Zuckerberg: Virtual reality is kind of terrible today, but it will be the future of computing

While the Oculus Rift's buzz rides almost entirely on its ability to drop people into the virtual reality of video games, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg sees the headset as an important element of the future of all computing.

Last year, Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion, and now we have a better sense of why the company was so interested in the technology.

Speaking at a town hall meeting in Bogota, Colombia, Zuckerberg discussed the future of computing platforms and where he sees them going.

He said he believes platforms for communication and computing change every 10 to 15 years.

"Ten to 15 years ago the primary way people were connecting to the internet was on computers," he said. "Maybe you had a laptop, but it was still a computer.

"Now mobile phones are clearly the main way we communicate, but they will not be the last way that we do computing."

Zuckerberg said he believes that over the course of the next 10 to 15 years there will be an evolution from mobile to a "more natural" way of communicating and computing, something "even more built into our lives than mobile phones are."

"I think it's pretty easy to imagine that in the future we will have something that we can wear that will look just like normal glasses so it won't look weird like some of the stuff that exists today," he said. "And you'll just have context about what's going on in the world around you and being able to communicate with people and not have to disrupt your conversations by looking down or be interruptive.

"I think that's going to be really powerful."

That said, it won't be an easy thing to make happen, he added, and it will go through some rough iterations.

"You all remember the first mobile phones were terrible and that's kind of the stage we're at now with virtual reality and augmented reality," he said. "It's just extremely early stage and the early stuff is very rough still.

"But I think that's going to be a really important trend."

Eventually, in 10, 15 or 20 years, Zuckerberg said he sees virtual and augmented reality becoming the next major platform.

"There will be another platform after computers that becomes the primary computing platform and we're really excited to build that as well," said Zuckerberg. "We're working on that with Oculus, which is, I think, by far the leader in virtual reality at this point and it's going to be very exciting to see how that develops."