After spending $2 billion acquiring Oculus early last year, Facebook has just announced it has "dramatically" increased its investment into virtual reality, where it will spend even more money on VR over the next decade.
Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer spoke with the Financial Times during the Oculus Connect developer conference in LA last week, where he said: "We are investing more year over year... We've got a multiyear plan for this worked out over a fairly long time horizon". Schroepfer didn't state a specific number, but he did say that Facebook will spend hundreds of millions of dollars bringing the Rift to the market, and over the coming years, it will turn into billions of dollars.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he thinks VR will become a dominant communications and entertainment technology (something we totally agree with) and that the early Rift sales will increase "slowly" when it launches early next year. Schroepfer added: "When we started to get engaged in this, the big conversation we had was that this is going to take a long time and it will require a sustained commitment from us over many years, more like a decade, to really see this through and solve all the technical, content or artistic problems we need to solve. But if we can do this, it's going to be the most interesting thing we're ever going to work on".