In his Connect Dev conference keynote, Oculus CTO John Carmack shared his belief that the future of virtual reality is with Mobile-based headsets, not the more powerful PC-based ones.
"It’s still not easy to make a Gear VR app," he told the audience. "But I come up here and I say, the future is mobile. I think as we look towards a billion people, it’s not going to be on PC."
"There might be a hundred million PCs that can do this, but I believe in the mission that Facebook had when it bought into Oculus, of having a billion people in VR. So it’s not going to be a higher and higher bar for performance; it’s going to be a lower and lower bar for adoption."
The famous game developer believes that PC-based virtual reality will remain a niche that can be used to experiment and explore new experiences in order to find out which ones are worth pushing down to the masses.
Carmack has been building and optimizing graphics engines since the early 1990's so he is familiar with working with limited processing power. While most people would agree that mobile CPUs are underpowered for meaningful virtual reality, he noted that they are actually overpowered when compared to the high end PCs we used to have a few years ago. In fact, Carmack asked the attendees to "find old-timers, anybody that worked on an Xbox or an original Gamecube or something like that, and tell them your minimum clock speed is 800 megahertz or something., They’ll say, 'megahertz?!' It’s absolutely possible to still do great things with that."
