Jesse Schell has picked up a reputation as a futurist, but in terms of VR, he's almost a historian. He's been working with the technology since 1993, and was the creative director of the Disney Imagineering virtual reality studio, where he produced Aladdin's Magic Carpet Ride in the mid 1990s. He's worked with the technology since that time, and has multiple Oculus Rift projects in development at his studio, Schell Games. He also works with experimental game technologies at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center, where he's an instructor. He's also the author of The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. Gamasutra caught up with Schell at this past weekend's Oculus Connect event in Los Angeles, where he was demoing some of his VR prototypes, and discussed the potential of the medium and its audience.

You have a background working for Disney and doing attraction-y stuff.

Jesse Schell: Well, yeah. I started doing VR professionally -- I mean, I guess I started doing VR in '93. Yeah, my joke is I was putting on my first VR helmet when Palmer was getting his first diaper on. So I started that stuff in grad school, and then started working at Disney in '95 doing VR -- the Aladdin's Magic Carpet Ride VR and a few others. And then I've been doing it continuously at the university since then. And so when it started to be a reality for consumers, it was exciting.

From your perspective, is it arriving, finally? Because you've been playing with it for 20 years!

JS: Yeah, it is arriving. It's really funny, because when the specs for the Rift were announced, I realized, "Oh, my God. These were the same specs we had at Disney in 1995 -- the only thing is, this unit costs $300, and ours cost $300,000." So it was 1,000 times cheaper. 1,000 times cheaper: Oculus' newest prototype, Crescent Bay I feel like it is finally arriving. I think it's a few different things: I think the six degrees of freedom is really important, and that's possible because of optical tracking. So optical tracking is now possible. One of the things that's so genius about the Rift is using the GPU to compensate for the deficiencies of the lenses, which was a thing -- it was always like, "You could do this, but you need $600 lenses," and that's just, "What the hell are you gonna do?" But no. Now, you have cheap-ass plastic lenses and correct for it in software, which is absolutely genius. So, anyway, I think it's a number of things. OLED is really important, because it gives a really fast latency. So it's like a number of things have converged so that this is the right time.

Another thing is that a number of developers who are jumping on this are the kind of people who have been hoping for VR for a long time, fairly enthusiastic. What do you think about regular people? Are they ready for VR?

JS: No. Well, everybody's ready to give it a quickie try. And that's what's going to be great about stuff like the Gear. A lot of people will be like, "Oh, great. I just snap my cell phone in here and look around a little bit and I try a couple things." My personal opinion is, that's going to have a great novelty factor and people will check it out, sort of like 3D movies, or something. And I suspect that for most people the novelty factor is going to wear off pretty quick. I will be surprised if there are sustaining applications that people will still be doing a year later in the casual market. Samsung's Gear VR, which transforms a Note 4 phone into a VR headset, in collaboration with Oculus

Do you think that there's a roadmap for getting widespread adoption?

JS: I personally think there are a few different paths here. One of them is -- the first big real market that we're going to see, other than the novelty market -- which can be big but it'll be short-lived and it'll be over -- the first big market is going to be hardcore gamers. I would put out there that I believe that there's going to be a sustainable market that is probably roughly the size of, I don't know, call it 20 percent of the Steam market, of people who will really, really be into this. They'll be into it hardcore. Some people will be disappointed; those definitely aren't like Facebook numbers or anything. But I think they're sustainable numbers. And people who are really into it? They'll pay a lot. They'll pay $200 for a game. They'll pay a $300-a-year annual subscription for a thing that is really gripping in that way.

It'll be like the MMO market in 1999 all over again.

JS: That's a great parallel. I think it'll be a lot like that. And exactly how big that'll be, I don't know. Because one of the things I haven't talked about is venues. People always talk about platforms, platforms, platforms, but really it's about, "Where do you play?" There's a reason we don't play MMOs in the living room. For like the entire history of MMOs, we've had one or two go to the living room, and they've all died. And they've all done really well at the PC desk. So what I always say is, "houses have multiple venues." One of them is the hearth. And that's the living room. The family gathers together, and it's a group thing. And then you have the workbench. That's where usually the PC lives. It's a place you go privately, you do hard work, it's very lean-forward. Usually the PC's there. Steam wants to live in the workbench. Game consoles are designed for the hearth. So it makes for a very strange question: What does a head mounted display want to be doing in the hearth? It doesn't want to be there. Because it's a one-person-at-a-time experience. It wants to be a workbench experience.

So, anyway... Longer term, I think the thing people aren't looking at now is augmented reality. Because while I think hardcore gamers are going to be big into VR proper, augmented reality is going to be for kids. Because adults are going to be too embarrassed to run around outside chasing after some invisible phantom. But a nine year-old, running around the yard, playing kickball with Pikachu? Like, oh my God. Kids are going to love this thing so much. But people aren't quite there, and augmented reality platforms are a bit different than VR, although the technologies are really related.