Oculus just went from something incredibly amazing that I couldn't wait to be a part of to something that I want nothing to do with. I suspect I'm not alone. Humans are emotional creatures, not always driven by strict rationality. Maybe I'll feel differently in a year.
Amen, and I don't really know why. I was on the fence about ordering one of the new Crystal Cove based devkits. Now I certainly won't. I'll wait to see how it shakes out; to see if low latency panels now take a backseat to an onboard camera for that special "social experience".
I guess it's because I was excited about the gaming and "new experience" potential, and the hope that a young company full of smart people would excel in that space. Unfortunately, the only association I can muster between gaming and Facebook is the spamfest Farmville. The biggest experience I can think of is the data mining.
VR is one of the few upcoming tech changes I can actually see adding "delight" to my computing experience. Alas, I've never experienced any delight with Facebook; at best, I've managed grudging tolerance. I think I'm sad at the loss of what might have been.
The problem for Facebook is that since there is such a distaste for them in the dev community that they are going to have a hard time attracting developers if a worthy competitor comes along. Devs are going to want to target a more open platform, unless there is a massive advantage to going the Facebook route. On the web, building a Facebook app is enticing because you get access to a massive audience. For VR, your audience are people who have the hardware, so until there is a large number of people who own VR goggles the power really is in the hands of the developers and what platforms they build their killer apps on.
I believe it. I'm there with him. I swore off everything sony after the cd rootkit episode. How long has that been, 12, 13 years now? I still don't even consider sony for electronics, even if they offer the best -insert device here-. I don't buy music offered on a sony label. I don't buy or go see movies produced at, or by a sony studio. I would, and do, simply do without their offerings and listen/watch/spend money on offerings from other companies instead.
Facebook is another company I will refuse to do business with, even if that means I do without something I would otherwise want.
Believe it. I won't buy one either now, period. I hate Facebook and will absolutely not buy any product they sell, no matter how cool it might otherwise be. Nearly everyone I interact with has a similar loathing of Facebook both as a company and a service, so it's not at all surprising to me that nearly everyone is furious about this acquisition.
I would rather have a Microsoft camera in my living room than a Facebook one. And yes, I imagine that the consumer version of Oculus VR will have a forward facing camera.
I won't have either but one is worse than the other.
Yes, I have the Oculus DK1 and I will start looking at the Sony's Morpheus concept from now on. Especially when Sony's track record this year has been amazing in every sector. I really love them getting back in business. I love honest technology companies which deliver best products with no strings attached. Facebook is not one of them.
That's exactly how i feel. I couldn't wait till i release, now I just wait for a new OpenGL /Other pc graphic API version with vr support and chinese competitors, that will surely emerge within the next five years.
Curious to see HN's negative reaction to this announcement. The sentiment appears to originate with gamers.
Gamers, particularly PC gamers, are a minority of computing end users. Minorities get less attention than the mainstream. Oculus VR chose gamers, particularly PC gamers, as its beachhead. The dedicated attention from such a world-changing technology must have been special. The backlash against losing that special status is understandable.
But VR's potential isn't limited to gamers. That is what Facebook recognised and is capitalising on with this acquisition. Oculus, as a (perhaps the) leader in the consumer VR space, is well positioned to shape the future of VR and with it consumer computing. They had a choice between a niche and the market, and they are reaching for the moon.
The expanded mandate means gamers will become a minority of Oculus's customer base. It does not follow that their experience nor expectations should degrade. Preëmptively burning Facebook and Oculus for thinking big seems petty.
I am open-minded about Oculus's future at Facebook. It is possible that Facebook will mis-manage Oculus and squander its lead. It's also possible that an independent Oculus would have missed the forest for the trees. That by going 100% for gaming, it would have forsaken a greater destiny. Barring back-seat driving by Facebook management, Oculus has more options at Facebook. More options are good for a young company at the beginning of a open-ended road.
I wonder if Microsoft considered Oculus but figured they had the Research heft to build their own independently and for less than $2b? Oculus have been pretty public about what they've learnt along the way, so that information might give pursuers handy shortcuts.
Even though Rift might not be locked to a hardware platform it will likely be tightly tied to the Facebook platform. Welcome to the Metaverse, please login using your Facebook account to proceed.
That's a good point. I think the difference is that instagram had an existing userbase and social ecosystem that complemented Facebook nicely as another content stream.
I don't think you will need a Facebook login to play games, but Facebook will likely monopolize any social aspects. Even if they don't overtly lock out other social players, I think that developers will be skittish to invest a lot of time and money developing the new Second Life with the risk of Facebook cutting them off at any point if they are seen as a competitor.
I think this was mentioned on the ATP podcast, but I can't remember...
Facebook isnt trying to be Apple and buy companies that contribute to their core products. They want to be Disney (who owns ESPN, Pixar and many others).
They've bought these companies (Instagram, Parse, WhatsApp and now Oculus) to largely leave them alone as independant companies operating within Facebook.
What is a specific likely worst-case you have in mind with Facebook?
Risks with other potential acquisition partners:
(1) Valve - limited scope. Valve would be fine if Oculus's future were limited to gaming. But they add little value, in balance sheet or experience, for a broader play. Valve + Oculus is only marginally better positioned, for revolutionising computing, than an independent Oculus.
(2) Microsoft - too conservative. Big organisation without a history of funding moon shots. As for pairing Oculus with Xbox, I'd copy the concerns with Valve.
(3) Dell - underinvestment. Dell is undergoing a private-equity turnaround focussed on optimising operating metrics for an IPO. Not a healthy environment for an open-ended, capital-hungry start-up with an adventurous future.
Apple would have been a fine home for Oculus. I suspect VR's market isn't mature enough for Cupertino. But I do not see a material difference between Google and Facebook. Privacy concerns exist at both, and both have a mixed record of integrating acquisitions. What both have is lots of ambition and the surplus capital and experience with which to fuel it.
Microsoft have history dealing in-depth with education, business and gaming, plus hardware, operating systems, mobile and so on. Facebook's core appears to be social and a little more superfluous.
Microsoft has a history with gaming because they built the Xbox. Facebook will have a history with gaming, hardware, and more because they will build the Oculus.
What is is a specific likely worst-case
you have in mind with Facebook?
That they realise there's no overlap between their products, so they discontinue the VR products and transfer the employees to web ad targeting.
More precisely they make a play for the "VR socialisation" arena but it's a half-hearted attempt because VR socialisation is some manager's pet project rather than their core business, facebook vr socialisation goes the way of Second Life, and the consequence is the same.
I see the absence of overlap as a good thing. It means it's highly unlikely that Facebook threw down $2 billion for some gimmicky social integration that a tiny sliver of their userbase could harness.
The Oculus team is cutting-edge hardware along a completely different vertical, orthogonal to facebook's core. Despite their size they have the talent and expertise to create that entire market by themselves, provided adequate funding. Facebook does not have to interfere at all, beyond writing the cheques. Over three years, Facebook could have itself a new gaming product to compete with Sony and XBox... in five, it might have an innovative consumer device to take on Apple. The conglomerate model typically has better odds of long-term survival - what happens when people grow tired of social in its current form (primarily content curation)? Then facebook's flagship product would be obsolete.
- It would signal a shift toward gimmicky experiences targeting a
casual market that wouldn't spend several hundred dollars on a
piece of esoteric hardware.
- It would spoil an opportunity to partner with a company that has
much more experience in hardware, gaming, dev tools, or anything
else Oculus could use to take off.
- The likely integration with Facebook's authentication and social
services will cause the product to suffer from all the ill will and
distrust Facebook has generated within parts of its userbase and
the developer community. Branding is important, and to these
communities - the ones Oculus likely needs to take off - Facebook's is poison.
An acquisition by Zynga or Gree might've been almost as bad, but any of the other companies mentioned wouldn't have signaled such a shift, and such a betrayal of the intent of the initial kickstarter investors and hopes of its supporters. Oculus appears to gain nothing but money from this deal. I'd say the announcement alone squanders Oculus' only relevant lead over Sony and others.
Actually, I'm surprised that Apple didn't get to Oculus. Apple has a history of being a catalyst in markets that are not yet matured. They did it with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. All of them were preceded by plenty of products that perhaps looked very similar on paper, but were a completely different (clunky) experience to use until Apple showed the market how it's done.
Oculus might've been what the Macs needed in order to take gaming market-share from PCs. Missed opportunity for Apple. In my opinion, would've been a bargain for them at $2B.
The true innovators maybe are the ones that exist by themselves without being "acquired", or before they get acquired (Apple was, is and will probably surprise again in the future, as will Google and Microsoft)
Once they get acquired...well...Skype Hotmail etc etc...(who are they again?)
And that's ok I guess, there's a lot of drive to create and grow (hack?), being top efficient and innovative on a shoe string budget, until you get a nice big fat pay check.
Maybe the little guys with big ideas are only "useful" until they get acquired, by that I mean that maybe it's more of a natural process that one thinks... Maybe by the time the technology is "invented", showcased and becomes stable enough to be "mainstreamed", it's time to collect your dollars and medal for "honourable service to xxxxx industry" and either move onto something else that will be cool and make you more (or less) money eventually and produce more internet "apps" addicts, or retire to the beach.
Read any startup book or blog: you can have a grand vision but you must start solving one small problem and expanding from there. Winning one niche and then scaling.
When you go after everything at once you go after nothing in particular.
The other thing is that it's probably going to be quite a long time yet before PC gamers actually become a minority of the Rift customer base. The whisper number for the first consumer version's resolution is 1440. At that resolution it will take not only a maybe-$300 Rift CV1 to play but also a seriously hefty video card to keep it fed with something like a steady 90 frames every second. (No currently-existing Crossfire/SLI setups need apply, as they introduce too much latency.)
>The dedicated attention from such a world-changing technology must have been special. The backlash against losing that special status is understandable.
While I agree with most of what you (eloquently) said, I take issue with the idea that gamers' reactions are a result of feeling less special.
