Oculus Quest is that good.

Last night I was playing the Star Wars game and found myself just looking around and admiring how my virtual gloves look.

I can’t really explain this and how deeply emotional it is. Which is why VR is such a magic thing and is better at getting rid of pain than opiates in many cases.

But now I see what Mark Zuckerberg is doing. He’s building a Metaverse that will be so magical that we will never want to go back to 2D social ever again.

But that’s a conversation for a future month or year, probably next year as Apple comes into the market next September. Until then, 15 months from now, if you want to experience the future put together $400 and get a Quest.

It is the product of the year and I can’t even think of anything else that’s close. And that’s from a guy with a Tesla and a June Oven.

I don’t know how much clearer to put it. You’re an idiot if you don’t buy one if you have the cash (and, yes, I know many of my friends don’t have the cash). I’m not talking to you, yet, but I told my son Patrick Scoble, who is about to graduate college and enter the real world, heh, that in 15 months he’s going to want a bunch of Apple stuff since I know their glasses and a new 5G iPhone is coming, along with more. The next 36 months will see a deep change in what we all think is the necessary computer. For me, now, Quest is at that stage.

The Quest makes me feel even more strongly about the paradigm shift that’s coming. It will create a new kind of “haves and have nots” and the “haves” will be able to participate in all sorts of things, from new kinds of jobs to new kinds of games, that the “have nots” won’t have.

I’m talking about 2022, but already I’m seeing how work is changing, check out my last few videos on YouTube.

Anyway, this is a magic device and deserves all the fantastic reviews it is getting. If you don’t get your face in one for an hour you just won’t have any idea about why I’m so adamant you get one.

Suzanne Borders, CEO/founder of BadVR, says she’s an absurdist, that she looks at the world differently than most other people and that’s the philosophy that drives even the name of her company.

I dragged my camera down to meet her and her team in their offices in Marina Del Rey, near Los Angeles, to get a look at the business visualizations they are building for use in both Spatial Computing headsets, like Magic Leap, and VR, for HTC Vive, Oculus Quest or Rift, or others.

Right away you see why this startup is gathering accolades. It makes its own hardware so its customers can “dive through” massive amounts of data much easier than trying to see the same data in older tools like Microsoft Excel, or charts.

The kind of data businesses are generating now just requires new approaches. Think about dwell times in retail stores. That’s data that soon will be gathered by cameras and sensors in store shelves and in the ceiling (Amazon’s new Go stores do exactly that, for instance). But does seeing that data in a chart, or trying to find patterns in it by looking at grids of numbers make any sense?

Borders thinks no.

Instead, she’ll build something like a digital twin of the store and then overlay the data on the grocery aisles themselves, so that managers can walk around and “see” where customers actually hang out. This would help them redesign stores, or think about where customers actually hang out considering, say, what brand of cookies to buy.

This kind of 3D thinking has deep impacts on all sorts of business data and strategies. Factories and warehouses, today, often have thousands, of sensors and thousands of robots. How do you visualize data streaming off of those servers and robots?

BadVR has the answers.

She showed me a factory floor (we were walking around this factory floor while drinking tea in a San Francisco). I saw the way the factory floor looked in real life but then I saw numbers and user interface elements over each machine that you could walk up to and study, or, even, change.

This isn’t how I ran the businesses I was involved in, which usually was a spreadsheet or a view of a database.

“I can augment myself and ultimately give myself superpowers,” she says, while explaining how this new way of looking at business data will change how our work lives and careers will change.

In the interview we discuss the next few years and what she expects to see in devices, in wireless thanks to 5G, how she funded her company, and why she got into VR itself.

Back to the absurdist claim. She told me about some trouble her name has gotten her into with investors and the status quo. Customers, she says, love it, and so do many others, particularly people walking by her booth at conferences, but some investors have said BadVR brings up troubling questions for them and they recommend changing it to something more “enterprise appropriate.”

“You have to have a sense of humor,” she says. “Enterprises are made of people. A lot of the tools designed for the enterprise are intentionally bland and boring.” She continues that a lot of people in the enterprise space think that anything with a sense of character or personality won’t be taken seriously. “I don’t believe that.”

“Enterprises are made of people.”

“I believe people are hungry for a tool that is both powerful, and useful, and fun and engaging to work with,” she says.

I agree.

I used to work at enterprises, whether Microsoft or Rackspace, and it’s time to leave that belief, and the tools that it brought businesses, behind.

I’m all for the absurdist future that Borders is fighting for. I love the name, and her set of business visualization tools does give workers superpowers, and it’s one of the reasons I drove to Los Angeles because I wanted to hear the story and meet the team she has gathered BECAUSE she sees the world differently than any entrepreneur I’ve ever met.