Speaking at the Web Summit Conference earlier this week Oculus founder Palmer Luckey said that he believes virtual reality will eventually become “more ubiquitous” than smartphones. He predicts that in 15 years people will have more virtual reality devices than smartphones. The predicted timeframe does make sense since VR still has a long way to go before it becomes as popular as smartphones but there’s certainly potential there, no wonder Facebook $2 billion to acquire Oculus.
Luckey is convinced that virtual reality devices will replace smartphones in just less than two decades. He acknowledges that smartphones have a long run left and while other advances are going on in mobile computing, “I’d be very surprised if in 15 years from now, we’re all carrying around slabs in our pocket that we actually take out and use,” he said.
He does admit that taking the top spot from smartphone isn’t going to be easy at all. Market researchers expect that next year there will be about 2.16 billion mobile users across the globe with 46.4 percent of them having smartphones.
Luckey is also of the view that augmented reality and virtual reality technologies are going to converge to align, and if hardware is created that users can wear all the time or at least carry on their person without being weighed down then there’s no release to believe that those devices can’t supplant everything that we currently do using our smartphones.
Filed in . Read more about Facebook, Oculus and Virtual Reality (VR).