Zuckerberg: It’ll be a decade before virtual reality becomes mainstream

You’ve probably seen the picture: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg walking down the aisle with a huge satisfied smile on his face as a sea of seated people wearing Samsung Gear VR headsets are completely unaware of his appearance. Many felt the photo was disturbingly Orwellian and a dark sign of what’s to come if we let virtual reality become mainstream and isolate us from reality with addictive experiences that we won’t be able to resist. In a new interview with the German newspaper Die Welt am Sonntag Zuckerberg denied “enjoying” the fact that he was seemingly commanding this so-called “VR army” and went on to set the facts straight. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” Zuckerberg told Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, parent company of the paper. “The exact opposite is the case. What was going inside the headsets was a video of children playing soccer in some faraway place. You could look around and you could see the kids playing soccer around you and it was a shared experience with everyone in that place that would have been impossible [to] experience otherwise.” Zuckerberg also said he wasn’t worried about VR’s isolated experiences making people become less social because “humans are fundamentally social.” “You could probably go all the way back to the first books,” Zuckerberg added. “I bet people said ‘why should you read when you could talk to other people?’ The point of reading is that you get to deeply immerse yourself in a person’s perspective. Right? Same thing with newspapers or phones or TVs. Soon it will be VR, I bet.”