INSIGHT
BECOMING A
(VIRTUAL) REALITY?
Tech companies from Canon to Google have dipped their toes in the water of VR, but it’s with the
mass-market roll-out of Oculus Rift from Q1 2016 that things will start to get really interesting for
consumers and advertisers of iGaming and other products, writes Mike Dodgson of Digital Fuel.
WHEN DOC BROWN and Marty McFly
set the date inside the DeLorean to 2015
in the Back To The Future film trilogy, we
caught a glimpse of what the world might
look like: flying cars, self-drying clothes
and hoverboards were the pinnacle of
technology in a world that had progressed
so much in the 30 years following.
Unfortunately, aside from smart watches
and selfie sticks, we’re a long way from
flying cars. However, the world of virtual
reality is fast approaching in a big way,
and it’s something that can revolutionise
entertainment, and potentially how we will
interact with brands.
One company leading the way in virtual
reality (“VR”) is Oculus. The Californiabased company raised an initial round of
capital in 2012 (of which $2.4m came from
the crowd-funding campaign Kickstarter) to
develop its successful prototype.
Palmer Luckey, a VR enthusiast, is the
brains behind Oculus. In 2011 at age 18,
he created his first head-mounted display
(HMD) in his parents’ garage. Several
prototypes and countless blog posts later,
Luckey went on to hook up with a number
of other VR entrepreneurs, including John
Carmack and Brendan Iribe, who assisted
in developing the product. Subsequently,
Luckey left university to focus solely on
what was then the un-named Oculus.
In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg announced
that Facebook would acquire Oculus for a
deal worth US$2bn in cash, plus Facebook
shares. The Oculus Rift is the product that
was originally devised in Luckey’s garage
three years earlier, and is on track for
release as a consumer product in Q1 2016
at a cost of around $300 (although you can
pre-order the development kit now).
66
iGB Affiliate Issue 51 JUNE/JULY 2015
The product involves a head-mounted
display (HMD) unit covering the user’s
eyes and line of sight, with the option of
headphones for an all-around peripheral
VR experience. Oculus boasts that the
HMD unit includes custom-tracking
technology that allows the user to
experience a 360-degree view in H