I'm at most an occasional gamer myself so I can't speak for "gamers," but do give them a little credit. Facebook doesn't have the best track record dealing with gaming companies and, as Notch noted, their motives are inherently different than the motives of the sole Oculus Team. This isn't necessarily bad, but it is a change. And change, particularly for something that appears to be on such a good path, introduces risk. And risk is scary for people who are emotionally invested.
But VR's potential isn't limited to gamers. That is what Facebook recognised and is capitalising on with this acquisition. Oculus, as a (perhaps the) leader in the consumer VR space, is well positioned to shape the future of VR and with it consumer computing. They had a choice between a niche and the market, and they are reaching for the moon.
Of course!
I'm surprised no one realises this is move to protect Facebook against Google's move into devices, specifically Google Glass.
Facebook doesn't want to be a sharecropper on a platform owned by Google.
I'd expect them to be looking at other companies in the "connected device" space too: Pebble, FitBit etc.
But it were this few from this so unimportant minority that filled their Kickstarter project with money, making this thing get so far. Advertising for it. Sharing propaganda and knowledge. They are the ones that could do this in the future with an end product making it desirable. Right now I don't see the usual FB people buy this thing. I see nobody really besides the gamers. Most of the people won't have a gain from it. This is not for MOST OF THE PEOPLE. It will remain an product for minorities for a long time.
They betrayed the gamers and this people will now jump on every possible alternative that comes around (and we've heard that there are things coming up already). Also they will hesitate to trust anybody else on something they love that much. This will hurt other start ups.
How about friendfeed? It was a direct competitor to facebook. Also left alone, still working the same, no ads or gimmicks added: http://friendfeed.com/ ... the only thing that's changed is improved uptime. Or instagram?
Are you really comparing those exchangeable webpages to a revolutionary human interface device?
All these webpages will go. Like FB. The device will remain there until we manage to implant something directly in our brains. We are talking about a new "mouse" here.
This is a god damned tragedy. (And the smartest move Zuck has ever made.)
VR was supposed to be a new frontier, I have been so excited to see finally the Next Thing was coming and it feels so much like the early days of the web and computing. But now it's owned by the worst company on the planet when it comes to choosing inspired thinking and pushing humanity forward instead of just trying to get inside of our lives (and now our heads.) I am frankly terrified.
Thank God for Valve, I hope they hit the gas and leapfrog these guys now on the tech and poach as many of them as they can. Thank goodness there is still plenty of work left to do and Facebook doesn't own all the VR patents. I am so fucking scared of a world where Facebook has a monopoly on VR. I really hope it doesn't happen.
Valve has stopped developing their own VR hardware and gave their prototype to Oculus a few months ago. If I remember correctly, their top VR guy also joined Oculus.
Sony is developing a competitor with project Morpheus, though.
Which is a proprietary addon for their playstation. Not interesting at all.
Occulus was going to be revolutionary because it was supposed to be an open platform. "Here is a headset, this is a starting point" every other company in the world could take it from there and see all the places it could go. How many improvements to the base model could be made. How many novel ways to utilize VR to advance common activities.
Instead, we now have Valve tossing away their project, Sony making its own proprietary toy dongle, and Facebook getting a live camera feed of your life while you use their video services on their proprietary platform with proprietary drivers and patents on everything including the paint job.
> VR was supposed to be a new frontier, I have been so excited to see finally the Next Thing was coming and it feels so much like the early days of the web and computing.
VR has been the Next Thing since before there was a World Wide Web, if not the internet itself. Maybe this time is different, maybe not.
This is a good move by Facebook. VR is going to be huge, huge huge. It might even be as big as Bitcoin. :)
I think what Oculus did was massively de-risk their next ten years. In their business plans, there were undoubtedly very large gray circles with things like "gain overwhelming market share (how?)" and lists of competitors that included, well, everyone in tech.
If you had to pick a tech company to leverage your disruptive new consumer technology, and make sure it kept the 'awesome', and was hacker friendly, who would you go to?
In exchange, they probably lopped another 10-50x of potential value off the top of their company. Not that they won't see some of that realized in Facebook if this is succesful -- they will. But, they will be sharing the gain around in exchange for getting access to that giant global customer base and being able to tap the considerable resources available at FB.
> If you had to pick a tech company to leverage your disruptive new consumer technology, and make sure it kept the 'awesome', and was hacker friendly, who would you go to?
I expected Microsoft to grab them and I'm surprised they didn't. Would've made a smart fit with Xbox and given them easy ways to directly integrate it with their OSs. Would work well with gaming, education, eventually business, mobile and so on. $2b a few months ago would've been a small price to pay to get in early on this, unless they have something comparable up their sleeves from the research division.
>If you had to pick a tech company to leverage your disruptive new consumer technology, and make sure it kept the 'awesome', and was hacker friendly, who would you go to?
Or Blizzard. They have an actual virtual world already. I can easily see WoW fans who already sit at a PC and buy special hardware for their games to flock to VR tech.
> Not that Mr. Newell hasn’t had opportunities to sell out. Valve has been pursued over the years by Electronic Arts, which would very likely have valued Valve at well over $1 billion had the talks progressed that far, said two people with knowledge of the discussion who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were private.
> Although Valve’s finances are private, Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, estimates that the company could be worth around $2.5 billion today.
It's guesswork and no method is explained though, so it's not like that's a very reliable estimate or anything.
Spoken like an investor who knows nothing about the audience. Sorry, VR was intended for PC gamers. They're not casual mobile gamers. They loathe casual games. They now loathe VR for wedding with Facebook.
I think a lot of the problem is that VR as a means of improving the process of "experiencing interactive content" only really works when the content is presented from a first-person view and there is value in that perspective. Right now, that means FPS and FPRPG games. Amnesia through the Oculus Rift is a genuinely amazing (and terrifying) experience that is improved by the headset (it makes you, the player, feel like you can't step back and escape, which adds to the experience); shopping in a virtual shopping mall is just an impediment to getting what I want.
Remember the VR-32 and VRML? Everyone was super excited that we were going to start doing all the things in virtual reality, and then we figured out that it's a really cumbersome way to present most information.
Sure, I understand that. My point is that perhaps folks who went to the trouble of dedicating their lives to VR might have a larger vision than this.
In 1992, you could have defined the Internet in similarly limited terms -- after all, using the Internet largely meant text interfaces. I'm just positing that the folks who run Oculus are a) smart and b) have spent a lot of time thinking about how best to spread VR.
If VR takes off, by definition it will mean expanding beyond FPS games, because most people do not play those (you could alternatively get VR to go mainstream by increasing market penetration of FPS and FPRPG games by orders of magnitude, which might be harder than putting VR to other uses).
I'm certainly willing to be wrong - I'm not an expert in the space beyond having been an enthusiast gamer for 20 years (and I recognize that doesn't give me domain authority) - but I've been waiting for VR to be a thing for a long time now, and while it's had some neat demos, it's almost never something that I look at and decide that prefer over more traditional interfaces.
Carmack is a ridiculously smart guy who is damned good at squeezing things out of hardware that shouldn't be possible, and if there's anyone that I think could work out the how-to of VR, I think it'd be him, but I'm not sure that I trust his read on what the markets want.
The question isn't so much "will VR take off?" as it is "what could VR possibly do beyond FPS games that could make it take off?" and I just don't have any answer to that at all.
Yes, but first it has to win the gaming market, or it's a non-starter. Games are the Facebokulus's killer, game changing, app. Everything else is just speculation, and will take a while and will build on whatever happens in gaming, because VR gaming is already here.
Now, I understand that in the Kickstarted it was promised only the first developer kit and that it was successfully delivered, but I feel very uneasy knowing that the Facebook platform is geared exclusively to casual gaming. My worry is that Facebook will be happy with a VR technically good enough for a social VR but that can't stand the requirements for gaming. I may be too old to understand, but I really don't feel the urge to interact in 3d with my friends to say hello or to watch their holiday's pictures.
VR, at least as it stands right now, is squarely in the domain of the enthusiast, which has a very broad overlap with PC gaming crowd. Something like the Oculus Rift has no real potential with mobile gaming (power requirements alone preclude that).
What sorts of applications can you imagine? The idea of virtual presence being a killer app is silly, IMO - I've played with both the Oculus Rift and telepresence robots - they're neat, but for meetings/gatherings, I'll take a plain old webcam any day. I can't imagine what Facebook would do with this that I would be interested in.
Isn't that what they exactly did? They got all the PC gamers on fire, got Carmac, got bought by facebook. Now they're reaching for the moon, they became so big that people started hating, you can't avoid that.
I don't think people are upset because they "got big", but because they were acquired by a corporation that signals a core shift in their ideals. If they were bought by Valve, or even Microsoft, I don't think there'd be nearly as much backlash -- because it's not that they're BIG, it's that Valve and Microsoft would not be pushing for a different market with their product (not to say they wouldn't later).
I agree that it is a good move, but not because of takes away risk. It's because Facebook has a great deal of users, money, and apparently vision. I had no idea Zuck was this smart (although building Facebook into a giant ought to have been a good clue).
Oculus isn't being conservative here. They're shooting for the moon.
When big companies buy small good products, they often turn to poop, because the new masters lack the original vision and the decisions about the product will be made by PMs trying to get a promotion, not by those who actually care. I suspect this will be the case with this acquisition. My opinion is based on the way I see facebook managing their products: whatever they're offering to ordinary users is mediocre and basically stays afloat only because of the network effect, and whatever they are offering to their paying customers is effectively a scam (youtube search for "facebook fraud"). I can't see them possibly making good use of Oculus.
This is a terrible move for Oculus, though. The reaction from their core audiences - hardcore gamers and developers - seems to be largely negative, at a time right after Sony - a company that caters to that audience - announced its competing "Project Morpheus". It's not being taken as a signal of Facebook's innovation, but as Oculus moving toward a casual audience, and their fan base feels abandoned. Do they really feel that whatever plans they have with Facebook are so low-risk and high return that they no longer need that audience?
The world's reaction is also negative. They don't want to wear a box strapped to their face to interact with their friends. Seriously, look at the reaction on Twitter by non-gamers and Facebook users. It's being met with incredulity and mockery.
They don't want now, but wait 'till Facebook does "their magic" on them :) That "networking effect" stuff is not buzz-speak, and they know how to wield it.
