Hi, this is Chris Dixon. This is the A16Z podcast. I'm here today with my colleagues Bologi Shrinivasin and Gil Shafir.

Today we're going to talk about virtual reality and Oculus. I guess the first question is, you know, this is one of these things, kind of like mobile computing, which has been sort of people have tried to do for, you know, 20 plus years.

You know, there was a company, for example, called Go Computing in the early 90s, which tried to do kind of an early version of the iPad.

It didn't really work.

And then eventually the iPad came along.

There were people that tried to do virtuality before and didn't work. And then Oculus came along. What sort of came together to make it happen now?

I think with virtual reality, it's something that you can't do a poor job with because you've got a screen close to your face. It's really easy

to get motion sick and really small problems in the experience can really destroy it for users.

So there had to be a number of advancements, I think, for it to really work. On the display side,

high resolution screens with faster refresh rates, and then a lot of the components

that go into cell phones, like the accelerometers and other inertial...

And just the speed of graphics chips. Like, one of the key ideas with virtual reality, right,

is the motion to photon latency, so the move your head, how quickly does screen get updated,

and so every one of those parts

in between that there has to be incredibly well optimized right but even without the

without the without the screen technology even you could potentially render wireframes fast enough

for an interesting experience but even that would get people sick without kind of faster yeah it's

sort of it's some variant of like the uncanny valley or something where it's like if you grafted out,

like until you get over some threshold, it's sort of, it's a terrible experience because you can get motion sickness.

And I think that happens some with the first dev kit because it wasn't quite there.

You know, and so, but once you kind of hit over that threshold,

suddenly it goes from like this kind of gadget

...