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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.
Fuck Zuck
Too bad. Through my use of the Rift, facebook will find a way to monetize me and what I do beyond the purchase price of the Rift. That's what they do; I can't see Facebook's culture changing anytime soon. Nope.
Please don't let this be true.
I don't care about Facebook or the oculus rift, but the shitstorm that is about to drop will be worth a watch!
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
Thousands of people just watched a twenty-something make two billion dollars with their money.
Remember the Futurama version of the internet. Lets go for a walk around Facebook in Virtual Reality...
No thanks.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Let's hope Facebook tanks soon, before they can buy up much more to take down with them.
Go post your latest frags directly to facebook!
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
Dear editors, April Fools is next week.
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
You know, with Buzzword Bingo one full row will suffice, not the whole card! I've never seen a press release with so much marketing bullsh*t.
"Fix it? It has been disintegrated, by definition it cannot be fixed!" - Gru in Despicable Me.
...sort of works for Facebook now? Bet he didn't see that coming.
Is that kind of like getting Skype in your eBay? (As in, totally useless?)
... such that everyone can watch your Facebook VR avatar from every perspective, and stick his "thumb up" in every orifice of yours. Next up: Sensor clothing you only have to wear such that when you fart, your avatar does, too. Imagine all the time you'll save typing to write about your latest fart on Facebook! Expect ads to jump on you from all directions.
If Zuck thinks the future of Oculus is about connecting and talking with people in virtual... And NOT firing rocket launchers at them.... Well then he's grossly mistaken about the true purpose of the Internet!
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
"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; ... 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."
If you find yourself saying things like this or speaking in this style you should probably just kill yourself because there's no hope left for you as a human being. God damn what an abuse of language.
worse: Comcast
better: Samsung, other lcd vendors, going public as its own stock
same: Apple, Sony, Valve, Microsoft, Disney
Way to throw your early adopters under the bus.
Ok now Occulus VR is officially dead. This is the most meaningless acquisition ever. I guess it was cheaper than the inane SnapChat acquisition but there is next to zero synergy between Facebook and a VR helmet.
Because all previous HMD's sucked, and Oculus doesn't.
You're comparing the Newton and the iPad.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
In your opinion, is it better than having Oculus VR bought by Microsoft?
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of nerd voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."
Finally, someone made money from VR! ;-)
Allot of negative comments here. I see how this can go bad too. Oculus seemed hellbent on providing great consumer level VR. That is what they do, and it's the *only* thing they do. That is why they would make a great platform. When large companies come in, they have larger strategies into which to fit everything. They do *many* things, and ends up doing many of them worse for that single reason. Big choices gets affected by strategy for other things, and the quality gets watered down.
Then again, Facebook has not broke Instagram? Perhaps it is just natural that they expand, and I agree with them very much that VR presence goes way beyond gaming. I'm in healthcare, and this is where I see it's potential besides gaming. This is why I got DK1 and have DK2 on the way. As long as Facebook does not destroy the platform, but rather adds to it's expanse, it will all be well.
Oh, and it might help with the fight agains Sony looming on the horizon.
So, who wants to bet whether or not the basic Oculus Rift will be permanently tied-into the Facebook ecosystem somehow?
Maybe some "cloud" features (required to access support forums, firmware updates, online configuration page, etc) that will be tied to your Facebook account -- none of which will make much sense, but somehow it will get shoe-horned in there.
At least Oculus have shipped a lot of dev kits - they were well built and went out to a lot of external developers.
Then there's the 2nd dev kit, which is nearing a finished product and shipping soon to even more people.
It's a far cry from the vapor-wear (ha!) that Sony has currently...
Besides, if they HAD a finished product Facebook would have paid more like $24 billion (see: WhatsApp). :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Expect the way down to be tumultuous occurrence.
Bye!
Perhaps Facebook plans to use this thing and build a sort of "Secondlife" experience in the Facebook world?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Facebook purchased Instagram for 1B, Oculus for 2B, and WhatsApp for 19B. Mystery to me where those numbers come from.
Seems like a panic move once they saw the demo of Sony's new HMD.
