The Next Major Computing Platform We'll All Be Using Will Make Smart Phones Seem Trivial

What's the next big platform or medium after smart phones?

Chris Dixon, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz believes its going to be virtual reality.

On his blog he recently linked to a story in the California Sunday Magazine by Carina Chocano. In that story, virtual reality expert Chris Milk said the following:

"This is the last medium. We're at the very beginning of it, but version 147 is The Matrix or Total Recall. Our brain is no longer translating an approximation of the story. You read a book; your brain reads letters printed in ink on paper and transforms that into a world. You watch a movie; you're seeing imagery inside of a rectangle while you're sitting inside a room, and your brain translates that into a world. And you connect to this even though you know it's not real, but because you're in the habit of suspending disbelief.

"With virtual reality, you're essentially hacking the visual-audio system of your brain and feeding it a set of stimuli that's close enough to the stimuli it expects that it sees it as truth. Instead of suspending your disbelief, you actually have to remind yourself not to believe."

This is why Facebook paid $2 billion for virtual reality company Oculus Rift.

"Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face -- just by putting on goggles in your home," Mark Zuckerberg said when the acquisition was announced. "History suggests that there will be more platforms to come. Today's acquisition is a long-term bet on the future of computing."

(Part of Facebook's thinking was that it was too slow adopting mobile, and it didn't want to be behind again when the next major platform comes out. And Facebook is betting that platform is virtual reality.)