Joyce Bettencourt Captures Fascinating Chat With John Carmack At Oculus Connect 2015

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has blogged about mobile phone footage from Joyce Bettencourt of John Carmack talking Metaverse, Second Life, Minecraft and a hell of a lot more at Oculus Connect 2015John Carmack: “Crass Commercialization”, Not High-Mindedness, Will Lead to the Metaverse.

John Carmack, for those who aren’t familiar with the name, was the co-founder of ID Software and lead programmer on games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake amongst others. These days he’s the chief technology officer for Oculus VR … the company behind the Oculus Rift … I hope most of you are familiar with Oculus VR! Oculus offer their staff free breakfast, lunch and dinner on their campus, so they sound like a decent company to work for although with perks like that you wonder if their staff get time to go home or out for a meal. Don’t panic, they also say they have family friendly policies.

Anyway, back to the footage. This comes in at just over fifteen minutes long and would probably have been longer if it hadn’t been for the fact that Joyce’s battery on her phone died whilst filming. Modern technology hey. I hope this is legally obtained footage, I trust Joyce so we’ll dive right in and I’ll embed the video at the end of this post.

John Carmack talks about virtual reality, head tracking devices, how the technology is still evolving and you get an insight into just how technically challenging getting a compelling VR experience to work is. He also talks about virtual worlds and the metaverse and I guess that’s what most people who read this blog will be interested in.

He starts talking about virtual worlds around the two minute mark and then gets deeper into the concept of a metaverse around the four minute mark where he states that he fought against Oculus building a metaverse team because they don’t really know what they are doing well enough yet, he adds that they didn’t want to build a Second Life but better in some way. John also raises the point that what the metaverse is still a question that hasn’t really been answered.

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