Glad I didn't put any money in to the kick starter. I hope I'm wrong but I got an overwhelming sense of dread from this.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
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."
We need some PR-friendly slang for this new kind of interaction. I propose that we call it "going outside". There could be entire phone apps devoted to "calling" your friends and arranging to "meet" them somewhere...
Koans and fables for the software engineer
easy to explain. from the summary:
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."
tl;dr: $2 billion for a product that doesn't even exist.
At leas the NSA didn't buy it... wait... maybe the did. Fuck.
Linden Labs virtual world can probably be obtained for dirt cheap, and it's the only thing in existence that makes sense linking FB and OCR.
Have gnu, will travel.
Well then he's grossly mistaken about the true purpose of the Internet!
I thought the true purpose of the internet was porn.
So John Carmack works for Facebook now?
Why would you be surprised about John Carmack? He sold out his company to Zenimax long ago.
I was moments away from buying Oculus' 2nd gen SDK just to play with the thing. It could have been a blast.
But now that they've been assimilated by the Borg, Oculus VR has been mortally poisoned. What a shame.
I propose some kind of portmanteau. Maybe synergy and socialize.
Socialgy?
Syneralize?
If Facebook has access to 3d virtual social contact, what do you think most users will use it for?
Hint: porn
There goes that cool product.
Yes we want to turn our cool new virtual reality device into a viewing portal for cats and stupid shit. Give us the billions!
Damm shame.
1). So people donated $2.5 million to start up a company that sold for $2 billion, and they don't see a dime of that.
2). Worse, they have no control over the company, so Facebook now gets to lock down the use of the technology to only big developers that can afford to license it rather than being open to hobbyists the way many of the backers were not doubt had hoped.
3). Oh, and a "next generation" version that is completely incompatible with the current one is now doubt on the way. Since your old generation version won't be available anymore, good luck getting any developers to support it.
A company branching out into tangentially related fields? It's like when that fruit-themed computer company decided to get into the record business. That sure didn't go anywhere, did it? Or when they decided they were going to try their hand at making telephones, what a lark!
I'm not a fan of Facebook, but I think this is a good partnership for both parties, as well as consumers.
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.
http://xkcd.com/875/
"Hint: porn"
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that most people don't like to mix their porn habits with NSA tracking.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
They're coming after us now -- the hardcore gamer, PC using, hipster, Facebook holdouts. Screw this, if Zuckerberg wants to infiltrate my computer with some Facebook authentication required "oculus configuration tool" and track all of my processes, keystrokes, and mouse-clicks, he can do what every other soulless marketing company does and just buy that information from Valve!
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
An IM platform that hardly makes any money and, at the end of the day, is just an IM platform, gets bought for $19B, and then a promising startup doing something technologically new, exciting and different that hasn't been done 100 times before is only worth $2B, to the same buyer?
The only thing that makes sense is that said buyer is buying end users, without caring so much about the companies or technology. That, after all, is the only thing really valuable about WhatsApp - lots of people whose data can be sold and who can be marketed to.
The Aquateen Hunger Force episode "eDork" comes to mind...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'll wait and see, but yeah, my interest in the Rift just took a nose-dive as well. A damned shame, it's the first really interesting thing to happen to gaming in a decade or so. Now it looks like we'll have our choice of selling our souls to our choice of Sony or Facebook if we want to play.
Maybe this is God's way of telling us VR is a bad idea?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
A FaceBook!
Take this sig and smoke it.
What does +1 LIKE mean in this context?
2 billion seems like a lot of money to sink into a gaming headset....Think more about where you could go from where the product is now, and think that other companies are doing that is similar.
*COUGH**COUGH* GOOGLE GLASS
Facebook wants to compete with Google. They think Glass is the next iPad, and are trying to get in the game.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
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!
at this 20 years behind the times >>> Mark Zuckerberg says the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is the beginning of something big: "This is really a new communication platform.
http://www.retrocollect.com/Ne...
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
All you need to get it to work is to get lobotomized. (already proficient Facebook users need no operation)
I imagine $2 bil will get you 'culturally aligned' with most anything ;)
Two words: VR Second Life.
