Hey, everybody.

Jamin here from "Game/Show."

I'm here at the office.

And I just got back from San Francisco,

where I was at the Game Developers Conference.

It's really cool.

If you ever get a chance to check it out,

you absolutely should go.

One of the things that I heard that was really interesting

was a talk by John Carmack, who-- I'm sure a lot of you

know-- is the creator of "Doom."

He's a very famous technical director

who recently took a post running all the technology

for the Oculus Rift, which is a company that

was acquired by Facebook.

They're doing virtual reality technology.

And he gave, gosh, an hour long plus

talk just sort of walking through his vision of what

virtual reality ostensibly will be like.

I think there are a couple really interesting takeaways

from the talk, a lot which is incredibly technical

and definitely over my head.

But there are two things I thought that was really, really

interesting in terms of framing how we should

think about virtual reality.

I think the first was, he had sort of made this point that--

and this is really strange for someone who had basically

cut his teeth as being the god of PC games

and being known as someone who's always pushing technology

forward.

He made this really strong case that, in order for technology

like virtual reality to really make a significant debt,

it would have to reach essentially

a billion people, which is roughly the size of Facebook's

audience.

And the reason why is because, in order for a technology

to really take cold, it has to be

in the hands of as many people as possible.

And that sort of reminded me that, as popular

as virtual reality ostensibly has been amongst people

who play games-- obviously in technical communities--

most people haven't really tried it yet.

And I think until it's in the hands of everyday people

like your mom, for example, it's going

to be really hard to tell whether or not

virtual reality is the roaring success that it is.

And I think the big revelation for me

was that this idea that, for him, he

was thinking of the future of VR experiences

was going to be these much smaller contained

bite-sized experiences, not necessarily

these like big AAA type things that you might be accustomed

to.

So the future is, again, for this guy who's

responsible for games like "Doom," for him to essentially

suggest that games like "Flappy Bird"

or things like that or going to be

pushing virtual reality forward is certainly a big concession.

I think the second big thing that they really dawned on

me actually came after I had a chance to try two

different Oculus experiences.

One was created by Weta, who did a lot of the visuals effects

for movies like "The Hobbit," for example.

And I tried an experience that they

did that was tied to the Smaug narrative from "The Hobbit."

It was really crazy.

And another one I did was one from Oculus Story Studio.

It was a short called "Lost," which

is about a hand that's lost in the forest.

I think that that made it pretty apparent that cinema

is going to be one of the big technologies driving

virtual reality forward in the future.

This idea, I think, before we're going

to get to a place to have interactive experiences,

I think we just need to have these passive "being

in a world" experience.

And again, these are not experiences that are yet

available to the public.

But I'll link to them in description.

One last thing, I think, before I go.

I think one of my big concerns, certainly

on the virtual reality side, is that there

are a wide variety of different players right now

who are in the space.

Gosh, there's so many.

There's Oculus.

And then HTC and Valve just announced the new one.

And there's an open source VR project.

Sony has Project Morpheus that's coming out.

Apple has filed patents for VR.

I think for creators, until there's

a single technology that's really unified

for all different types of creators to use,

I think it's going to be really, really tough to really see

things before.

I think a really good analogy is the early days

of the web, when there were a variety of different browsers.

And for a lot of you, you probably don't remember this.

And it certainly before my time as well.

There was a moment in time for the history of the web where

there was concern that each individual browser would

have its own set of standards.

So if you have "The New York Times," for example,

you'd have to make your web page differently

if it showed up on Internet Explorer, versus if it showed

up on Netscape.

And there was this big meeting, a web standards summit,

where they made these decisions about, what is the technology?

How are websites going to be displayed across all browsers?

I think, until virtual reality reaches

a similar type of consensus about how things are made

and how old they're ultimately distributed,

I think it's going to be quite some time

before we really start to see the technology take off.

But, hey, I could be wrong.

Anyway, that's all for now.

Obviously very excited about all the things

that are happening in the world of VR.

And yeah.

I'll see you all next week.