John Carmack Quotes

I've tried Oculus Rift; I've played with the Steam VR rig. Both are mind-blowing. In a traditional video game setting, in a first-person shooter, you can see a tower in the distance. You can walk up to that tower and use your controller to look up.

I started looking at small companies that were running a sort of virtual reality cottage industry: I had imagined that I would just put on a helmet and be somewhere else - that's your dream of what it's going to be.

There's going to be a lot of collaborative social experiences with Rift and Touch.

A lot of people, even if they know what VR is, see it as this tool to go in your basement and play Halo.

Virtual reality is inevitably going to become mainstream - it's only a question of how good it needs to be before the mainstream is willing to use it.

The whole thing with VR is that it doesn't matter, local versus networked gaming. The goal in virtual reality isn't to have people sit in the same room with headsets on.

VR is going to be defined by the content that is designed explicitly for virtual reality.

There's three things that you need for virtual reality to work. You need the hardware that's affordable and doesn't make people sick, you need an audience that is willing to pay for it, and you need the content.

Virtual reality, to me, seems to have a number of different tiers. Entry-level-tier VR is this experience: on a phone, some simple head-tracking, and some quick and dirty, game-engine-quality stuff.

VR as a display technology, as it's miniaturized and made comfortable and mainstream, will be a replacement for all other forms of display technology, input and output. So for anybody who works with computers all day, this is going to be our future.

When Oculus adds hand controllers that will make tools, swords, and guns work better in virtual reality, you'll be able to reach out and use your virtual sword. It will make things even more interactive.

When you put on the glasses in a 3-D movie they just kind of sit there and you forget about them.

I've seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer-controlled; the TV viewer of the future will wear a special helmet. You'll no longer be an external spectator to fiction created by others, but an active participant in your own fantasies/dramas.

Maybe a day will come when we may have to just put on a pair of glasses and see sports events.

It is possible to build a virtual-reality generator whose repertoire includes every possible environment.

Oftentimes, when we think of 3D, we think of things coming out of the screen, but actually, you've got this zero, this negative space, what they call the negative space, which is the scene, what's being filmed in the positive space of the audience. As you can have things come out, you can have all of this depth.

When I heard about the Microsoft Kinect, though, I felt an urgency rising in me. A game you played without touching any machinery? A chance to wave your hands around, Minority-Report style, and move things around on a screen? This sounded like almost too much fun, with gadget-y pizzazz that sounded astonishing.

When I saw how real virtual reality can be, and that we can replace human vision with virtual vision, this can be the ultimate platform.

We look at Sony as someone who's jumping into the space to help evangelize and build out VR. They're very centered around a console experience.

There's going to be all different price points, and you get what you pay for. There's certainly low things made of cardboard that you don't put on your head, you just hold up little viewers that give you this glimmer of what VR could be.

We designed a number of features from the ground up, like custom display and optics technology with very high refresh rates and pixel density. We added integrated 3-D audio, a built-in microphone so you can speak to friends inside virtual worlds, and precise mechanical adjustment systems.

You put on this set of goggles, and within seconds, your brain is convinced you're now in a different, virtual environment. You're somewhere else, and that somewhere else may be a video game, it may be in a real-time movie, a museum exhibit, or a medical surgical training app.

I'm a huge gamer. I'm very excited, and the idea of the Rift was as a headset that was designed around the specific uses of VR gaming. But I'm excited about a lot of stuff that's outside of it, because I was a VR enthusiast. I want VR to be the thing that we all live in, that we all use for everything, not just games.

Virtual reality sort of encloses and immerses the person into an experience that can be really cool but probably has a lower commercial interest over time. Less people will be interested in that, but there are some really cool areas there for education and gaming that we have a lot of interest in.

I really have thought about immersive storytelling my whole career, so when I first heard about VR, I was like, 'Oh, this sounds like it's for me.'