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Hi, this is the A16Z podcast. I'm Kyle Russell, a deal partner here at the firm looking at

virtual reality and augmented reality, among a few other things. I'm joined today by two people

who know a lot about VR. I'll let them introduce themselves so you can put a name to a voice.

Saku, if you'd like to start off. Hey, I'm Sackendala, Panthe-Ratner. I'm a research, I'm Sarkandala, Pantirt Rettner. I'm a research, I'm on the deal in research team here in

Driesen Horowitz. I focus on VR and amongst other emerging technologies. Before this, I was an intern at

Oculus. And hi, my name is Bo Cronin. I have a background in computer science and perceptual and

computational neuroscience, and I've become particularly interested

in VR recently because it allows us to in many ways expand our perception of both the real world

and worlds that we get to make up from scratch. So thanks you both for joining today. I'm really

excited to talk about, you know, kind of where VR is at and, you know,

what aspects of it, I think, are maybe underconsidered by people who just kind of look at it as a

raw set of technologies of things that track motion and our screens attached to someone's face.

I think that there's a lot of aspects where, you know, if you look at mobile or desktop computing

and other ways that we use technologies, aspects that are commonly discussed aren't even brought

up sometimes when you're looking at VR.

So one of the things I'd like to kind of just check in on first is where VR is at today

in terms of the technology and in the commercial space.

So recently, Samsung and Oculus released the Gear VR. Saku, you actually used to work at

Oculus, so maybe it'd be fun for you to talk about where the consumer platform is at today.

Right. So the big thing with Oculus is that the VR headsets, which had been around for maybe 10, 15 years before that, finally became affordable and also usable.

So we got the right ratio of being VR high quality enough and also it's reasonable for the average person to buy one.

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