Plus, gaming and socialization go hand in hand - it's amazing that others just don't fucking get this yet and see "gamers communities" as just niches or islands.
They already had that audience - down the line, once they have established their beachhead. Selling themselves to facebook doesn't bring it any closer.
False false false; this is the dead of Oculus for one simple reason: Developers, doesn't matter how much ridiculous amounts of money you have if you scare away developers making it part of one of the spammiest and most hatred companies in the world it will fail.
Part of the reason I asked if I could cancel my preorder of Dev Kit 2 was some bad experience with Facebook dicking devs early on. Unless they've changed their tune in recent years, I don't understand how this could bode well for their support audience.
My bold prediction: Facebook will be broke in five years, gone in ten. Anyone getting into bed with them now is putting the noose around their own neck.
Facebook is a prototype of what "social networking" should be. Anyone who took five minutes out of their day could think up ten ways "social networking" could be better, and probably all of them would be incompatible with facebook's business model.
IANABP (..Business Person) but their 2 big acquisitions have increased their share of the social/data/identity pie considerably. Yes, these can be very ephemeral and the market can change on you (as MySpace will gladly tell you), but having 1.1B+ monthly actives on your core platform alone (plus however much instagram+whatsapp do) gives you a lot of room to try and recover when things start shrinking.
The oculus VR acquisition feels special, in that they aren't just buying users/reach, but something more substantial and forward looking. If they're smart, they'll let the oculus team work on the track they've been on, and let Facebook teams develop the "non-gaming VR experiences" they want to push.
Hard to think how much the landscape would need to shift for FB to be broke in 5 years. If Oculus delivers on their VR dreams, that alone could potentially bring an almost-bankrupt FB back from the brink.
I find it's very easy to imagine how the landscape could change for FB to be broke in five years; Anyone can build a better way to "social network", and anyone will. Guaranteed. The only real question is... what happens if Facebook can't buy them?
I admire what Facebook has achieved, but it's clear to me that they don't understand what their actual role is, or what people "want" from Facebook as a company if it is to survive. There is an air of mild desperations to the whole enterprise that hints at the acknowledgement of an imminent demise. This acquisition reeks of that desperation.
This is extremely disappointing. This technology had the potential to be much bigger than Facebook. The Occulus was poised to create an entirely new industry. They were pioneering a technology never before seen, with a legend like John Carmack pushing the state of the art.
I cannot think of a more colossal mistake to make as a founder. Palmer Luckey has shown he has absolutely no faith in his ability nor that of his team. Occulus had nothing but success in their future. They had investors beating down their doors with money, developers announcing support for the platform before even getting a dev-kit, and consumers itching to grab hold of their product.
Facebook is the antithesis to Occulus. They have never created any technology, they add zero value to the the real world, and have no future potential in the long run. Occulus selling to Facebook would have been like Tesla selling to Proctor and Gamble after they released the Roadster. A company with a technology so radical it can change the industry, succumbing to weakness and cashing out to an old money company that has no expertise in the field for some chump change.
I am filled with sadness and disappointment. I believe Palmer Luckey will regret this decision.
I don't want a "general-purpose VR headset". There are already many devices described that way (that work well enough for that purpose.) I wanted something built exclusively for the extreme requirements of gaming, and I feel this acquisition is going to distract the Oculus team from that. Facebook has no experience whatsoever in that domain, and the only way I see Oculus benefiting from this is the huge cash reserves they'll have access to once acquired. Truth be told, I was really hoping they'd get acquired by Valve - that'd strengthen their existing partnership (which I'm sure will cease to exist post acquisition), give them a good team to work with wrt. videogames and VR in general, and put them in an environment where their core focus is the same as that of their parent company. In this case, if the "experiment" fails, Facebook will almost certainly dump the project. Every time someone says "... we're going to make X a platform" before they actually have X, a kitten dies somewhere. There are still technical issues with the Oculus headset, and I'm afraid Facebook's "platform" focus is going to draw attention away from that. In short, I don't see this working. If fact, if Oculus fails, it might set the entire VR industry back several years. Luckily, we still have some hope in the form of Valve.
What a waste. I hate Facebook for doing this. And I'm not too happy with Oculus for accepting this either.
On the subject of those huge cash reserves, just how much of their IPO is left at this point? Zuckerberg is definitely spending way more than FB is earning, and it's mostly on assets that are bringing in additional costs, with few near-term revenues.
>I wanted something built exclusively for the extreme requirements of gaming, and I feel this acquisition is going to distract the Oculus team from that. Facebook has no experience whatsoever in that domain
com'n, VR FPV in FarmVille would be an experience to die for :)
Facebook is rapidly becoming a seriously dominant technology player. I used to think of them as a "flavour of the year" play, but I'm having to readjust that perspective pretty hard.
It looks like they really are driving a long term strategy of being at the core on human -> human communication.
Yeah, I see this as a big move for FB, much bigger than for Oculus.
Someone I know had already identified FB as one of the Big Four several years ago, analogizing to the Big Four during the robber baron days of steel and rail. The other three are Apple, Amazon, and Google.
All four have some sort of machine learning / AI race going on. They are not the only ones around (Twitter, for example).
But this is pretty big. Google has the Glasses project. Apple probably has something cooking somewhere. And I have no idea about Amazon.
I also wonder if FB will keep the team together. It'd be a shame for John Caramak to skip out after the acquisition.
I'm (pretty)sure Facebook will leave Oculus alone; it would be dumb if they didn't, especially with all the anti-Facebook sentiment in our current zeitgeit. This is definitely a long term play towards becoming a major technology company. It's interesting to see what Facebook will become when "Facebook the website" is gone.
I was excited about Oculus even though I wasn't necessarily going to buy one. But this acquisition is like Elon Musk announcing that Tesla will build a small 1 litre diesel car next, or SpaceX's next mission is to Detroit.
I mean, I'm sure Facebook has some amazing PHP and Python on their backend servers but has anyone not checked out the awfulness that is Facebook's web site ? UX is not supposed to be a four letter word.
What do Oculus gain from this that they couldn't have obtained with their $2.4m Kickstarter ? I don't believe Facebook won't be monitoring every penny spent there.
I wonder does this have anything to do with Sony announcing her own VR project Morpheus. Technology wise Sony's alternative didn't show much advantage, but industry support wise it showed that it's a very very prominent opponent Oculus VR has to beat.
Selling it to Facebook seems to me an indication that the leadership no longer believe that Oculus can be as successful in the gaming industry as they hoped.
Or, to phrase it differently, maybe they cared most about VR technologies going mainstream, and were only doing it themselves because nobody else seemed to be.
I can't imagine Carmack working for Facebook. This is surreal. As Palmer noted in his blog post he was skeptical when Facebook first approached them with the idea. I suppose Facebook eventually made a monetary offer they couldn't refuse. Whether Facebook makes it a VR advertising unit or Facebook Glass, it's likely to be something very different from what Oculus envisioned as an independent company.
He was already crazy rich off id, though. He had his own aerospace company that he funded out of his own pocket for several years. He isn't the kind of guy who really needed another break - I always got the impression he left Zenimax for Occulus because he wanted to get back at the front of the tech revolution train after going in the back seat for a decade.
That's right, Carmack said Armadillo Aerospace would "[...] probably stay in hibernation until there’s another liquidity event where I’m comfortable throwing another million dollars a year into things." ( http://www.newspacejournal.com/2013/08/01/carmack-armadillo-... )
Facebook does have the Internet.org[0] initiative which focuses on getting internet connections to more people in the world. I can't speak to its effectiveness or how serious they are about it though.
I imagine the investing in internet access for the world is wholly because one way to grow their own user numbers is to get more people connected to the internet - if they can just spend enough money to associate people with that messaging as their advertising budget - then they may start off with a good relationship to those new internet users.
At this point the only way to grow their user numbers significantly is to get more people connected to the internet. The question is whether it's something they seriously think they can do or just an attempt to convince Wall Street they have growth potential.
I said this on the other thread, but this is the most terrifyingly awesome technology acquisition I've ever seen. Facebook chat in two years: put on a headset and get teleported to a room in a virtual world where you can talk to your friends' avatars. Skype and Google+ Hangouts suddenly seem very 20th century.
I've always found Facebook's stock to be a ridiculously risky long-term investment since their entire growth plan is predicated on monetizing an already established customer base, where a single event that causes people to switch en masse to a more private/secure social network would destroy the company. After today's acquisition I no longer think this.
> Facebook chat in two years: put on a headset and get teleported to a room in a virtual world where you can talk to your friends' avatars. Skype and Google+ Hangouts suddenly seem very 20th century.
This doesn't happen in two years at all -- it's hard to keep track, but Google Glass has been in its public beta release for over a year and yet there are no people walking around using them, at least where I'm from.
Plus I think most of us are still using the keyboard (be it virtual or physical) to tap instant messages and email -- if VR would be so mature in two years that we'd be able to do a lot of things through a virtual world, why haven't we ditched keyboards straight away?
There is likely a user input revolution around the corner, but I'd be looking at the 2024 date or later. This is probably a good reason why to be concerned about the purchase -- Facebook seems unlikely to care about Oculus games beyond what Oculus promised in their Kickstarter.
I totally agree that wearable computers like Google Glass aren't ready to replace conventional mobile devices. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the webcam+screen model of video chat (not the keyboard+mouse model of computing) in the near future will be replaced by something like webcam+Rift+Omni. I think the technology will likely be mature enough within the next few years and that the public is already ready to adopt it.
Before the 1964 World's Fair, the notion of video chat to accompany the telephone was considered science fiction. Even after the technology was demonstrated to the public, it stayed in the realm of science fiction, as seen in the film 2001, until the 21st century. I really think that being able to interact with other people in a digital world a la the Matrix would sell millions of units instantly.
> Put on a headset and get teleported to a room in a virtual world where you can talk to your friends' avatars. Skype and Google+ Hangouts suddenly seem very 20th century.
I'd rather talk to my friends' faces, albeit on a computer screen, rather than their avatars in a virtual room. Face to face communication isn't practical when both parties are wearing something over their eyes.
