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Facebook Buying Oculus VR For $2 Billion
Several readers sent word that Facebook will acquire Oculus VR for $2 billion. Mark Zuckerberg says the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is the beginning of something big: "This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures." The obvious question is: why Facebook would buy a company focused on VR gaming? The Oculus team says, "But when you consider it more carefully, we're culturally aligned with a focus on innovating and hiring the best and brightest; we believe communication drives new platforms; we want to contribute to a more open, connected world; and we both see virtual reality as the next step. ... It opens doors to new opportunities and partnerships, reduces risk on the manufacturing and work capital side, allows us to publish more made-for-VR content, and lets us focus on what we do best: solving hard engineering challenges and delivering the future of VR." Put more simply: money and connections.
...sort of works for Facebook now? Bet he didn't see that coming.
Yeah, I'd be pretty damn pissed.
I mean I have no problem when a product flops, assuming the person creating the kickstarter didn't know it would flop. If they make a legitimate effort with the money they get, and they didn't miss-represent themselves, then that's fair in my opinion.
But this is basically them killing off what was a successful project. Maybe it's a reaction to the recent Sony announcement, but even if they thought they were about to lose, to me they still had a duty to the, inappropriately termed I guess, investors.
This almost makes me wonder if kickstarter needs to add some kind of protection against this kinda thing.
This ./ article from 1999 has Carmack talking about Snow Crash:
Making Snow Crash into a reality feels like a sort of moral imperative to a lot of programmers, but the efforts that have been made so far leave a lot to be desired.
It is almost painful for me to watch some of the VRML initiatives. It just seems so obviously the wrong way to do something. All of this debating, committee forming, and spec writing, and in the end, there isn't anything to show for it. Make something really cool first, and worry about the spec after you are sure it's worth it!
I do think it is finally the right time for this to start happening for real. While a lot of people could envision the possibilities after seeing DOOM or Quake, it is really only now that we have general purpose hardware acceleration that things are actually flexible enough to be used as a creative medium without constantly being conscious of the technical limitations.
The Metaverse of the Snow Crash world was basically an epic social virtual reality experience. I've always figured Carmack would be involved in making that a reality somehow, and the Oculus Rift certainly seems like it could be a critical part. Facebook actually makes sense from a social perspective as well.
I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people terrified because of imagined privacy implications, but I'm still fascinated to see where this ride takes us.
As far as I know, FB has never sold a hardware product til now. So it's really hard to guess what business strategy they have in mind. If you remember, they even made efforts to avoid the cell phone market, selling FB overlay over Android instead.
In my view (and I understand this isn't universal), when you buy into a kickstarter it's because you want to see something happen. It's like investing, but instead of expecting money out of it, you expect a thing to become available which otherwise wouldn't (and which you then might have to pay additional money to get). It would be like donating to PBS, receiving your mug, then finding out they'd sold PBS to TLC and were buying an island somewhere.
For those that view buying into a kickstarter as a gamble against getting the promised reward (which I accept as a valid view), then I agree with this argument. Oculus delivered the dev kit, and as someone who owns one, it's what was promised, with the added bonus that it caught on and there is actual software for it.
Wow. John Carmack quit his job at iD (Zenimax) to be the CTO at Occulus Rift and then in less than six months is probably getting a few dozen millions of dollars.
Talk about knowing where to be at the right time....
Same with Marc Andreesen and his VC cash infusion of $75 million just a few months ago. Those guys are going to turn that $75 mill into a bunch more through this turn and burn deal. Not so much a 'burn,' but it is a very quick harvesting on their investment.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!