John Carmack reviews VR app “Just Relax”

It should be initialized to be more like the real world. The terrain comes up as unexplored wilderness, with hills, mountains, valleys, lakes, trees, deserts, and vegetation. If you own land (which is a server-side thing), you can build it and clear it.

It would be a nice touch if moving around wore paths, so that paths and roads appeared naturally.

I was once naive, I joined Google to make a game engine. My belief at the time was like yours. It's Google, they're a giant company with infinite resources. There's no way this won't take over the game engine world.

it wasn't until about 14 months in I realized that competing with Unreal and Unity wasn't just a mater of 30 people building an engine. to actually succeed it would take more like 300-400 people and a mandate for those people to form an everlasting division within the company of support. people to make an IDE, people to continually update the engine and IDE, people to hand hold devs. people to make 100s of videos. people to run classes. people to organize conferences. people to organize game jams. people to do bizdev. people to woo the top devs. people in all the major game dev hubs in the world, people to localize docs, etc...

this works for unity and unreal because selling their game engine and services is their core mission. for Google (and for Facebook) all it would ever be is some open source code of some under featured engine they ship once and forget. Unity has about 1000 employees. Unreal has at least 250. Their entire missions are to make, sell, and promote those game engines. That will never be facebook's mission which is why it would never succeed.

I think that's the most likely option honestly. I don't mean that to be snarky, by the way. Most of the dedicated VR users now are still largely in the early adopter space and are heavily high end PC users - so they generally have higher levels of technology ubiquity.

To reach the vast majority of people, the costs, in both money and accessibility, need to drastically come down. Practically, for facebook and other developers, that means reducing the overhead on these systems dramatically.

Mobile is the nearest term approach to this - though still unsolved. Again, this is why Carmack is focusing heavily on GearVR development and says so himself [1]: "There is no way that a PC peripheral or a game console winds up being the path that billions of people interact with."

[1] http://www.reaxxion.com/7793/carmack-announces-that-oculus-r...

I talked with the Unity founders at GDC and they have very little interest in putting resources around mobile right now , so I think there is a hole in the market that will be really hard to fill by another startup. Hence, why I think these platform owners would be best to tackle it.

As an aside, I think it would be more optimal if there were a third party focused on a mobile VR engine - but again, as we agree it's such a huge project, with really difficult distribution pathways, that I think it's too big of a mountain right now for an independent group. So we're gonna be waiting around a while for that.