Fair point, I forgot about the lack of eyes part. I guess the Oculus Rift would work better for a multiplayer FPS where your characters are all wearing helmets.
Either you're misunderstanding me or you're equating an anthill with the pyramids of Giza. In Second Life, your avatar is a sprite on a screen. With Oculus Rift + Virtuix Omni, your avatar is you. It's like the Matrix. Or Avatar. Or a [lower resolution] lucid dream where you can interact with people from the real world in video game maps. For me, that's truly awesome in the literal sense of the word.
No, I understand you exactly. But I'm also paying attention to the last 30 years where this keeps getting tried and either it doesn't work or it degenerates into a 2nd life analog.
There's nothing magical about 2nd life, but in a first person POV and in 3d.
Explain how sitting in front of my desk, with this gear on, looking at avatars of my friends, no matter the fidelity of the gear, is a better communication medium than group chat or video hangouts or the million other more efficient communication mediums that exist is worth anything more than a passing novelty?
Or are you proposing that I look at a high bandwidth, 3d video stream of somebody with a black rrectangle strapped to their face while they look at my complimentary version?
It's not that it's a better communication medium any more than a 4K monitor is a better medium for learning what's being broadcast on your television. But it's certainly more enjoyable.
Imagine if you had an actual supernatural button that you could press to teleport yourself to an alternate dimension in which you could chat with friends. It wouldn't be a more effective tool for communication than a phone or video chat, but I'm sure you'd often use it since magic is, well, magical. VR is the closest you're gonna get to that experience.
Edit: And hopefully there would be a workaround for the issue of goggles obstructing the face.
I too am instinctively repelled by this acquisition. I did prefer the idea of the technology remaining independent and supported on multiple platforms.
MS, Apple, Google, Sony all have their own closed(* Android is arguable, I know) devices that they would prefer to limit the technology to. The benefit to Facebook is to have a primary interface perhaps hosted on another platform but not completely dependent on it.
I can think of three obvious negatives:
Carmack's apparently successful work using mobile graphics hardware to generate acceptable output for the Rift could allow a much wider adoption among the casual users who don't have a hardcore gaming PC/latest generation console. Facebook might focus on producing a low-cost version that lacks the resolution/low latency which would be preferable to gamers / professional 3D users. An extensive patent portfolio could inhibit higher-end competitors from easily addressing that market.
The second concern is that Facebook would in political superpower-like ways abuse the power to grant access to a popular VR platform and demand concessions such as mandatory Facebook accounts for gaming, an egregious cut of royalties, banning of anything that "replicates Facebook functionality" etc.
Thirdly, is the probably the most common knee-jerk consumer issue; ultra creepy Facebook, logging and mining everything that you foveate on, from the ad logos in virtual environments to the facial/bodily features of your friends' avatars. They build a more detailed model of your own desires and motivations than you consciously have of yourself.
* Because the Oculus guys are seen to have sold out.
* Because Facebook is seen to be a ruthless exploiter of personal information.
I, for one, was actually days away from buying an Oculus device but I'm going to hold off for now. It's a combination of the negativity from here being infectious and the fact that if Facebook decided to buy now, maybe there's something much bigger on the horizon (apart from the DK2).
I hope Valve releases their own VR headset now, and locks Oculus out of Steam, with only their own VR headset being compatible. Valve has already done all the same research, and are even ahead of Oculus. I could see them turning it into a product by mid-2015, which is probably sooner than Oculus' own consumer version.
They don't need to lock out other headsets, that's kind of the opposite of their service model and philosphy. But they would have the advantage of controlling the distrobution platform, their in-house software/engine, and their hardware. Lots of advantages there, similar to Apple.
Theirs will likely become the superior product, organically.
I just hope they make it a hackable platform like they claim the steam controller will be, and like steamOS already kind of is. Because we can know for damn sure if there is profit opportunity in Occulus any openness about it will be stomped into the dirt.
>...it might not seem obvious why Oculus is partnering with Facebook...But when you consider it more carefully, we’re culturally aligned with a focus on innovating and hiring the best and brightest
Looks like ALL companies in this world would be a good fit for a facebook acquisition.
At least some of Facebook's history of arbitrary platform creation and destruction has to do with their youth as a company. They are growing up and we've seen successively fewer missteps in the past two years.
So there is room to hope for a successful partnership. Oculus has a really phenomenal product and partnering with Facebook is going to scale that product MUCH faster than it would've otherwise. This could be the perfect deal for both companies.
Don't get me wrong, my heart sank when I heard it was Facebook. And the WSJ's article on how disingenuous they were with their kickstarter backers is still real. But in the truly long-term, we might look back on today as a big moment for virtual reality.
1st rule: you do not talk about the money
2nd rule: you DO NOT talk about the MONEY
3rd rule: you talk about how the acquirer and acquiree shares the same vision and dreams that would enable the acquiree to build great things.
I could be wrong, and I even think this might be an unpopular opinion (I'm not a huge FB fan, FWIW), but I think this is pretty good for Oculus. It's exposure writ large. Also funding, but from a Marketing perspective this can open some serious doors for them.
That said, I'm saddened. A possible greater exposure could have happened from another company purchasing it, Apple for instance, or even (some will shudder), Google.
I'm not going to give up on Oculus just yet though, but I'm somewhat disapointed. Even if Facebook doesn't ruin it, it's... well, it's still Facebook.
I shuddered at the Apple suggestion, not the Google one.
With Google there would still be a very excellent chance the device would run across PCs (Windows/Linux and Macs) and maybe even iOS devices (if Apple allowed it) along with Android. With Apple, obviously not, it would be Mac/iOS only and fuck everyone else.
True enough, though certainly the same with Microsoft, and possibly Google (Android only?). Maybe Facebook will be the one really only open one? I only worry that real games will not get a chance and we'll have a glut of "Totally Immersive Candy Crush!!!"
Sony is probably happy as heck since it effectively resets everything to give their project a chance. Also, I am a little sick of the "joined" terminology. You got bought and are no longer in control of your companies destiny. Unless you pull a NeXT, "joined" is not true.
At first glance, it might not seem obvious why Oculus is partnering with Facebook, a company focused on connecting people, investing in internet access for the world and pushing an open computing platform.
An "open computing platform"? What are they talking about?
"The affect heuristic is an instance of substitution, in which the answer to an easy question (How do I feel about it?) serves as an answer to a much harder question (What do I think about it?)."
It seems from the reaction that for Facebook this wasn't just a $2 billion deal but a $3 billion deal — $2 billion in cash, plus $1 billion of Oculus' value wiped out by the announcement.
Wow, I thought the real-life James Halliday was going to be Palmer Luckey, Gabe Newell, or John Carmack. I didn't pick that it could be Mark Zuckerberg!
Oculus just went from something incredibly amazing that I couldn't wait to be a part of to something that I want nothing to do with. I suspect I'm not alone. Humans are emotional creatures, not always driven by strict rationality. Maybe I'll feel differently in a year.
I came here to say exactly this.
There will be others, though. Lots of others.
Me too. I feel somehow Facebook with be obtaining troves of data from this.
Amen, and I don't really know why. I was on the fence about ordering one of the new Crystal Cove based devkits. Now I certainly won't. I'll wait to see how it shakes out; to see if low latency panels now take a backseat to an onboard camera for that special "social experience".
I guess it's because I was excited about the gaming and "new experience" potential, and the hope that a young company full of smart people would excel in that space. Unfortunately, the only association I can muster between gaming and Facebook is the spamfest Farmville. The biggest experience I can think of is the data mining.
VR is one of the few upcoming tech changes I can actually see adding "delight" to my computing experience. Alas, I've never experienced any delight with Facebook; at best, I've managed grudging tolerance. I think I'm sad at the loss of what might have been.
>an onboard camera for that special "social experience".
see what your friends are seeing, hear, feel... welcome to the hive. Resistance is futile.
I don't believe for a second you won't buy one. There's always this sort of grousing, and it never matters in the long run.
The problem for Facebook is that since there is such a distaste for them in the dev community that they are going to have a hard time attracting developers if a worthy competitor comes along. Devs are going to want to target a more open platform, unless there is a massive advantage to going the Facebook route. On the web, building a Facebook app is enticing because you get access to a massive audience. For VR, your audience are people who have the hardware, so until there is a large number of people who own VR goggles the power really is in the hands of the developers and what platforms they build their killer apps on.
I believe it. I'm there with him. I swore off everything sony after the cd rootkit episode. How long has that been, 12, 13 years now? I still don't even consider sony for electronics, even if they offer the best -insert device here-. I don't buy music offered on a sony label. I don't buy or go see movies produced at, or by a sony studio. I would, and do, simply do without their offerings and listen/watch/spend money on offerings from other companies instead.
Facebook is another company I will refuse to do business with, even if that means I do without something I would otherwise want.
Believe it. I won't buy one either now, period. I hate Facebook and will absolutely not buy any product they sell, no matter how cool it might otherwise be. Nearly everyone I interact with has a similar loathing of Facebook both as a company and a service, so it's not at all surprising to me that nearly everyone is furious about this acquisition.
It is rationale to not trust a company owned by Facebook. Facebook has a horrid record and we have no reason to trust them or anything they own.
I would rather have a Microsoft camera in my living room than a Facebook one. And yes, I imagine that the consumer version of Oculus VR will have a forward facing camera.
I won't have either but one is worse than the other.
Yes, I have the Oculus DK1 and I will start looking at the Sony's Morpheus concept from now on. Especially when Sony's track record this year has been amazing in every sector. I really love them getting back in business. I love honest technology companies which deliver best products with no strings attached. Facebook is not one of them.
That's exactly how i feel. I couldn't wait till i release, now I just wait for a new OpenGL /Other pc graphic API version with vr support and chinese competitors, that will surely emerge within the next five years.
Curious to see HN's negative reaction to this announcement. The sentiment appears to originate with gamers.
Gamers, particularly PC gamers, are a minority of computing end users. Minorities get less attention than the mainstream. Oculus VR chose gamers, particularly PC gamers, as its beachhead. The dedicated attention from such a world-changing technology must have been special. The backlash against losing that special status is understandable.
