. I was imagining not too long ago while drawing, what if I could draw in 3D, and use some sort of plate to stabilize the movement. It took just one google search today and there we go! Frickin' Gravity Sketch.(Watch video or read more about it here: http://www.wired.com/2014/04/design_04022014_rift/#slide-id-651631)

On a different note, virtual reality has been known for potential virtual tourism. It gives you the ability to travel places you perhaps can't afford or physically can't for different reasons. But what about movies. There's been some of talk about creating movie experiences for virtual reality headsets, but what about the movies you already love, and would love to see and experience first hand?

Perhaps not even a real place, an imagined one, not even in our dimension. How about evading little critters and saying hello to this guy from the animated film Spirited Away?

Or how about taking a walk through the TV series Breaking Bad's meth lab, and swat flies while you're at it.



These are in no way entire video games, more like experimental experiences that lets users step into worlds they know from the movies/series they love. But they are signs of things to come. If you were given a magic golden ticket that could take you to the land of any movie you wanted, where would you go?