Don't know how well it'd map to the current user base, but it's the only connection that springs to mind. Fortunately as an I/O device most of the improvements applicable to something like Second Life are equally applicable to real games (nausea reduction, getting it to a decent resolution,etc). Unfortunately... well... Facebook.
Bah. Worst news I've heard this month.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
selling mice and keyboards.
Curved displays (just make it 2' radius and let me wear it over my head)?
Need I go on? Turns out, most people don't really want what I (or we geeks?) want. They want a lightswitch on the wall, not "Computer - dim lights". They want their credit card to work (always!), not a display on the card telling them their balance. They want a brass key that unlocks stuff, not an RFID chip that'll do it for 'em when they walk up. This stuff looks great in sci-fi, but in reality people want what they grew up with, only better. Kids want new stuff, but they grow up to be just like us eventually. All they want is what they've got, only better. They don't want new (although they'll accept "new" when it isn't anymore).
Where there were some technological and economic improvements, the tangible difference was community. Oculus managed to connect to a vibrant dev community, and that means that when it hits the more general markets there will already be a rich set of software floating around for it. HMDs often suffered from a chicken and egg problem, few sold because there was little to do with them, and there was little interest in making stuff to do since was no customer base or community.
I was one of the backers that got an early dev kit.
As far as I was concerned at the time, the amount I donated got me a dev kit and access to the development kit. Which is exactly what happened, certainly more than you can say for some Kickstarter projects.
Why would i care if the business was sold for any amount of money? I didn't back it to own part of the business, there was never an expectation of that. It was only ever because I wanted early access to what looked like, and still looks like, the most viable VR headset made to date.
On "control over the company", devs did have a kind of control in that they could provide feedback to the company, and help uncover problems that would build a better commercial headset.
As for the "next gen" version, sure it's unlike the current one - but that means a better consumer product in the end, so if you are developing anything for the Oculus instead of just using the dev kit as a toy, why would you have an issue with that? It means an even more viable product in the end will be delivered, which means more customers for whatever you are developing. To someone developing for this the $350 a next-fen dev kit costs is NOTHING compared to resources you put in for development of a new product to run on it.
I don't know what it means to have Facebook own this. The only short-term thing I can imagine is that the consumer version is closer to market now than it might have been otherwise... since Facebook has not yet destroyed WhatsApp I remain reasonably optimistic that the Oculus will deliver what we were expecting all along with minimal interference from Facebook, and some strong financial backing to take on larger companies like Sony.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If nothing else it could mean a consumer product ships sooner now they they have large financial resources to pull on.
Also I tend to think it would over time mean more affordable devices too, which would mean your project could be sold to more people.
I have a non-game project in mind for the Oculus also and I see mostly good coming from this. As a consumer of a product it may be more of a mixed bag, but I think overall still a good thing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
WhatsApp? OculusRift? I have a feeling that Zuck really has no fucking clue as to the direction he wants to take his company and will end up taking down a few companies with him once Facebook gets Friendstered. It really smacks of "I want to be as cool as Elon, but damned if I know how to do it.. "
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Buggy/beta was not the point. Listening to customer complaints and responding was. On that point, MSFT has it in SPADES over Faceborg.
I don't get the sense you were a backer of Oculus at all.
You and everyone else seems to have forgotten the end goal of the kickstarter, which is shipping to consumers - not just shipping a dev kit to play with, but a dev kit to use in development of something you could sell to people. So the only reasonable way to look at this purchase being good or not is does it mean a product will be shipped.
I was a backer, I got a dev kit. I am in no way annoyed that the company has been sold, because (A) I got a dev kit as promised, but the longer term goal of (B) a product being shipped to consumers to whom I can start selling something that I've developed to run on the Oculus is now MORE likely, not less.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
To me being bought by Apple or Samsung would have been equally bad, because it would have meant attachment to one of those mobile OSs and the loss of generality.
Facebook is platform neutral so I'm happier with them purchasing than I am with pretty much any of the companies you list - except for Valve.
Disney would have meant too many restrictions even though they are also platform neutral.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And Notch has already cancelled his Oculus Rift deal because Facebook creeps him out.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
What good is a development kit for a product that's unlikely to see production in a form compatible with said development kit?
