Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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.
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.
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! ;-)
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
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.
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
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.
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.
If Facebook has access to 3d virtual social contact, what do you think most users will use it for?
Hint: porn
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.
Knutsi- I agree with all your points, but wanted to extend your comment a bit.
Probably that last line is the most significant motivator for both parties--
For Oculus, Sony was raising a threat. Also, supply of displays from Samsung might prove to be an unfeasible constraint. Especially if Samsung decides to create their own VR googles. With FaceBook money, they can build their own OLED factory if need be.
For FaceBook, they have to really worry that a technology on the horizon might take their hundreds of millions of eyeballs off FaceBook html and point them in a different direction- just like FaceBook took eyes away from network television. They just bought what might have been a FaceBook killer in the future. Maybe they aren't planning to weld Oculus rift onto the FaceBook homepage. Maybe they'll let it crush facebook, but they won't care because they'll be riding on top of the beast that stomped it to death.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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/
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.
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.
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!
Hey, maybe Facebook will acquire the badly needed "Frag" option alongside "Like".
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
All you need to get it to work is to get lobotomized. (already proficient Facebook users need no operation)
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
. . .teenage girls.
Which is all that was needed to make it interesting to teenage boys as well.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
Name one product Facebook acquisition which it has not been monetised by their data mining core business. Here is a list to help you. Whatsapp and Oculus don't count, as they were recent acquisitions and haven't had time to be insufficiently profitable to be butchered.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
https://support.oculusvr.com/h...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
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.
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?
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