According to Oculus Rift inventor Palmer Luckey, virtual reality is near and dear to Marc Andreessen’s heart. Twenty years ago, before he created the Mosaic web browser, Andreessen was a college student working in a virtual reality lab, just like Luckey himself.
But that’s not why the Andreessen Horowitz venture capitalist decided to invest millions of dollars in Oculus today.
The company showed him a new version of the virtual reality headset — and a new vision — that reportedly blew him away.
"I looked at him and said, what do you think? Are you ready to change the world? And he said absolutely, let’s do it. It was pretty much unanimous, right then and there," Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe tells The Verge.
"For me, it was up there with the first time I saw Apple II, Mac, the web, Google, iPhone," writes Chris Dixon, Andreessen Horowitz partner and new Oculus board member.
What Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon saw was what Oculus plans to unveil at CES this year: a prototype version of the Oculus Rift headset that the company claims will no longer make people sick when they use it. It’s higher resolution, lower latency, and effectively eliminates the motion blur of the original $300 dev kit that went on sale last year. And importantly, it now incorporates full positional motion tracking so the headset actually knows where your head is located.