But VR's potential isn't limited to gamers. That is what Facebook recognised and is capitalising on with this acquisition. Oculus, as a (perhaps the) leader in the consumer VR space, is well positioned to shape the future of VR and with it consumer computing. They had a choice between a niche and the market, and they are reaching for the moon.
The expanded mandate means gamers will become a minority of Oculus's customer base. It does not follow that their experience nor expectations should degrade. Preëmptively burning Facebook and Oculus for thinking big seems petty.
I am open-minded about Oculus's future at Facebook. It is possible that Facebook will mis-manage Oculus and squander its lead. It's also possible that an independent Oculus would have missed the forest for the trees. That by going 100% for gaming, it would have forsaken a greater destiny. Barring back-seat driving by Facebook management, Oculus has more options at Facebook. More options are good for a young company at the beginning of a open-ended road.
The negative reaction isn't because of any of that, it's because it's Facebook.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Valve, hell even Dell would have all been acceptable acquirers for most PC gamers backing the Oculus Rift.
Microsoft/Apple would have been bad because that would lock the Rift to a single platform.
I wonder if Microsoft considered Oculus but figured they had the Research heft to build their own independently and for less than $2b? Oculus have been pretty public about what they've learnt along the way, so that information might give pursuers handy shortcuts.
Even though Rift might not be locked to a hardware platform it will likely be tightly tied to the Facebook platform. Welcome to the Metaverse, please login using your Facebook account to proceed.
What makes you think that when you can't log into Instagram with your Facebook account?
That's a good point. I think the difference is that instagram had an existing userbase and social ecosystem that complemented Facebook nicely as another content stream.
I don't think you will need a Facebook login to play games, but Facebook will likely monopolize any social aspects. Even if they don't overtly lock out other social players, I think that developers will be skittish to invest a lot of time and money developing the new Second Life with the risk of Facebook cutting them off at any point if they are seen as a competitor.
I think this was mentioned on the ATP podcast, but I can't remember...
Facebook isnt trying to be Apple and buy companies that contribute to their core products. They want to be Disney (who owns ESPN, Pixar and many others).
They've bought these companies (Instagram, Parse, WhatsApp and now Oculus) to largely leave them alone as independant companies operating within Facebook.
What is a specific likely worst-case you have in mind with Facebook?
Risks with other potential acquisition partners:
(1) Valve - limited scope. Valve would be fine if Oculus's future were limited to gaming. But they add little value, in balance sheet or experience, for a broader play. Valve + Oculus is only marginally better positioned, for revolutionising computing, than an independent Oculus.
(2) Microsoft - too conservative. Big organisation without a history of funding moon shots. As for pairing Oculus with Xbox, I'd copy the concerns with Valve.
(3) Dell - underinvestment. Dell is undergoing a private-equity turnaround focussed on optimising operating metrics for an IPO. Not a healthy environment for an open-ended, capital-hungry start-up with an adventurous future.
Apple would have been a fine home for Oculus. I suspect VR's market isn't mature enough for Cupertino. But I do not see a material difference between Google and Facebook. Privacy concerns exist at both, and both have a mixed record of integrating acquisitions. What both have is lots of ambition and the surplus capital and experience with which to fuel it.
Microsoft have history dealing in-depth with education, business and gaming, plus hardware, operating systems, mobile and so on. Facebook's core appears to be social and a little more superfluous.
Microsoft has a history with gaming because they built the Xbox. Facebook will have a history with gaming, hardware, and more because they will build the Oculus.
Microsoft pushed gaming long before the XBox. The XBox was just the next step.
That they realise there's no overlap between their products, so they discontinue the VR products and transfer the employees to web ad targeting.
More precisely they make a play for the "VR socialisation" arena but it's a half-hearted attempt because VR socialisation is some manager's pet project rather than their core business, facebook vr socialisation goes the way of Second Life, and the consequence is the same.
> *[Facebook] discontinue the VR products and transfer the employees to web ad targeting"
Oculus has 50 employees [1]. Facebook did not pay $40 million per employee to scrap their product.
Oculus is also a bleeding-edge hardware start-up. It was more likely to drop dead all on its own than at the hands of well-capitalised owner.
[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/oculus-vr
$40 million.
If paying a lot makes acquisitions succeed, maybe facebook should have paid more to make the acquisition even more successful :)
This deal reminds me of ebay buying Skype: Two technology companies, both with reasonable products, but nothing to do with each other.
Nothing to do with each other, but eBay made $1.4B on the deal.
I see the absence of overlap as a good thing. It means it's highly unlikely that Facebook threw down $2 billion for some gimmicky social integration that a tiny sliver of their userbase could harness.
The Oculus team is cutting-edge hardware along a completely different vertical, orthogonal to facebook's core. Despite their size they have the talent and expertise to create that entire market by themselves, provided adequate funding. Facebook does not have to interfere at all, beyond writing the cheques. Over three years, Facebook could have itself a new gaming product to compete with Sony and XBox... in five, it might have an innovative consumer device to take on Apple. The conglomerate model typically has better odds of long-term survival - what happens when people grow tired of social in its current form (primarily content curation)? Then facebook's flagship product would be obsolete.
Worst case with Facebook:
An acquisition by Zynga or Gree might've been almost as bad, but any of the other companies mentioned wouldn't have signaled such a shift, and such a betrayal of the intent of the initial kickstarter investors and hopes of its supporters. Oculus appears to gain nothing but money from this deal. I'd say the announcement alone squanders Oculus' only relevant lead over Sony and others.
Actually, I'm surprised that Apple didn't get to Oculus. Apple has a history of being a catalyst in markets that are not yet matured. They did it with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. All of them were preceded by plenty of products that perhaps looked very similar on paper, but were a completely different (clunky) experience to use until Apple showed the market how it's done.
Oculus might've been what the Macs needed in order to take gaming market-share from PCs. Missed opportunity for Apple. In my opinion, would've been a bargain for them at $2B.
I'd be interested to know what you think of Twitter as a potential owner.
The true innovators maybe are the ones that exist by themselves without being "acquired", or before they get acquired (Apple was, is and will probably surprise again in the future, as will Google and Microsoft)
Once they get acquired...well...Skype Hotmail etc etc...(who are they again?)
And that's ok I guess, there's a lot of drive to create and grow (hack?), being top efficient and innovative on a shoe string budget, until you get a nice big fat pay check.
Maybe the little guys with big ideas are only "useful" until they get acquired, by that I mean that maybe it's more of a natural process that one thinks... Maybe by the time the technology is "invented", showcased and becomes stable enough to be "mainstreamed", it's time to collect your dollars and medal for "honourable service to xxxxx industry" and either move onto something else that will be cool and make you more (or less) money eventually and produce more internet "apps" addicts, or retire to the beach.
Even aquisitions from those companies would have been met with disappointment. I think folks were hoping for Oculus to stay independent.
Read any startup book or blog: you can have a grand vision but you must start solving one small problem and expanding from there. Winning one niche and then scaling.
When you go after everything at once you go after nothing in particular.
The other thing is that it's probably going to be quite a long time yet before PC gamers actually become a minority of the Rift customer base. The whisper number for the first consumer version's resolution is 1440. At that resolution it will take not only a maybe-$300 Rift CV1 to play but also a seriously hefty video card to keep it fed with something like a steady 90 frames every second. (No currently-existing Crossfire/SLI setups need apply, as they introduce too much latency.)
>The dedicated attention from such a world-changing technology must have been special. The backlash against losing that special status is understandable.
While I agree with most of what you (eloquently) said, I take issue with the idea that gamers' reactions are a result of feeling less special. I'm at most an occasional gamer myself so I can't speak for "gamers," but do give them a little credit. Facebook doesn't have the best track record dealing with gaming companies and, as Notch noted, their motives are inherently different than the motives of the sole Oculus Team. This isn't necessarily bad, but it is a change. And change, particularly for something that appears to be on such a good path, introduces risk. And risk is scary for people who are emotionally invested.
But VR's potential isn't limited to gamers. That is what Facebook recognised and is capitalising on with this acquisition. Oculus, as a (perhaps the) leader in the consumer VR space, is well positioned to shape the future of VR and with it consumer computing. They had a choice between a niche and the market, and they are reaching for the moon.
Of course!
I'm surprised no one realises this is move to protect Facebook against Google's move into devices, specifically Google Glass.
Facebook doesn't want to be a sharecropper on a platform owned by Google.
I'd expect them to be looking at other companies in the "connected device" space too: Pebble, FitBit etc.
But it were this few from this so unimportant minority that filled their Kickstarter project with money, making this thing get so far. Advertising for it. Sharing propaganda and knowledge. They are the ones that could do this in the future with an end product making it desirable. Right now I don't see the usual FB people buy this thing. I see nobody really besides the gamers. Most of the people won't have a gain from it. This is not for MOST OF THE PEOPLE. It will remain an product for minorities for a long time.
They betrayed the gamers and this people will now jump on every possible alternative that comes around (and we've heard that there are things coming up already). Also they will hesitate to trust anybody else on something they love that much. This will hurt other start ups.
I keep thinking about Parse, a startup that Facebook bought a while ago and has mostly left alone to do it's thing.
I don't see the usual FB people using Parse. I see nobody really besides the developers.
Sure but this is not just another app developing platform...
How about friendfeed? It was a direct competitor to facebook. Also left alone, still working the same, no ads or gimmicks added: http://friendfeed.com/ ... the only thing that's changed is improved uptime. Or instagram?
Are you really comparing those exchangeable webpages to a revolutionary human interface device?
All these webpages will go. Like FB. The device will remain there until we manage to implant something directly in our brains. We are talking about a new "mouse" here.
The assumption of the gamers being a minority is incorrect, at least for young male adults [1].
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/28101518/ns/technology_and_science...
This is a god damned tragedy. (And the smartest move Zuck has ever made.)
VR was supposed to be a new frontier, I have been so excited to see finally the Next Thing was coming and it feels so much like the early days of the web and computing. But now it's owned by the worst company on the planet when it comes to choosing inspired thinking and pushing humanity forward instead of just trying to get inside of our lives (and now our heads.) I am frankly terrified.
