Oculus Rift the Only App You’ll Ever Need

Just imagine. You need to do a little online banking. You slip your Samsung phone into the Gear VR headset, pull it on, and open up your bank app. A question. “Where would you like to perform your transaction today?” A wall of options appears. A luxury yacht in the Mediterranean? An underwater volcano in the Pacific? In polar orbit of Saturn? Feeling adventurous, you lift off, bound for space. You arrive, then check your account balance, transfer some funds, and sign up for automatic bill pay. You take in the splendid rings of the sixth planet and beam back to Earth.

That is your future reality, thanks to Oculus and the VR industry it has ignited. At the Oculus Connect show this week, Oculus Rift, the Kickstarter-funded VR company purchased by Facebook, gave us a glimpse of what they hope our future will be. It extended to games, movies, and that little-known vertical known as “beyond.”

First, here’s what we know. Every new Samsung phone will be compatible with the Gear VR headset, a $99 add-on that holds your phone right in front of your face. This alone will prove an excellent test case for VR-enabled mobile apps. The greatest challenge will likely be development costs, as amazing virtual graphical environments don’t come cheap. But the savvy Android developer will be working on a way to bring their brand to to VR as quickly as possible.

Sometime in Q1, 2016, the actual Oculus Rift hardware will be made available to the public for a few hundred bucks. That will need to be plugged into an Oculus Ready PC in order to run — sorry Apple fans, but Macs won’t be ready until the indefinite future.

Oculus has signed a deal with Fox to bring a hundred or so movies including “Birdman” and “Alien” to the little big screen. Meanwhile, Oculus Chief Technical Officer John Carmack is hard at work on the virtual Netflix living room as part of the Netflix app for use with Samsung Gear VR.

Oculus will of course be releasing games, and eventually haptics. But the big takeaway from all this is that anyone with a Samsung phone will be able to experience virtual reality with a very small barrier to entry. No need for a new $1,000 PC, or a $300-plus Oculus headset. Instead, there is only the Gear VR accessory and the phone you already use everyday. If Oculus and Samsung have their way, they will create a new digital environment not only for entertainment, but for interaction with the digital world. Apple should be very concerned.

Of course, not everyone is taking the move to VR seriously. But we sure are.