Because it still lets you test out if your idea works on a headset, and in the end you still have code you can use going forward.
Code you develop under the old headset will still run on the new ones, you just migrate to newer versions of the SDK and make whatever tweaks are needed to keep running.
We all knew at least some things would be different in the final versions so it's really not that big a deal that a new and more advancedÂdev kit is coming out. iOS developers would kill for the ability to have early access to pre-production iPhone devices even if they were not quite the same specs, because it lets you get closer to a shipping product that makes use of new hardware at or around launch.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For us to sell YOU as a product. "They trust me — dumb fucks." Youthful indiscretion on Zuckerberg's part? My hairy old ass it was.
DaveyJJ
Now you can watch your friends Drama Llama in 3D reality!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Sure but what Oculus was promising was always a corporate company that builds VR gear.
Yes, but that has not changed, and there's reason to think it would change.
Oculus is close to shipping a consumer VR headset, for what other reason would you buy the company? Not shipping the headset would be a huge waste of money and potential.
To me Facebook buying the company means it is MORE likely we'll see shipping consumer hardware, in fact if anything the danger would be that Facebook would have them ship sooner than they might have otherwise! But Oculus has come far enough now that I think shipping with the technology in the second dev kit would be OK for consumer use.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I feel devastated that Facebook is buying Oculus. I was hoping so very much to get the retail version one day, but now that Facebook is involved, I greatly fear for the future of great VR. It may turn into great VR hardware, but it will inherently suck to due to significant privacy concerns because of the involvement of Facebook.
Oculus was at the cutting edge of VR innovation, they held so much promise...
Truly, with one hand they giveth, and the other they taketh away...
It is a sad day indeed.
Will it? Why would it? Facebook gets no future money form you, why would they care if your old dev kit code still works?
How much is that newer version gonna cost? If the upgrade to SDK 3.0 is $3500 instead of $350 are you still going to buy it? What if the new SDK isn't for sale to the public at all, just companies that Facebook wants to work with?
Since Facebook is buying it, any hope of me buying a Rift just evaporated here and now...
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
YOU are not Facebook's customer, you are their product
The product sits on the shelf for "free"
The customer pays money to get at the product.
People who foolishly think of themselves as facebook "users" with "free" accounts are not paying because they are the products and all those details they post about themselves are the free "advertizing" and free "product details" that the products self-generated. The actual customers of Facebook are the big advertizers who are shovelling dollars into the Zuck empire. They are buying access to YOU and YOUR TIME but you are stupidly letting Zuck have those profits. It's an amazing business model for Zuck, really. The products provide themselves, self-document, self-market and yet he gets to sell them (over and over again) and take all the profits.
The funniest (or most-tradgic) part is that the Zuck clearly despises his "users". What other conclusion can you arrive at? His primary user/product base is young Americans, but he is using piles of money from Facebook to lobby the congress to open the borders to floods of illegal immigrants and remove the caps on H1-B visas to open the floodgates to waves of cheaper foreign tech workers. His political efforts suppress wages and benefits for young workers, drive-up the youth unemployment rate, and drive-up the costs of government entitlement programs (thereby heaping more debts onto the young, who will pay for this for the rest of their lives)
I watch porn with really long filenames so that even the NSA will run out of storage space if they try to keep track of all the metadata.
Facebook understands people. That's why facebook is free, because they know how to make money off of free. What makes you all of a sudden think they're going to start charging? Do they charge anything for any of their sdk's?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Was so excited for this, only to have it all ruined right before the finish line. Hopefully someone will risk the patent minefield and release something similar in the future.
The Zuck isn't. any kind of geek. He's more the fratboy type.
No doubt this purchase is not all cash-- probably mainly stock. When your stock is trading at a P/E of 106 then trading 2Billion of your stock to buy another company seems reasonable. It's like buying it with moldy turnips at the fresh turnip price.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
From Oculus to Cockulus courtesy of Suckerburg...
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
Get your FaceHugger units while they're hot.
Oculus is supposed to be closely tied to Steam, right?