Thank God for Valve, I hope they hit the gas and leapfrog these guys now on the tech and poach as many of them as they can. Thank goodness there is still plenty of work left to do and Facebook doesn't own all the VR patents. I am so fucking scared of a world where Facebook has a monopoly on VR. I really hope it doesn't happen.
Valve has stopped developing their own VR hardware and gave their prototype to Oculus a few months ago. If I remember correctly, their top VR guy also joined Oculus.
Sony is developing a competitor with project Morpheus, though.
Which is a proprietary addon for their playstation. Not interesting at all.
Occulus was going to be revolutionary because it was supposed to be an open platform. "Here is a headset, this is a starting point" every other company in the world could take it from there and see all the places it could go. How many improvements to the base model could be made. How many novel ways to utilize VR to advance common activities.
Instead, we now have Valve tossing away their project, Sony making its own proprietary toy dongle, and Facebook getting a live camera feed of your life while you use their video services on their proprietary platform with proprietary drivers and patents on everything including the paint job.
It is a pretty big travesty.
> Which is a proprietary addon for their playstation. Not interesting at all.
Yes, Sony products can never be rooted. Kinnect was a proprietary addon for XBox and look what happened there.
And look at the thriving ecosystem of 3rd party, unlicensed kinect apps
> VR was supposed to be a new frontier, I have been so excited to see finally the Next Thing was coming and it feels so much like the early days of the web and computing.
VR has been the Next Thing since before there was a World Wide Web, if not the internet itself. Maybe this time is different, maybe not.
this time is different
This time is even more different than the last time!
This time the technology is mature enough to support the vision, and isn't laughably poor and expensive.
This is a good move by Facebook. VR is going to be huge, huge huge. It might even be as big as Bitcoin. :)
I think what Oculus did was massively de-risk their next ten years. In their business plans, there were undoubtedly very large gray circles with things like "gain overwhelming market share (how?)" and lists of competitors that included, well, everyone in tech.
If you had to pick a tech company to leverage your disruptive new consumer technology, and make sure it kept the 'awesome', and was hacker friendly, who would you go to?
In exchange, they probably lopped another 10-50x of potential value off the top of their company. Not that they won't see some of that realized in Facebook if this is succesful -- they will. But, they will be sharing the gain around in exchange for getting access to that giant global customer base and being able to tap the considerable resources available at FB.
> If you had to pick a tech company to leverage your disruptive new consumer technology, and make sure it kept the 'awesome', and was hacker friendly, who would you go to?
google
Yep, those would be the two companies you'd have bidding. Except, Carmack is too heavy metal to go to Google. I only partly jest.
Carmack is definitely too heavy metal for google :)
tbh, of all companies, i would never say "carmack is going to facebook".
amazon?
I expected Microsoft to grab them and I'm surprised they didn't. Would've made a smart fit with Xbox and given them easy ways to directly integrate it with their OSs. Would work well with gaming, education, eventually business, mobile and so on. $2b a few months ago would've been a small price to pay to get in early on this, unless they have something comparable up their sleeves from the research division.
Well, Don Mattrick left last year and Marc Whitten's leaving/just left, so I don't really find it surprising.
Valve
Valve or Google definitely. Valve because of the gaming expertise, Google for the existing experience and culture of innovation.
> Google for the existing experience and culture of innovation
Perfect contrast with Facebook.
Nintendo
>If you had to pick a tech company to leverage your disruptive new consumer technology, and make sure it kept the 'awesome', and was hacker friendly, who would you go to?
Valve.
Or Blizzard. They have an actual virtual world already. I can easily see WoW fans who already sit at a PC and buy special hardware for their games to flock to VR tech.
Yeah, there are so many companies that I'd have picked over FB if I were them. Blizzard and Valve would have been excellent choices, though.
Does Valve have $2billion dollars lying around to acquire companies with?
Yes
Don't think so. Valve's total equity was estimated at ~$2.5bn in 2012
Just curious where you got the source for this -- no pun intended.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/technology/valve-a-video-g...
> Not that Mr. Newell hasn’t had opportunities to sell out. Valve has been pursued over the years by Electronic Arts, which would very likely have valued Valve at well over $1 billion had the talks progressed that far, said two people with knowledge of the discussion who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were private.
> Although Valve’s finances are private, Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, estimates that the company could be worth around $2.5 billion today.
It's guesswork and no method is explained though, so it's not like that's a very reliable estimate or anything.
Ah interesting, thanks for following up.
Or even Nintendo, or maybe even Bethesda (assuming they aren't bitter about him leaving Id)
Bethesda already passed on it.
Spoken like an investor who knows nothing about the audience. Sorry, VR was intended for PC gamers. They're not casual mobile gamers. They loathe casual games. They now loathe VR for wedding with Facebook.
>> VR was intended for PC gamers
I'm not familiar with the intimate details of the Ocululs business plan, but their story page says they have a larger view of the potential for VR:
"revolutionize the way people experience interactive content"
and their vision says nothing about games:
"Immersive virtual reality technology that's wearable and affordable."
Perhaps the negative comments here are part of the natural bitterness from insiders that accompanies any technology as it goes mainstream?
I think a lot of the problem is that VR as a means of improving the process of "experiencing interactive content" only really works when the content is presented from a first-person view and there is value in that perspective. Right now, that means FPS and FPRPG games. Amnesia through the Oculus Rift is a genuinely amazing (and terrifying) experience that is improved by the headset (it makes you, the player, feel like you can't step back and escape, which adds to the experience); shopping in a virtual shopping mall is just an impediment to getting what I want.
Remember the VR-32 and VRML? Everyone was super excited that we were going to start doing all the things in virtual reality, and then we figured out that it's a really cumbersome way to present most information.
>> Right now, that means FPS and FPRPG games.
Sure, I understand that. My point is that perhaps folks who went to the trouble of dedicating their lives to VR might have a larger vision than this.
In 1992, you could have defined the Internet in similarly limited terms -- after all, using the Internet largely meant text interfaces. I'm just positing that the folks who run Oculus are a) smart and b) have spent a lot of time thinking about how best to spread VR.
If VR takes off, by definition it will mean expanding beyond FPS games, because most people do not play those (you could alternatively get VR to go mainstream by increasing market penetration of FPS and FPRPG games by orders of magnitude, which might be harder than putting VR to other uses).
I'm certainly willing to be wrong - I'm not an expert in the space beyond having been an enthusiast gamer for 20 years (and I recognize that doesn't give me domain authority) - but I've been waiting for VR to be a thing for a long time now, and while it's had some neat demos, it's almost never something that I look at and decide that prefer over more traditional interfaces.
Carmack is a ridiculously smart guy who is damned good at squeezing things out of hardware that shouldn't be possible, and if there's anyone that I think could work out the how-to of VR, I think it'd be him, but I'm not sure that I trust his read on what the markets want.
The question isn't so much "will VR take off?" as it is "what could VR possibly do beyond FPS games that could make it take off?" and I just don't have any answer to that at all.
Yes, but first it has to win the gaming market, or it's a non-starter. Games are the Facebokulus's killer, game changing, app. Everything else is just speculation, and will take a while and will build on whatever happens in gaming, because VR gaming is already here.
Before you can expand, you have to first hit your core market. This deal seems like putting the cart before the horse, to me.
Actually, in the Kickstarter they state in bold:
"Designed for gamers, by gamers." [1]
Now, I understand that in the Kickstarted it was promised only the first developer kit and that it was successfully delivered, but I feel very uneasy knowing that the Facebook platform is geared exclusively to casual gaming. My worry is that Facebook will be happy with a VR technically good enough for a social VR but that can't stand the requirements for gaming. I may be too old to understand, but I really don't feel the urge to interact in 3d with my friends to say hello or to watch their holiday's pictures.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-...
Spoken like a fan with no imagination. Sorry for that, but seriously, come on. PC Gamers are the only audience you can see for VR?
VR is way, way, WAY bigger than some hardcore gaming nerds (of which I am one).
VR, at least as it stands right now, is squarely in the domain of the enthusiast, which has a very broad overlap with PC gaming crowd. Something like the Oculus Rift has no real potential with mobile gaming (power requirements alone preclude that).
What sorts of applications can you imagine? The idea of virtual presence being a killer app is silly, IMO - I've played with both the Oculus Rift and telepresence robots - they're neat, but for meetings/gatherings, I'll take a plain old webcam any day. I can't imagine what Facebook would do with this that I would be interested in.
True. But the best strategy for widespread adoption is to get the hardcore enthusiasts first, who in this case are the PC gamers.
</i>For example, see how well that's worked out for Tesla.
Isn't that what they exactly did? They got all the PC gamers on fire, got Carmac, got bought by facebook. Now they're reaching for the moon, they became so big that people started hating, you can't avoid that.
Literally no one is hating them for getting big, everyone hates Facebook and doesn't want Oculus (which makes awesome technology) ruined by them.
I don't think people are upset because they "got big", but because they were acquired by a corporation that signals a core shift in their ideals. If they were bought by Valve, or even Microsoft, I don't think there'd be nearly as much backlash -- because it's not that they're BIG, it's that Valve and Microsoft would not be pushing for a different market with their product (not to say they wouldn't later).
Filthy Casuals. Yeah that demographic was basically given the finger by this move, if I were Sony, I'd capitalize.
>They now loathe VR for wedding with Facebook.
No just Oculus.
I agree that it is a good move, but not because of takes away risk. It's because Facebook has a great deal of users, money, and apparently vision. I had no idea Zuck was this smart (although building Facebook into a giant ought to have been a good clue).
Oculus isn't being conservative here. They're shooting for the moon.
When big companies buy small good products, they often turn to poop, because the new masters lack the original vision and the decisions about the product will be made by PMs trying to get a promotion, not by those who actually care. I suspect this will be the case with this acquisition. My opinion is based on the way I see facebook managing their products: whatever they're offering to ordinary users is mediocre and basically stays afloat only because of the network effect, and whatever they are offering to their paying customers is effectively a scam (youtube search for "facebook fraud"). I can't see them possibly making good use of Oculus.
