During a live chat from Facebook's Innovation Hub in Berlin on Thursday morning, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that he played ping pong with the president of Indonesia last week — in virtual reality.
“Last week the president of Indonesia visited Facebook and I gave him the latest tour of Oculus," Zuckerberg said.
"So we’re standing in different rooms and we start playing ping pong. Okay this is cool, but we could do this in with a normal table, so let’s make this interesting: Let’s dial up and down the gravity. Now we’re changing physics and we’re doing things we couldn’t otherwise do. So we played ping pong in zero gravity, like we’re in space. We’re hitting balls but I don’t hit it too hard because there’s no gravity, it’s gone. The good news is in virtual reality there are always more balls.”
Zuckerberg and the president of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, eventually got the hang of zero gravity ping pong, but then Zuckerberg changed the settings to anti-gravity.
“Now the rules of physics are such that by default everything floats up, so to keep the ball in your zone you have to hit it down to keep it from floating away."
Zuckerberg had a lot to say about virtual reality's future potential — as a device for connecting people, and helping build things that couldn't otherwise be built.
“I think [VR] is going to be pretty amazing," Zuckerberg said. "The vision our virtual reality team has is to give people the power to experience anything, whether that’s a real thing that’s happening across the world that you just couldn’t be there for, or something that’s difficult or impossible to build but can be experienced this way. I think that’s going to be pretty profound for spreading lots of different experiences and giving people the tools to express anything that they care about, which, at the end of the day, is Facebook’s mission.”
You can read more about Mark Zuckerberg's vision for virtual reality, which he shared on Thursday morning, right here.
