[Stelter:] Welcome back to RELIABLE SOURCES live from the Venetian in Las Vegas, home to Tuesday's presidential debate here on CNN. Now, at our last debate in Vegas,CNN did something unique, placing special cameras all around the theater to live-stream that event in virtual reality, a first for any network. Now it seems like every big news outlet is experimenting with V.R. And early adopters say it will revolutionize all of media, while others are left asking, what the heck is it exactly? I'm going to try to answer that question for you in today's episode of "NewTube," our continuing series on the future of digital media. It could be the biggest leap in capturing our world since the photograph. This is virtual reality. Now, when you hear V.R., you might imagine people wearing headsets, turning their heads, and waving their arms. You might think it's a joke. But when you actually see it, when you try it, you stop laughing. All around the world, engineers are fine-tuning technology that immerses you in a 3-D 360-degree experience. Giants like Facebook are betting big that we will all be strapping goggles to our head and flailing around in the next few years. And Oculus is the company leading the way.
[Palmer Luckey, Founder, Oculus V.r:] I think that virtual reality has the potential to be the most connecting technology of all time.
[Stelter:] Twenty-three year-old Palmer Luckey created Oculus as a teenager working in his parents' garage.
[Luckey:] I got into V.R. not because I was looking for the next likely financial return, but because I was a science fiction enthusiast who was entranced by the idea of virtual reality and using V.R. particularly for video games.
[Stelter:] In 2012, Luckey used Kickstarter to try to keep his project afloat.
[Luckey:] Make a pledge and help us change gaming forever.
[Stelter:] And he ended up raising nearly $2.5 million.
[Luckey:] We were one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns at the time, not because a bunch of Hollywood studios or a bunch of electronic mega-corporations came in and said, this is our next feature we're going to use to sell people new TVs. It's because people said, we really want that.
[Stelter:] Last year, Facebook brought his startup for $2 billion.
[Mark Zuckerberg, Founder, Facebook:] I had seen V.R. before, but this was by far the best experience I had ever seen. It was teleporting to some other place just by putting on a headset. I was seeing the next great technology platform that's going to define the way that we all connect in the future.
[Stelter:] Hold on. Give me a minute here. If you're like me, hearing other people talk about virtual worlds living inside goggles is not very compelling. That's actually an implicit problem with V.R. and reporting about it too. It's the "see it to believe it" problem. So this is the best I can show you. Watch the first time I ever played games inside Oculus Rift. [on camera]: It's like being in a child's playroom. Knocking on a ball. Dropped my hands. Someone firing at me. I'm firing back. So, I can point at the other player that's where are you? Are you next door? So, I'm grabbing a slingshot. And as I pull it back with my other hand it's actually really hard to put into words. [voice-over]: Palmer has had more experience choosing the right words. [on camera]: How do you describe virtual reality?
[Luckey:] Virtual reality has that power to really allow you to do anything. Anything you can imagine doing in the real world, you can do, plus the whole set of experiences that are not possible in the real world.
[Stelter:] Right now, V.R. is mostly about gaming. But you can hear where Luckey is going with this, moves in V.R., live news events in V.R., even face-to-face meetings.
[Luckey:] You can take people from opposite sides of the world and put them into the same virtual room together. Once you can do that well enough, you really remove the need for people to travel and burn tons of jet fuel to get around the world. You remove the need to have massive conferences where you expend huge resources just to get people in the same room talking to each other.
[Stelter:] So, will his dream come true? Well, Oculus is not the only player in this virtual space. Sony has Project Morpheus. HTC has Vive. And then there's Microsoft's HoloLens, V.R. startup Magic Leap, and Google Cardboard, a cheap headset that uses your cell phone as the display. But virtual reality doesn't always come cheap. The Oculus Rift system is expected to cost $1,500.
[Luckey:] I think our biggest challenge is driving the quality up and the cost down.
[Stelter:] The public might reject V.R., the same way it rejected 3-D TV, but Oculus has the potential to change the very definition of a screen, because, when you're looking at virtual reality, you forget you're looking at a screen at all. [on camera]: We invented photographs, and then radio, and then television, and then the Internet. Do you believe V.R. is the next in that line, a whole new medium?
[Luckey:] I think V.R. is interesting because it's not only its own new medium. It's also capable of emulating all prior mediums. Within the next few years, we would probably end up having a meeting in virtual reality. And what is great is, you could be in New York and freezing in the city and I could be sitting on a bench in Southern California or in the smog of Los Angeles. But, to us, it doesn't matter. We're both wearing V.R. headsets and we're feeling like we are right now, here in the same place.
[Stelter:] I think I'm going to ask for a V.R. headset for Christmas. I will see you back in New York next week.