Why Facebook’s $2 Billion Bet on Oculus Rift Might One Day Connect Everyone On Earth, threatened a recent Vanity Fair headline, and it’s not that I don’t like you people, but I need my space. Maybe it’s time we took a break?

Seriously, I suppose humans circumventing the physical world will be both boon (educationally, for sure) and bane (aren’t we already removed enough from reality?), but most of what happens in this new realm will probably involve people masturbating with ghosts. You want Eleanor Roosevelt to give it to you rough, history majors? Yes, we have the technology to do that.

VR from Facebook probably won’t do much for me personally since my ideal virtual world would be one in which Facebook didn’t exist. Oh, well.

From Alistair Charlton at IBT:

By 2025, Facebook believes it will have built a teleporter. But not as we know it; instead of using the website to whisk you off on holiday at a moment’s notice, users will use virtual reality to be taken into a different, but believable, virtual reality world.

This is the ambitious vision of chief technical officer Mike Schroepfer, who says Facebook “wants to build a device that allows you to be anywhere you want, with anyone, regardless of geographic boundaries”. This future will make use of Oculus, the virtual reality company bought by Facebook for $2bn (£1.3bn), which is busy preparing a consumer version of the Rift VR headset.

While VR headsets present fairly believable visuals that trick your mind into believing your are somewhere else, the challenge for Facebook over the coming decade will be to make VR feel real as well as look real. Oculus’ touch controller is already in development to bring a tacticity to VR.•