How much you wanna bet Facebook is gunning to buy Valve *right now* ?
-
Oculus VR shall now be known as "FaceGlass".
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that most people don't like to mix their porn habits with NSA tracking.
Then explain Skype.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
3D Movies?
http://www.3dtv.at/movies/inde...
I'm not upgrading to any smartphone unless it supports the ability to take stereoscopic movies and play them back.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I fail to see the difference between Oculus Rift and many of the HMDs that previously existed. Is this just a case where the pioneers got the arrows in their backs and the latecomers were able to monetize things?
Due to smartphones, the technology is now available to provide proper screens for HMDs. This is the critical piece that was missing previously. Also, what Palmer pioneered was using only a single lens to enhance the field of view, and doing the distortion correction in software, which wasn't possible until a few years ago (you basically need a fullscreen fragment shader while causing virtually no additional lag).
Also, to avoid nausea VR needs at least 60Hz (better 90Hz) display update rate, and you need very low latency for the head tracking (below 10ms). This wasn't possible until very recently either. For example, even the PS4 cannot do that in an acceptable resolution, you need a higher class PC for that.
Will it? Why would it? Facebook gets no future money form you, why would they care if your old dev kit code still works?
They would pretty obviously get money from higher sales of the Oculus, facilitated by developers writing software for it...
How much is that newer version gonna cost? If the upgrade to SDK 3.0 is $3500 instead of $350 are you still going to buy it?
Why would it be? The cost is the hardware cost.
To answer the question, $3500 is still pretty cheap as far as game dev kits have traditionally been... but the reality has shifted to much lower indie development costs so there's no reason that Oculus would do anything other than keep charging a fair price for development hardware to encourage more apps across on the system.
After all, a million apps later Apple still charges just $100 for development fees.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I thought the true purpose of the internet was porn.
You see? Mark really does know what he's doing.
Facebook is way overpaying. All those guys have is yet another piece of 3D headgear. They're not the first, they're not the best, they're not shipping production product, and what they have is rather clunky. It's basically off the shelf displays with the optics to focus them at infinity.
$2 billion for that is a bit much.
To steal a comment from another site I frequent:
"Everybody that gave hundreds or thousands of dollars because they believed in the Oculus Kickstarter? Yeah, they "invested" in the company, but had no equity. They basically funded a Facebook acquisition."
Even if you got your rift now, you just got played, and hard.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Well, there goes that. Anyone got an open source fork?
I have yet to see a single person in the community comments on a number of sites who doesn't dislike this move
If you read the Oculus VR forums, there are some who are as annoyed as you but some who are not.
I have a dev kit myself and was a backer, given the stance from Facebook is hands off I am willing to just think of Oculus as carrying on as it was, only having no money worries to deliver a good product.
I think it's kind of a shame that now some people like you and the Minecraft guy are now working hard to destroy what is STILL a great community driven product.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Palmer Luckey explains what this means on Reddit.
A few samples:
"I guarantee that you won't need to log into your Facebook account every time you wanna use the Oculus Rift."
"It it enough to bring a consumer product to market, but not the consumer product we really wish we could ship. This deal is going to immediately accelerate a lot of plans that were languishing on our wishlist, and the resulting hardware will be better AND cheaper. We have the resources to create custom hardware now, not just rely on the scraps of the mobile phone industry. There is a lot of good news on the way that is not yet public, so believe me, things will become a lot more clear over time."
"Sure, we could have made more money down the road, but this deal was not about making the most money. It was about doing the best thing for the long term future of virtual reality.
This lets us make CV1 everything we want it to be, which is going to drive much larger sales and adoption."
"I won't change, and any change at Oculus will be for the better. We have even more freedom than we had under our investment partners because Facebook is making a long term play on the success of VR, not short-term returns.
A lot of people are upset, and I get that. If you feel the same way a year from now, I would be very surprised."
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Because visiting friends in real life is soo 2013...queue LawnmowerMan
Do you want to play in VR? Sign in to Facebook! Allow them to hoover you for all the data you have on your system!
Good going Occulus. Way to kill your product.
