Facebook boss Zuckerberg says virtual reality success will take time

What is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg planning for Oculus Rift, the virtual reality platform the social media giant bought earlier this year?

Clues emerged during Facebook's quarterly results call earlier today, picked up by Gamasutra. In the call to investors and analysts, Zuckerberg talked about the company's long term plan for VR.

"It needs to reach a very large scale, 50 to 100 million units, before it will really be a very meaningful thing as a computing platform," he said. "I do think it's going to take a bunch of years to get there. Maybe, I don't know, it's hard to predict exactly, but I don't think it's going to get to 50 or 100 million units in the next few years, right? That'll take a few cycles of the device to get there."

Back in March, Facebook paid $2 billion for Oculus. At the time, Zuckerberg said he was preparing for the platforms of tomorrow, and that his interest in the potential of VR extended far beyond games.

"When you get to that scale, that's when it starts to be interesting as a business, in terms of developing out of the ecosystem," he said today. "So when I'm talking about it as a 10-year thing, I'm talking about building the first set of devices, and then building the audience and the ecosystem around that, until it eventually becomes a business."