Oculus Rift Purchased By Facebook

[Inkie]

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-to-buy-oculus-rift-for-2-billion-2014-3

I dunno.

[Gez]

I wonder where Carmack will go now.

[pritch]

It makes perfect sense when facebook has become steadily shittier to look at and crap to use over the past 7 years to buy a virtual reality headset company.

[geo]

Gez said:

I wonder where Carmack will go now.

Wherever the paychecks come from.

It was very random of Facebook to go in on this. Google glasses competition. Facebook has been buying up a lot of companies lately.

Oculus might stand a chance of hitting the mainstream surf for a year, before people realize its a fad. Sony will hit their Morphius hard for a year like Move and 3D TVs. Then when Christmas ends, that'll be it.

[Technician]

Blip was just recently acquired by Disney. Soon all services and innovations will be owned and dictated by the few. I say that like it's something new.

[geo]

According to a statement from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company plans to expand Oculus beyond gaming:

After games, we're going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face -- just by putting on goggles in your home.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-to-buy-oculus-rift-for-2-billion-2014-3#ixzz2x1SzPQcY


*cough* Monitors and webcams. No one tried that yet? Will that mean they'll come up with cameras to be at NBA games, classrooms and doctor's offices and move as you move your head across the world?

The sad part is Marvel is only worth double of Oculus, a company that hasn't brought its product to market yet.

[Technician]

geo said:

The sad part is Marvel is only worth double of Oculus, a company that hasn't brought its product to market yet.

DC is better but at the end of the day comics suck.

[Cupboard]

Zuckerberg and his shitty company can zuck my dick.

[Reisal]

My thoughts when I saw the news article..

And interest to 90% of the users interested in the hardware, especially the 9,522 backers who got it off the ground initially.

[geo]

Technician said:

DC is better but at the end of the day comics suck.

They didn't buy it for the comics. They bought it for the characters. Merch, TV, movies, games and so on.

[Jonathan]

Any concerns I have about Facebook acquiring Oculus are more than compensated for by the schadenfreude of watching a million hardrcore gamer nerds raging in comment threads and threatening to cancel their preorders.

[Snakes]

Congrats Sony!

[Mr. Freeze]

Where were you when gaming died?

[Avoozl]

I wonder if this was the plan all along to sucker people into supporting it so they can make a bigger profit out of it.

Anyways what if Google bought it instead?

[geo]

Google already has glasses. Half the people in the world wear glasses. Its only a matter of time before every pair of glasses are google glasses and the people that don't need glasses are wearing them for funzies. Then you can just turn off your lights and connect your glasses wirelessly to video games. Google wins while Facebook's big idea needs money to promote it, compete against Sony and Microsoft and from Fuckerburg's idea, it will need robots to be physically at locations to move their head when you move yours to give you the immerse experience. The Microsoft VR will be compatible with all Windows and will dominate VR like X-Box 360 controllers even if Oculus has a head start.

[Cupboard]

geo said:

Google already has glasses. Half the people in the world wear glasses. Its only a matter of time before every pair of glasses are google glasses and the people that don't need glasses are wearing them for funzies. Then you can just turn off your lights and connect your glasses wirelessly to video games. Google wins while Facebook's big idea needs money to promote it, compete against Sony and Microsoft and from Fuckerburg's idea, it will need robots to be physically at locations to move their head when you move yours to give you the immerse experience. The Microsoft VR will be compatible with all Windows and will dominate VR like X-Box 360 controllers even if Oculus has a head start.

I can't decide if that thought originated from geo or gggmork.

[fraggle]

geo said:

Google glasses competition.

Except, it isn't. In any sense whatsoever. Google Glass and the Oculus Rift are completely different, utterly unrelated products.

[geo]

yerp. Broader audience. Google would win.

[Caffeine Freak]

fraggle said:

Except, it isn't. In any sense whatsoever. Google Glass and the Oculus Rift are completely different, utterly unrelated products.

Thank you for pointing out a simple fact that has somehow eluded this discussion thus far.

Gez said:

I wonder where Carmack will go now.

Facebook has said that Oculus will operate independently of them, and that internally, things will remain unchanged, including Carmack's position as CTO.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/25/the-creator-of-doom-is-now-a-facebook-employee/

Of course, we'll see where things stand in a year or two.

I'm sure FB is interested in giving Oculus an idea of what they think Oculus should be working on, so I'm curious as to what they mean when they say Oculus will operate independently.

[DooM_RO]

Jesus Christ, I don't know how to feel about this. I REALLY hope the price stays 300$ because I live in a poorer country but I have a bad feeling about this.

[Untamed64]

It seems theres going to be built-in facebook ads in the Oculous Rift aswell.

Its a sad day..

[Patrol1985]

Two recent tweets from John Carmack regarding the issue:

"I suppose I will get a FB account now, so that may lead to some writing a little longer than tweet length..."

and

"I have a deep respect for the technical scale that FB operates at. The cyberspace we want for VR will be at this scale."

He doesn't seem unhappy about the Facebook deal :P

[Avoozl]

Untamed64 said:

It seems theres going to be built-in facebook ads in the Oculous Rift aswell.

Its a sad day..

Damn, I was afraid of that happening.

[Patrol1985]

I use facebook, but I HATE IT that it wants to connect to every single application / webpage I use. FB is a way for me to communicate with my friends, I don't want it to supervise all my other Internet actions. Too bad all other alternatives (ICQ etc.) have been killed by FB :/

[Blastfrog]

Woah, didn't see that one coming. I'm not sure how to feel about this. While I don't want to jump to wild conclusions, this does concern me. I'd really rather have as little to do with Facebook as possible. So long as the headset doesn't have any deeply ingrained FB shit, and can also run custom firmware to completely avoid connecting to FB in any way, then I'm not too worried. If it does try to take freedom from the user...

[Jodwin]

Patrol1985 said:

I use facebook, but I HATE IT that it wants to connect to every single application / webpage I use.

Errr, don't blame Facebook for that, blame the other websites which decide to integrate their functionality with Facebook. Facebook simply provides them with the means to do so, and the other sites are glad to use whatever features Facebook gives because it either lessens development and maintenance costs or increases awareness of the website by status messages you post.

[Phml]

Those ten thousand regular joes who helped kickstart the project as a grassroots tech project focused on video games must be stoked they got a plushie or poster or whatever cool reward rather than company stock!

[dew]

Even the PR is already full of social networking lingo, so I can only imagine a push for integrating Oculus into the FB universe further down the line. And it will fail miserably, because the device is awkward as hell and people might not want to tie a brick to their forehead in order to chat up their friends or have a video conference. Oculus is an interesting gaming device, but using it for anything else will probably be highly embarrassing. And by gods, I hope Zuck won't see it until it's too late and billions have been wasted.

[Maes]

Get ready to play Doomville err... Doom with Zynga points.

dew said:

Oculus is an interesting gaming device, but using it for anything else will probably be highly embarrassing.

Why do you say that? Where's your enthusiasm and optimism for new technologies?!

[GreyGhost]

geo said:

it will need robots to be physically at locations to move their head when you move yours to give you the immerse experience.

I envision a world overrun by Shelbots and don't find that a comforting thought.