Occulus VR, interesting technology now tied permanently to a nasty, invasive owner who won't actually do anything with it...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Some imagination is required to see the potential here. Imagine the following scenario: You're at the Superbowl. On the 50 yard line, first row, behind the Seattle bench (or the Denver bench, if you prefer that.) When you look to the left and right, you see the massive crowd shouting in excitement. When you look up, you see the top of the stadium. The stadium looks huge. The ceiling appears hundreds of feet away. You can hear the roar of the crowd, the echo of the announcers, the shouts of the quarterback, coaches, and players. You see the football players line up. They look about 60 feet away from you. And they look real. You are virtually there. The events that you're watching are actually happening, because you're viewing a 3D feed of the Superbowl from a 3D camera set up on the 50 yard line.
You decide that the crowd is a little too loud. You pull up a virtual interface and reduce the crowd noise to 75%. Now you can hear the players and the announcers easier.
You look down. You can see your body. You're holding a beer. You take a drink from the beer. (You're actually holding a beer in your living room. Your body and the beer are superimposed on the 3D image in your viewer.)
If the Oculus can provide a near "retina" display, with low latency head tracking, and an immersive, realistic 3D image of an actual event, then the above is possible.
Now consider the financial potential. If this device is really successful, it may sell 10 million units in the first year. This is not unreasonable, when compared to console sales, which are in the tens of millions. Now, what will the market pay for a front row virtual seat at the actual Superbowl. Compared to pay-per-view costs of premium events, $50 seems likely. If they can convince half those Oculus owners to shell out that money for this novel experience, they could be looking at $50 x 5 million is $250 million revenues, from a single event.
Then expand this out to other events. UFC fights. The Olympics. Wimbledon. Music concerts. Walking through the Louvre, or the Guggenheim. Touring the ISS. The Grand Canyon. The Redwood Forest. Scubadiving a wreck in Bonaire. Skydiving.
Virtual parties with remote friends in whatever environment you can dream up. A penthouse in Manhatton. The restaurant at the Eiffel Tower. A four story cabin in Telluride. The docking bay of an Imperial Star Destroyer.
And of course, all the porn and the video games will also be available.
Virtual Reality advocates have been preaching these possibilities since around 1995. But what has changed since 1995? In 1995, most consumer VR sets were 320x200. Now the resolution has improved 30 times, with cheap 1920x1080 displays, and 4K displays on the horizon. The resolutions are so good, you will not be able to distinguish the individual pixels, and all that retina hype will finally have some use.
And graphics processing power? It's literally 10,000 times more advanced than 1995, which was mostly just CPU based at that time.
Much of the cost of high-end VR systems was in the optics. It appears that Oculus has solved this by simulating the optics using graphics engines, which saves hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on the VR hardware, but still achieves similar results. (This remains to be seen.)
We now are deploying reasonable bandwidth to houses, so that streaming 3D events becomes viable.
We have the technology, and all the pieces are finally coming together. If Facebook and Oculus play this right, they can start a revolution as monumental to the way we interact as the web itself.
Take off every Sig. For great justice.
https://support.oculusvr.com/h...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I think it's likely that Zuckerberg knows that Facebook is preposterously overvalued, that the market will realise this, and is diversifying into some other areas with massive future growth while the going is good. Perhaps they'll create a virtual world communication type thing. I don't think this is too bad a development.
Those fuckers took Kickstarter money and now they're selling out their backers.
Bunch of cunts - fuck 'em. And fuck Carmack too for enabling this fucking disaster.
Particularly Oculus. I mean the thing is in the prototype stage, and has nothing really in the way of unique technology. Plenty of 3D headsets have been done before, and all the screens, processors, sensors, and so on they are using are off the shelf shit.
Well guess what? You can buy a lot of that for $2 Billion. You can also hire a lot of engineers, developers, and so on. I'd venture to say with a budget like that you could probably beat them to market, given how glacially slow their development has been.
I really can't see how there is anywhere near that kind of value to this. It has no market share, no product, it is just a concept in development.
