In a Facebook post last Saturday, Mark Zuckerberg laid the foundation for what he and his team at Facebook plan to do within the next decade. There was a lot of insight given from Mr. Zuckerberg, but something we wanted to touch on is the talk of bettering the world through groundbreaking technology.
Zuckerberg talks about how the next great platform will be coming from both AR and VR. He speaks on how AR glasses are going to change the way we interact with technolgy, and that seems to be the way things are trending as of now. He also talks about how housing prices could drop in major cities thanks to VR. This could be done by remote workspaces.
Working from anywhere in the world via a VR headset seems like the (productive) ceiling for virtual reality. The entire section of his post about the next computing platform can be found below. If you are interested in reading the entire post, you can check that out on Zuckerberg’s Facebook page.
The Next Computing Platform
The technology platform of the 2010s was the mobile phone. The platform of the 2000s before that was about the web, and the 1990s was the desktop computer. Each computing platform becomes more ubiquitously accessible and natural for us to interact with. While I expect phones to still be our primary devices through most of this decade, at some point in the 2020s, we will get breakthrough augmented reality glasses that will redefine our relationship with technology.
Augmented and virtual reality are about delivering a sense of presence — the feeling that you’re right there with another person or in another place. Instead of having devices that take us away from the people around us, the next platform will help us be more present with each other and will help the technology get out of the way. Even though some of the early devices seem clunky, I think these will be the most human and social technology platforms anyone has built yet.
The ability to be “present” anywhere will also help us address some of the biggest social issues of our day — like ballooning housing costs and inequality of opportunity by geography. Today, many people feel like they have to move to cities because that’s where the jobs are. But there isn’t enough housing in many cities, so housing costs are skyrocketing while quality of living is decreasing. Imagine if you could live anywhere you chose and access any job anywhere else. If we deliver on what we’re building, this should be much closer to reality by 2030.
