Oculus Rift founder: 'Facebook as we know it is not the future of virtual reality'

Palmer Luckey built the first virtual reality headset of the modern era - then sold it to Facebook for $2bn. But he's not sure the future of VR is with Mark Zuckerberg's social media platform

Palmer Luckey has been waiting for this year his whole life. As a teenager, he collected obsolete virtual reality headsets from the original VR boom of the early 90s, using them as the basis for his own hacked together prototypes. Then, four years ago, he dropped out of California State University, founded Oculus and crowdfunded the Rift, the first modern-day VR head-mounted display (HMD) technology. This April, the device will get its long awaited launch - and it won't be alone: the Samsung Gear VR arrived last year, while the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR headset will follow later in 2016.

"This is a huge year," says Luckey. He's at Microsoft's Spring Xbox Showcase in San Francisco, introducing the forthcoming Oculus version of Minecraft. But as the figurehead of the current virtual reality boom, he's happy to discuss the wider state of play. "This is the first year there will be mass market consumer VR," he says. "It's the first time there's going to be a lot of developers actually selling VR software and getting feedback. But I don't think 2016 is necessarily the year of virtual reality - it's not going to instantly explode into mass popularity. It's going to take time."