Their hardware is known to do what it is advertised to do, be reasonably well built, and not have a bunch of BS tie-ins. If you buy a MS keyboard or mouse, well that's what you get. You don't have to install "Bing, for your Mouse!" or some shit like that to make it work. You plug it in to the computer, it does its thing. It isn't prevented from working under Linux or anything like that. I know plenty of Linux types that do not care for MS software, but like their hardware.
AFIACT, that community just went down the shitter. I don't suppose the community was worth $2 billion to Oculus, anyway.
Markus Persson stopped further progress on a Rift version of Minecraft because of Facebook's involvement. Much respect to Notch for choosing to keep his hands clean of anything FB. There's been quite a bit of bewilderment over his position. If you don't understand where he's coming from after this whole time, I'd stop trying to understand.
Notch's move restores some of my faith in common sense. Well done, Notch. I don't even play Minecraft, maybe I should take a look at it.
I've read the marketing fluff .... what's the real reason Zuck parted with $2bln? There has to be profit in there somewhere.
Follow the gold, and show me the money.
Where's that "like" button?
File not found. Fake it(Y/N)? _
I hope it comes with the e-iano upgrade. I always wanted to hear all of my songs played as a single ragtime tune.
Yes, because we all know that technology never evolves. This thing will always remain big and heavy, and no amount of Facebook money will ever allow for a rev 2.0 design that is smaller, lighter, more stylish, or more capable.
I mean, aren't you still sporting a cell phone like Gordon Gekko? Doesn't your laptop still weigh 25 pounds?
Shooting rockers at them.
shut up or he'll buy that too.
/not sure if a bad thing or not
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I really hope you forgot to delay this to be posted on April Fools day. Because truthfully, this is hilarious. What, do I get to be stalked by my ex'es in 3D now? XD
1. Zuck's wants to turn OR into a 21st century ::Cue::Cat! I predict many LULZ coming in the futar!
2. Does FB really have the gumption to embrace VRs ultimate market, pr0n?
Social porn apps would be a bad thing because I use porn specifically because I'm anti-social and can't stand the rest of humanity.
antisocial apps, hmmmmm.... drone-based pizza/beer/lube delivery right to your basement.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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."
We need some PR-friendly slang for this new kind of interaction. I propose that we call it "going outside". There could be entire phone apps devoted to "calling" your friends and arranging to "meet" them somewhere...
1. People are physically distant from each other. My in-laws would love to be able to VR into their grandchildren's world, visit on birthdays, etc. rather than Skype.
2. Have you even watched teenagers interact nowadays? Even when they are physically next to each other, they text each other. They take pictures of each other and send them to each other. It's just weird. Try watching 4 kids, each with a tablet, playing Clash of Clans. They will text each other!! When the person is right next to them!!! With Rifts, they would, literally, sit next to each other and do stuff, either in a shared virtual space, or different spaces, and take pictures and send them to each other.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
Listen guys I know a lot of people are complaining about Oculus going to Facebook. Carmack is a total genius.
There are a couple of reasons this probably happened.
This is from Carmack's message when he joined Oculus Rift as CTO last year.
Carmack probably started the ball rolling to get Facebook interested. Carmack has always had problems with massive user connectivity to his systems. He has never really been able to manage it very well or he would have pioneered a MMO. His focus has always been geared towards bringing fast paced FPS game engines to market but they almost always lacked very good latency or rendering when more than 16 people would join a game. Facebook has been working on connectivity since day one. Carmack probably wants them involved so he can access their complete knowledge base.
I think this is a calculated move by Carmack. He's also going to shake things up at Facebook.
I think he's gonna have a positive effect on Facebook and also on Zuckerberg, who has lacked a moral mentor that will possibly be found in Carmack.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Valve on the same line as facebook? Being bought by a company that actually makes (3d, non-farmville) games would seem a good thing to me. Valve also sells 3rd-party games on their site, so I could have seen them licensing out the tech.
oh shut the fuck up. If someone offers you 2 billion dollars would you fucking refuse it? I know I sure as fuck wouldn't. He could personally refund all kickstarter backers 10x the amount they DONATED and still be laughing all the way to the bank, Is he being a sellout? Sure, but who can blame him when 2 billion dollars on the line.
