In Episode One we discussed: Oculus Rift, the virtual reality headset for gaming: gimmick or the next big thing?
With the announcement that Facebook is buying Oculus VR for $2 billion, what does the Bad Voltage community think?
–jeremy
I think Sony must be delighted about this. For all intents and purposes this is going to cut the industry leader for VR to this point as their product is re-purposed for some kind of Facebook glasses type product.
I suspect this will give Sony a chance to steam forward and become gaming market leaders with their Morpheus product.
I think that even if you projected the image directly onto your retina with a laser beam while smoking crack, Candy Crush Saga would still be shit.
Pretty depressed? I managed to get a shot of the HD rift when Occulus were in Australia last year, and was blown away by how awesome it was.
I don’t see Facebook’s game plan, but it would be pretty upsetting to require a Facebook account to use a piece of hardware.
Slight history lesson. My boss for a few months at Linden Lab was CTO Cory Ondrejka (I joined in May 2007, he left in Dec 2007). Cory is now VP of Engineering at Facebook. Given his roots in VR (he developed the main scripting language for Second Life, amongst myriad other things), do you really think he’d let something as powerful and opportunistic as Oculus be subverted into a sub-par Google Glass? From what I’ve seen him say so far, they (and I include Zuck in “they”) are geeking the fuck out about Oculus. I can’t see them wanting to subvert the core tech too much.
I can’t help but think that “Zuck” is just buying up random cool things, just because he can. It’ll be interesting to see whether this acquisition gets investigated by the FTC too?
While I don’t deny that Cory is probably a pretty cool guy, he is one cog in a machine with a passionate and opinionated founder. The product definition process at Facebook won’t start and end with Cory.
I am not suggested whatever the technology is used for will be shit, but I do worry that it is a step back for VR in terms of gaming. I suspect the main use of it will be for head tracking and augmented reality.
Everyone has their panties in a knot about all this, but no-one actually knows what Facebook plan to do with Oculus. Have they even said they will do anything other than operate Oculus as an independent business unit, a la Instagram? From what I’ve heard, the main response from Oculus devs is a cautious “wait and see”, while they continue to hack on new and interesting things; notch’s “ewww” response is simply childish, IMHO.
At any rate, I’m still unconvinced a headset is going to be anything other than a niche gaming peripheral, purchased only by the diehard for use in specific verticals, in the same way that flight sim enthusiasts spend hundreds of pounds on full on flight sticks (hello, Thrustmaster’s Warthog HOTAS).
Now that #Facehook has lost all of it’s collateral, I wonder what Jonny would have to say about it ?
All that potential development money, has just been sold down the river to Delaware.
What on earth are you talking about? Also, please not to be talking about Facebook like “Micro$oft” (ick).
Or Crapple!
Makes me think of many years ago, people would be upset at a tv show and would call for a boycott of the sponsors of the show. How did that work? Not too good. I say, you don’t like it, don’t watch it, or use it, or buy it, and then be done with it. I don’t really want to hear about it.
Yeah. My lonely one man boycott of Sony for their terrible attitudes towards open source and continually inventing stupid new storage formats does not seem to have hurt them much. Although now that I actually research this, they were a billion dollars in the red last year, so maybe I am having more effect than I thought I was. Power to the people!
Which one? Betamax? MiniDisc? Memory Stick?
My point exactly 
Or person. Maybe word will get around that you just don’t get Stuart seriously annoyed with you. 
Free as in free-speech dictates I can call facebook, or facehook, whatever I like.
I hate it and all the fb.me links that are in my tweet feeds. It’s worse than a frontal lobotomy.
Firstly, “free as in free-speech” isn’t codified anywhere. Nominally, and jurisdictionally, US constitutional First Amendment rights would apply, since the BV Discourse server is hosted in Ann Arbor, MI, but you have to be aware that the First Amendment doesn’t give freedom to say whatever you want, whenever you want, to whomever you want. The First Amendment simply guarantees that the US Congress will not pass legislation which denies freedom of expression:
What the First Amendment does not do, and additionally what the UNHCR and EHCR instruments also do not do, is guarantee your freedom of expression on a privately owned, privately funded website.
Granted, there is no explicit curbing of speech codified anywhere on the BV forums, however, the code of conduct here is don’t be a dick. We’ve had one ban already due to extended dickish behaviour, and while I’m not saying what you said was something that would merit a ban (not that I could extend the banhammer, even if I wanted to), what I am saying is that – in my humble opinion – what you said and the way you said it was approaching microlevels of dickishness. Nothing inherently awful, or disrespectful to any individuals here, but towards the level of “dude, come on, this isn’t 1995, we’ve all grown up a bit”.
I know a lot of people who work, and have worked, at varying heights of position at Facebook. Not just “oh yeah, I’ve heard of them and poked them once or twice”, but friends I know personally, some of them really good friends, a lot of whom I’ve worked with before. They’ve worked at levels from engineers all the way up to VP. They’re good people. They have good intentions. They’re not sitting around wringing their hands together, twiddling moustaches, and plotting on how to … well, be dicks.
And finally, as I, as I’ve said previously:
4 Likes
4 years well I ask you ?