This is a terrible move for Oculus, though. The reaction from their core audiences - hardcore gamers and developers - seems to be largely negative, at a time right after Sony - a company that caters to that audience - announced its competing "Project Morpheus". It's not being taken as a signal of Facebook's innovation, but as Oculus moving toward a casual audience, and their fan base feels abandoned. Do they really feel that whatever plans they have with Facebook are so low-risk and high return that they no longer need that audience?
They have a new audience now: the world.
The world's reaction is also negative. They don't want to wear a box strapped to their face to interact with their friends. Seriously, look at the reaction on Twitter by non-gamers and Facebook users. It's being met with incredulity and mockery.
They don't want now, but wait 'till Facebook does "their magic" on them :) That "networking effect" stuff is not buzz-speak, and they know how to wield it.
Plus, gaming and socialization go hand in hand - it's amazing that others just don't fucking get this yet and see "gamers communities" as just niches or islands.
Their new audience isn't quite as easily convinced to invest hundreds of dollars on a piece of dedicated hardware.
They already had that audience - down the line, once they have established their beachhead. Selling themselves to facebook doesn't bring it any closer.
False false false; this is the dead of Oculus for one simple reason: Developers, doesn't matter how much ridiculous amounts of money you have if you scare away developers making it part of one of the spammiest and most hatred companies in the world it will fail.
Facebook is not the most hatred company in the world, especially after Instagram, Whatsapp and Oculus' acquisitions.
> most hatred [sic] companies in the world
Look at #81. http://www.apcoinsight.com/methodologies/tools/el-top-100-co...
Part of the reason I asked if I could cancel my preorder of Dev Kit 2 was some bad experience with Facebook dicking devs early on. Unless they've changed their tune in recent years, I don't understand how this could bode well for their support audience.
My bold prediction: Facebook will be broke in five years, gone in ten. Anyone getting into bed with them now is putting the noose around their own neck.
Facebook is a prototype of what "social networking" should be. Anyone who took five minutes out of their day could think up ten ways "social networking" could be better, and probably all of them would be incompatible with facebook's business model.
IANABP (..Business Person) but their 2 big acquisitions have increased their share of the social/data/identity pie considerably. Yes, these can be very ephemeral and the market can change on you (as MySpace will gladly tell you), but having 1.1B+ monthly actives on your core platform alone (plus however much instagram+whatsapp do) gives you a lot of room to try and recover when things start shrinking.
The oculus VR acquisition feels special, in that they aren't just buying users/reach, but something more substantial and forward looking. If they're smart, they'll let the oculus team work on the track they've been on, and let Facebook teams develop the "non-gaming VR experiences" they want to push.
Hard to think how much the landscape would need to shift for FB to be broke in 5 years. If Oculus delivers on their VR dreams, that alone could potentially bring an almost-bankrupt FB back from the brink.
I find it's very easy to imagine how the landscape could change for FB to be broke in five years; Anyone can build a better way to "social network", and anyone will. Guaranteed. The only real question is... what happens if Facebook can't buy them?
I admire what Facebook has achieved, but it's clear to me that they don't understand what their actual role is, or what people "want" from Facebook as a company if it is to survive. There is an air of mild desperations to the whole enterprise that hints at the acknowledgement of an imminent demise. This acquisition reeks of that desperation.
I would have said Oculus, before today.
This is extremely disappointing. This technology had the potential to be much bigger than Facebook. The Occulus was poised to create an entirely new industry. They were pioneering a technology never before seen, with a legend like John Carmack pushing the state of the art. I cannot think of a more colossal mistake to make as a founder. Palmer Luckey has shown he has absolutely no faith in his ability nor that of his team. Occulus had nothing but success in their future. They had investors beating down their doors with money, developers announcing support for the platform before even getting a dev-kit, and consumers itching to grab hold of their product.
Facebook is the antithesis to Occulus. They have never created any technology, they add zero value to the the real world, and have no future potential in the long run. Occulus selling to Facebook would have been like Tesla selling to Proctor and Gamble after they released the Roadster. A company with a technology so radical it can change the industry, succumbing to weakness and cashing out to an old money company that has no expertise in the field for some chump change.
I am filled with sadness and disappointment. I believe Palmer Luckey will regret this decision.
I don't want a "general-purpose VR headset". There are already many devices described that way (that work well enough for that purpose.) I wanted something built exclusively for the extreme requirements of gaming, and I feel this acquisition is going to distract the Oculus team from that. Facebook has no experience whatsoever in that domain, and the only way I see Oculus benefiting from this is the huge cash reserves they'll have access to once acquired. Truth be told, I was really hoping they'd get acquired by Valve - that'd strengthen their existing partnership (which I'm sure will cease to exist post acquisition), give them a good team to work with wrt. videogames and VR in general, and put them in an environment where their core focus is the same as that of their parent company. In this case, if the "experiment" fails, Facebook will almost certainly dump the project. Every time someone says "... we're going to make X a platform" before they actually have X, a kitten dies somewhere. There are still technical issues with the Oculus headset, and I'm afraid Facebook's "platform" focus is going to draw attention away from that. In short, I don't see this working. If fact, if Oculus fails, it might set the entire VR industry back several years. Luckily, we still have some hope in the form of Valve.
What a waste. I hate Facebook for doing this. And I'm not too happy with Oculus for accepting this either.
On the subject of those huge cash reserves, just how much of their IPO is left at this point? Zuckerberg is definitely spending way more than FB is earning, and it's mostly on assets that are bringing in additional costs, with few near-term revenues.
>I wanted something built exclusively for the extreme requirements of gaming, and I feel this acquisition is going to distract the Oculus team from that. Facebook has no experience whatsoever in that domain
com'n, VR FPV in FarmVille would be an experience to die for :)
Wouldn't it be better if we simply started farming IRL then?
Don't even get me started on the silliness that is Farmville - no more than a glorified Skinner box.
Facebook is rapidly becoming a seriously dominant technology player. I used to think of them as a "flavour of the year" play, but I'm having to readjust that perspective pretty hard.
It looks like they really are driving a long term strategy of being at the core on human -> human communication.
Yeah, I see this as a big move for FB, much bigger than for Oculus.
Someone I know had already identified FB as one of the Big Four several years ago, analogizing to the Big Four during the robber baron days of steel and rail. The other three are Apple, Amazon, and Google.
All four have some sort of machine learning / AI race going on. They are not the only ones around (Twitter, for example).
But this is pretty big. Google has the Glasses project. Apple probably has something cooking somewhere. And I have no idea about Amazon.
I also wonder if FB will keep the team together. It'd be a shame for John Caramak to skip out after the acquisition.
I'm (pretty)sure Facebook will leave Oculus alone; it would be dumb if they didn't, especially with all the anti-Facebook sentiment in our current zeitgeit. This is definitely a long term play towards becoming a major technology company. It's interesting to see what Facebook will become when "Facebook the website" is gone.
I'm also interested to see if the Second Life team gets shopped around, or if they will still try to stay independent.
Is it a strong strategy or more of a desperate "we have to grab this to be relevant in 5-10 years" reach?
I was excited about Oculus even though I wasn't necessarily going to buy one. But this acquisition is like Elon Musk announcing that Tesla will build a small 1 litre diesel car next, or SpaceX's next mission is to Detroit.
I mean, I'm sure Facebook has some amazing PHP and Python on their backend servers but has anyone not checked out the awfulness that is Facebook's web site ? UX is not supposed to be a four letter word.
What do Oculus gain from this that they couldn't have obtained with their $2.4m Kickstarter ? I don't believe Facebook won't be monitoring every penny spent there.
Oculus was not our last hope, there is another: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/avegantglyph/a-mobile-p...
I wonder does this have anything to do with Sony announcing her own VR project Morpheus. Technology wise Sony's alternative didn't show much advantage, but industry support wise it showed that it's a very very prominent opponent Oculus VR has to beat. Selling it to Facebook seems to me an indication that the leadership no longer believe that Oculus can be as successful in the gaming industry as they hoped.
Or, to phrase it differently, maybe they cared most about VR technologies going mainstream, and were only doing it themselves because nobody else seemed to be.
I wish they joined valve. Or even Msft for that matter, we'd atleast get integration with xbox.
Ouch, no thanks. Talk about dashed hopes and dreams.
See main discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469115
I can't imagine Carmack working for Facebook. This is surreal. As Palmer noted in his blog post he was skeptical when Facebook first approached them with the idea. I suppose Facebook eventually made a monetary offer they couldn't refuse. Whether Facebook makes it a VR advertising unit or Facebook Glass, it's likely to be something very different from what Oculus envisioned as an independent company.
It's rather entertaining to see the difference in comments between the Oculus announcement page and the Facebook page.
I can't believe Carmack is thrilled about being part of Facebook. His twitter feed seems a little sparse today...
He's too busy talking to Ferrari dealers, hopefully.
He was already crazy rich off id, though. He had his own aerospace company that he funded out of his own pocket for several years. He isn't the kind of guy who really needed another break - I always got the impression he left Zenimax for Occulus because he wanted to get back at the front of the tech revolution train after going in the back seat for a decade.
Didn't his space company run out of cash? This could help re-fund that.
That's right, Carmack said Armadillo Aerospace would "[...] probably stay in hibernation until there’s another liquidity event where I’m comfortable throwing another million dollars a year into things." ( http://www.newspacejournal.com/2013/08/01/carmack-armadillo-... )
For the sake of kicking off a discussion...
"Facebook [...] a company focused on connecting people, investing in internet access for the world and pushing an open computing platform."
Can anyone put facts or numbers to those last two statements? Is Facebook putting any concerted effort beyond PR/vanity projects into those goals?
http://www.opencompute.org/
https://code.facebook.com/projects/
Facebook does have the Internet.org[0] initiative which focuses on getting internet connections to more people in the world. I can't speak to its effectiveness or how serious they are about it though.
0 - http://internet.org/ (kinda funny that I use a cliff note link for this)
I imagine the investing in internet access for the world is wholly because one way to grow their own user numbers is to get more people connected to the internet - if they can just spend enough money to associate people with that messaging as their advertising budget - then they may start off with a good relationship to those new internet users.