I think Facebook will try and become the distributor of Oculus-supporting games
Not going to happen, that would eliminate both the iOS App Store and the OSX App Store AND the Windows8 app store as release channels.
You are not understanding what exists and the ways debs have been planning to release games - and as noted on Reddit Oculus is continuing as they had planned.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A consumer version of the Rift will come out in our life time thanks to this.
Facebook will make their own version of second life instead of working on software we actually want to see.
The hardware won't be affected.
The indie crowd will grumble and then forget about this in a month or two.
Third parties will make decent games for it.
Overall this is a net win.
discuss ways to create more synergy between the Occulus and FBs core business
To me, I don't think you are understanding Facebook's purchases - either WhatsApp or Oculus.
Facebook is "buying out" - that is, buying to gain access to people who are not, and may never be part of the core business. WhatsApp users are a great example of that, since WhatsApp does zero session or even identity tracking kinds of things.
Facebook is trying to avoid becoming one giant silo, and instead is trying to become a well-rounded company with many interests, not just what you see as Facebook Core.
FB is fast becoming the Monsanto of the IT world
They just bought the most privacy respecting company on earth, and one of the most open gaming hardware platforms on earth, and are having them continue as they were. So on the direction of momentum is looks very much like they are headed away from the Monsanto vector. Instead of "becoming", you should have used the word "were".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hey, you remember all the promises that came up with the Xbox-one?
All of those stock exchanges are also illegal. I know, I looked into the issue as I was about to code one of those Bitcoin exchanges but wanted to know how deep I needed to hide my cover in case the SEC decided to go after the developers for cooking up such an idea.
In theory you can get licenses to operate some exchange like that, but for now it is 100% an underground economy. Legally you do need to be a qualified investor even in that situation.
Whoa whoa whoa, the OR (a fancy monitor), can track what you're doing now?
Can my Dell monitor do this?
I would also post uninformed baseless guesses as AC as well.
Remember your first hard drive?
Remember your first internet?
If you don't think we will be able to capture that much data in your lifetime then I hope you are really old, or really naive.
I have a feeling this acquisition will cause Oculus to become facebooks redheaded stepchild. What possible use for VR could facebook have?
Greg
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Say it ain't so! I had high hopes for this device, now all I see is advertising and gimmicky games to get money from me.
GLaDOS
And exactly how much is the kickstarter's share on these fabulous USD 2 Billions?
Because, you know, was the kickstarter's money that funded the company until now. What's on this for them?
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
"The events that you're watching are actually happening, because you're viewing a 3D feed of the Superbowl from a 3D camera set up on the 50 yard line."
That's one camera at one location. I never suggested it would have to capture "every possible viewpoint for every user".
Granted, this would require a new type of camera that would actually be spherical, so it could capture all the light coming at it from all directions (minus a small blind spot.) However, I think cameras like this already exist, similar to what's used for collecting Google Maps views.
I would expect about 5 different viewpoints would be sufficient. One on each side of the 50 yard line, one on each end zone, and one aerial view. This would vary based on the type of event.
Take off every Sig. For great justice.
Perfect for cell phones. Now we can see large screens instead of that puny hand held thing. If someone comes up with a reasonably good controller, you've turned cell phones into a decent game/whatever platform.
They don't release budgets for most video games.
I'd actually respect them if they did that. It would be a remarkably decent thing to do.
However, I do agree - they either really believed in VR, and Facebook's money will help them deliver on their vision, and/or they were in this to make money, and job done. Either way you can't blame them for saying 'yes'.
the shitstorm
please don't give 3D VR movie ideas to Sci Fi .
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
With the loss of good will from those who supported Oculus I am guessing it all comes down to whether Valve will continue to support it. Since it is common knowledge that Valve has a working prototype of their own, who thinks Valve will dust that off and drop Oculus support. I think it would be a 1 - 2 punch, they would kill any reason to pick one up and probably absorb all the disillusioned Oculus fans. Since Valve is interested in an open platform for gaming and seeing as how they have support for all the major OS's it should be and easy decision.
Come on Gabe, throw us a bone.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Yes: Van Eck Phreaking
This is not the funny you're looking for.
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