Mark Zuckerberg on Mind Reading, Apple and the Race to Mainstream VR

Today we published a 45-minute special edition of The Information's 411 podcast featuring a recent interview we conducted with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, about his company’s growing investments in augmented and virtual reality. The following is a lightly edited transcript of that interview:

Alex Heath: Can you just set the stage here for us on why Facebook as a company cares so much about AR/VR?

Mark Zuckerberg: Why do I care about this? As you say, we’re primarily a social company. We try to build things that help people interact in all these different ways, from private text messaging to rich videos to photos that you share. The holy grail of social experiences is the ability to feel like you’re present with another person. Nothing that we have in technology today gets close to that with phones or computers or TVs, even video chats. You have technology that allows you to communicate and that can with different fidelity help you see what’s going on with the other person. But there’s just something that’s really magical about the sense of presence and feeling like you’re there with another person and everything that goes into that psychologically.