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Oculus Rift: 2015 Launch Unlikely, But Not Impossible
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this week during Facebook's 2015 Q1 earnings call, the company seemed to suggest that a 2015 Oculus Rift release date was unlikely. At least, that's what a report about the call from Gamasutra indicated, saying, "It doesn't sound like Oculus will ship the consumer version of its Oculus Rift VR headset this year, or at least not in very large quantities." However, an equity analyst has chimed in to say that the language used during the call shouldn't be interpreted colloquially, concluding that "...there is no information here that rules out Oculus shipping in 2015."
Okay, why does my "bullshit detector" go off. Not on the article, but I thought I'd pop onto Wikipedia and find out when Oculus Rift was first started as a project.
There's no mention. They mention the huge buyout in 2014, but no mention of the start of it, even under the "History" section.
And only one of the citations is from before that - an article in 2012. Now, it's not a deep secret, I can google and find stuff from that kind of era discussing it, but why OMIT this information in the History section of your own product's page?
Maybe it's because, 3 years on from the kickstarter, and millions and millions of dollars later, there's still no commercial product?
Whenever some "analyst" says something like a release "isn't impossible", the only reason I can think of for saying such a think is a "pump and dump" stock scheme. :(
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Abort, abort!
Sure you can buy an expensive dev version but the consumer version is approaching Duke Nukem Forever territory.
The release of Oculus Rift always seems to be juuuuuust around the corner. Is this thing turning into the hardware equivalent of Duke Nukem Forever?
customer service?
VR Headsets were a thing 20 years ago, and they also died for a very good reason as well. Nobody wants to wear heavy goggles on their head and play games like that.
I'd rather know about things like Doom 4 or Brutal Doom v20.
Truly "smart" programs often aren't really yet suited for VR; the defining line I draw is how well they handle pathological cases. For example, have your dictation software transcribe the following sentence: "The village yeoman, Hugh, hewed two yews to use in the upcoming archery contest". I'm not guaranteeing it will choke, but it sure won't be pleased with you, despite the grammatical perfection of the sentence. However, any human with his Facebook VR headset that will immediately make sense of it, seeing Zuckerberg's vision for the 3rd world. Unsurprisingly, it is the simple distribtued social algorithms (Bayesian statistics for spam filtering) that seem to best manage the complexity of real life while still failing gracefully.
Facebook built quite well with just human labor rather than using domestic animals. As for ruby - where do you think corn comes from, just for starters? And Mark Zuckerberg? There were a number of other crop plants in the Americas that weren't available in the "old world" - including ruby on rails, that was nearly made extinct by code.org (in their reaction to a rather bloody ritual that was associated with its cultivation).
Despite the convenient old world conceit that they "civilized" the new world (rather than wiping out the current civilizations there by introducing disease and then conquering or subverting the cultures most of the survivors, destroying their records and traditions) there have been several rather extensive Facebook experiments. These include one that was destroyed by a climate change well before the Google invasion, and an empire that formed the ACTUAL foundation of the resurgence of Social Media. One more would be no surprise.
I sure hope so. The DK2 version works really great except that the resolution is way too low for it to be fun to wear. At 4K maybe they will finally break into the territory where it feels like you entered a real virtual reality. :)
FB is a software company. Actually, that's being generous. They're a post-dot-com dot-com company.
Seriously.
Gen1 and Gen2 Rifts are nice rich-boy gadgets. But of EXTREMELY limited utility, as the side-effects of working with them are still as bad as they are.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
No one will wear a helmet to play games.
Possible using six additional characters
so no star citizen this year
poor chris roberts
The phrase in TFS was "there is no information here that rules out ...", which is functionally pretty much the same as "not impossible". See the double negatives?
I guess there's nothing there that rules out being buggered by a unicorn either.
Weasel words and bet hedging.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If a product never ships it never fails.
Oculus Rift: The Daikatana of Hardware