At this point the only way to grow their user numbers significantly is to get more people connected to the internet. The question is whether it's something they seriously think they can do or just an attempt to convince Wall Street they have growth potential.
> We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.
https://twitter.com/notch/status/448586381565390848
I said this on the other thread, but this is the most terrifyingly awesome technology acquisition I've ever seen. Facebook chat in two years: put on a headset and get teleported to a room in a virtual world where you can talk to your friends' avatars. Skype and Google+ Hangouts suddenly seem very 20th century.
I've always found Facebook's stock to be a ridiculously risky long-term investment since their entire growth plan is predicated on monetizing an already established customer base, where a single event that causes people to switch en masse to a more private/secure social network would destroy the company. After today's acquisition I no longer think this.
> Facebook chat in two years: put on a headset and get teleported to a room in a virtual world where you can talk to your friends' avatars. Skype and Google+ Hangouts suddenly seem very 20th century.
This doesn't happen in two years at all -- it's hard to keep track, but Google Glass has been in its public beta release for over a year and yet there are no people walking around using them, at least where I'm from.
Plus I think most of us are still using the keyboard (be it virtual or physical) to tap instant messages and email -- if VR would be so mature in two years that we'd be able to do a lot of things through a virtual world, why haven't we ditched keyboards straight away?
There is likely a user input revolution around the corner, but I'd be looking at the 2024 date or later. This is probably a good reason why to be concerned about the purchase -- Facebook seems unlikely to care about Oculus games beyond what Oculus promised in their Kickstarter.
I totally agree that wearable computers like Google Glass aren't ready to replace conventional mobile devices. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the webcam+screen model of video chat (not the keyboard+mouse model of computing) in the near future will be replaced by something like webcam+Rift+Omni. I think the technology will likely be mature enough within the next few years and that the public is already ready to adopt it.
Before the 1964 World's Fair, the notion of video chat to accompany the telephone was considered science fiction. Even after the technology was demonstrated to the public, it stayed in the realm of science fiction, as seen in the film 2001, until the 21st century. I really think that being able to interact with other people in a digital world a la the Matrix would sell millions of units instantly.
> Put on a headset and get teleported to a room in a virtual world where you can talk to your friends' avatars. Skype and Google+ Hangouts suddenly seem very 20th century.
I'd rather talk to my friends' faces, albeit on a computer screen, rather than their avatars in a virtual room. Face to face communication isn't practical when both parties are wearing something over their eyes.
Fair point, I forgot about the lack of eyes part. I guess the Oculus Rift would work better for a multiplayer FPS where your characters are all wearing helmets.
> put on a headset and get teleported to a room in a virtual world where you can talk to your friends' avatars.
Uhm...No thanks. Second life has already been tried.
Why does this idea keep coming up? It sucks every.single.time.
Either you're misunderstanding me or you're equating an anthill with the pyramids of Giza. In Second Life, your avatar is a sprite on a screen. With Oculus Rift + Virtuix Omni, your avatar is you. It's like the Matrix. Or Avatar. Or a [lower resolution] lucid dream where you can interact with people from the real world in video game maps. For me, that's truly awesome in the literal sense of the word.
No, I understand you exactly. But I'm also paying attention to the last 30 years where this keeps getting tried and either it doesn't work or it degenerates into a 2nd life analog.
There's nothing magical about 2nd life, but in a first person POV and in 3d.
Would you find it magical if it were truly immersive 3d where eye movements would scroll and an Omni-like 3D treadmill actually worked?
No it's even worse. Now I have to work even harder to have the marginal experience I can have from my desk.
Have you tried a Crystal Cove Oculus? Have you seen the demos from HD cameras that capture video in almost 360 degrees?
Explain how sitting in front of my desk, with this gear on, looking at avatars of my friends, no matter the fidelity of the gear, is a better communication medium than group chat or video hangouts or the million other more efficient communication mediums that exist is worth anything more than a passing novelty?
Or are you proposing that I look at a high bandwidth, 3d video stream of somebody with a black rrectangle strapped to their face while they look at my complimentary version?
Wait.
It's not that it's a better communication medium any more than a 4K monitor is a better medium for learning what's being broadcast on your television. But it's certainly more enjoyable.
Imagine if you had an actual supernatural button that you could press to teleport yourself to an alternate dimension in which you could chat with friends. It wouldn't be a more effective tool for communication than a phone or video chat, but I'm sure you'd often use it since magic is, well, magical. VR is the closest you're gonna get to that experience.
Edit: And hopefully there would be a workaround for the issue of goggles obstructing the face.
I cannot imagine how Carmack is excited about this
Maybe he gets enough cash out of it to restart Armadillo.
I too am instinctively repelled by this acquisition. I did prefer the idea of the technology remaining independent and supported on multiple platforms.
MS, Apple, Google, Sony all have their own closed(* Android is arguable, I know) devices that they would prefer to limit the technology to. The benefit to Facebook is to have a primary interface perhaps hosted on another platform but not completely dependent on it.
I can think of three obvious negatives:
Carmack's apparently successful work using mobile graphics hardware to generate acceptable output for the Rift could allow a much wider adoption among the casual users who don't have a hardcore gaming PC/latest generation console. Facebook might focus on producing a low-cost version that lacks the resolution/low latency which would be preferable to gamers / professional 3D users. An extensive patent portfolio could inhibit higher-end competitors from easily addressing that market.
The second concern is that Facebook would in political superpower-like ways abuse the power to grant access to a popular VR platform and demand concessions such as mandatory Facebook accounts for gaming, an egregious cut of royalties, banning of anything that "replicates Facebook functionality" etc.
Thirdly, is the probably the most common knee-jerk consumer issue; ultra creepy Facebook, logging and mining everything that you foveate on, from the ad logos in virtual environments to the facial/bodily features of your friends' avatars. They build a more detailed model of your own desires and motivations than you consciously have of yourself.
Any chance this deal can be called off? Terrible decision.
So the backlash seems to be:
* Because the Oculus guys are seen to have sold out.
* Because Facebook is seen to be a ruthless exploiter of personal information.
I, for one, was actually days away from buying an Oculus device but I'm going to hold off for now. It's a combination of the negativity from here being infectious and the fact that if Facebook decided to buy now, maybe there's something much bigger on the horizon (apart from the DK2).
I hope Valve releases their own VR headset now, and locks Oculus out of Steam, with only their own VR headset being compatible. Valve has already done all the same research, and are even ahead of Oculus. I could see them turning it into a product by mid-2015, which is probably sooner than Oculus' own consumer version.
They don't need to lock out other headsets, that's kind of the opposite of their service model and philosphy. But they would have the advantage of controlling the distrobution platform, their in-house software/engine, and their hardware. Lots of advantages there, similar to Apple.
Theirs will likely become the superior product, organically.
I just hope they make it a hackable platform like they claim the steam controller will be, and like steamOS already kind of is. Because we can know for damn sure if there is profit opportunity in Occulus any openness about it will be stomped into the dirt.
>...it might not seem obvious why Oculus is partnering with Facebook...But when you consider it more carefully, we’re culturally aligned with a focus on innovating and hiring the best and brightest
Looks like ALL companies in this world would be a good fit for a facebook acquisition.
At least some of Facebook's history of arbitrary platform creation and destruction has to do with their youth as a company. They are growing up and we've seen successively fewer missteps in the past two years.
So there is room to hope for a successful partnership. Oculus has a really phenomenal product and partnering with Facebook is going to scale that product MUCH faster than it would've otherwise. This could be the perfect deal for both companies.
Don't get me wrong, my heart sank when I heard it was Facebook. And the WSJ's article on how disingenuous they were with their kickstarter backers is still real. But in the truly long-term, we might look back on today as a big moment for virtual reality.
/r/oculus isn't happy: http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/21cvry/facebook_acqu...
Checkout this prescient thread on /r/oculus/: http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1wf6mg/so_no_way_to_...
Rules of being acquired:
1st rule: you do not talk about the money 2nd rule: you DO NOT talk about the MONEY 3rd rule: you talk about how the acquirer and acquiree shares the same vision and dreams that would enable the acquiree to build great things.
I could be wrong, and I even think this might be an unpopular opinion (I'm not a huge FB fan, FWIW), but I think this is pretty good for Oculus. It's exposure writ large. Also funding, but from a Marketing perspective this can open some serious doors for them.
That said, I'm saddened. A possible greater exposure could have happened from another company purchasing it, Apple for instance, or even (some will shudder), Google.
I'm not going to give up on Oculus just yet though, but I'm somewhat disapointed. Even if Facebook doesn't ruin it, it's... well, it's still Facebook.
I shuddered at the Apple suggestion, not the Google one.
With Google there would still be a very excellent chance the device would run across PCs (Windows/Linux and Macs) and maybe even iOS devices (if Apple allowed it) along with Android. With Apple, obviously not, it would be Mac/iOS only and fuck everyone else.
True enough, though certainly the same with Microsoft, and possibly Google (Android only?). Maybe Facebook will be the one really only open one? I only worry that real games will not get a chance and we'll have a glut of "Totally Immersive Candy Crush!!!"
Sony is probably happy as heck since it effectively resets everything to give their project a chance. Also, I am a little sick of the "joined" terminology. You got bought and are no longer in control of your companies destiny. Unless you pull a NeXT, "joined" is not true.
At first glance, it might not seem obvious why Oculus is partnering with Facebook, a company focused on connecting people, investing in internet access for the world and pushing an open computing platform.
An "open computing platform"? What are they talking about?
"The affect heuristic is an instance of substitution, in which the answer to an easy question (How do I feel about it?) serves as an answer to a much harder question (What do I think about it?)."
It seems from the reaction that for Facebook this wasn't just a $2 billion deal but a $3 billion deal — $2 billion in cash, plus $1 billion of Oculus' value wiped out by the announcement.
Wow, I thought the real-life James Halliday was going to be Palmer Luckey, Gabe Newell, or John Carmack. I didn't pick that it could be Mark Zuckerberg!
It sounds to me like Oculus just sold out. Great now instead of a new way to game we are going to have something like Lawnmower Man Facebook.
Pretty funny that all the comments on the linked article are tied to Facebook
One word - metaverse. That is all.