Ugh. I don’t want anything to do with facebook. Now I’d be afraid to buy the Oculus. I’d likely need a facebook account to download drivers or some such, and that would mean agreeing to their nefarious EULA. Who knows what kind of evil things they could do with my data then.
If you took away Facebook people would be whining about another big evil corporation buying the tech. Previously for years it was Microsoft’s role. And if hardcore users abandon it they won’t care b/c you aren’t their target audience. Again, not sure how people think tech works, but “selling out” is part of the standard business model. Anybody who backed this project and didn’t notice it being supported by venture capitalists left and right after the kickstarter could be surprised I guess, but isn’t that their fault for being willfully ignorant? Enough of this pie in the sky crap. The OR backers sound like children today.
And BTW I’m probably more anti-government/large corporations than most of the people on this site. Just don’t use things that involve something you don’t like. A virtual reality headset isn’t exactly an inalienable right.
Sounds like you hate your friends, not Facebook. Facebook exists the way it does, including its ridiculous tying together of user data and ads (just like google) because people use the service in a way that facilitates that. There is no conspiracy here, people willfully put way too much info about themselves online. your friends are the sellouts, not Facebook.
I don’t have a Facebook account, never did, and never will. Nor do I attempt to “link in” with the people who were also at my high school never-mind how-many years ago. Avatars on computer screens are not your “friends.” Yeah, you can grab your Wii and walk-around in your living room and pretend that you’re hiking on a trail somewhere … or you can get your butt off the couch and actually hike someplace. I’ll take the latter. I don’t need “immersive technology” that is meant to further isolate me from other people in the name of interaction with those same other people. No, thanks.
On the one hand, I’m delighted that Facebook seems to have $2 billion dollars at its disposal, but on the other hand I’d like to know exactly how they’ve managed to do that. And, why they decided to pour such an astonishing amount of cash onto this technology acquisition when for much less money they probably could have done it themselves. The dollar amounts that are in-play here, and so routinely, is … suspicious, really.
c’mon man the articles all clearly state that it’s 400M in cash and the rest in stock.
Great news for investors in Oculus. Those guys just hit the jackpot. Facebook however… that guy throws away money like crazy. I can’t see how his company is sustainable like this.
I ordered my DK2 and I hope this doesn’t change anything there. If nothing else, we’ll have a community of tinkerers making fun stuff with the Rift (much like that community is now). 
Razer’s head hancho dropped a hint that they might also be in the VR game, still don’t know if Valve is pushing a prototype as well. So hopefully there are still more options that are PC friendly. I’m not going to rely on Sony at all for PC usability.
What about total immersion in environments that are not possible to recreate in real-life (ie. most of the environments seen in games)?
How about the idea that you have a pet like a Dragon or play in an environment as an animal (real or mythical), one needs to still know that some of the biggest potential is to virtually create experiences that are otherwise impossible.
I think the level of immersion stems from the storytelling, rather than the graphical execution. I have felt completely immersed in virtual environments with a standard monitor. Hell, I’ve read books that sucked me right in. With the quality of storytelling brought by some of the lackluster blockbuster games out there, it seems like just another gadget to make you spend more money to “really experience” the vitrual world.
To add, its really not just immersive technology…rather its not the only perk of such VR headsets.
Imagine this, can you buy a 90" + hdtv and also have it be portable for a few hundred bucks? Its just not possible. With VR headsets, you can have virtual displays in front of you at pretty much any size. It really is the best and yet cheapest form of display. One could even exist inside a movie theater like setting, scaled on an accurate level.
The only opinion on this deal that I place any interest in…
…the man has been working towards VR as far back as Wolfenstein3D. Whether or not this deal sullys Oculus I have faith Carmack will continue his VR work regardless, in one form or another.
For example…
- “Like” buttons everywhere
- OpenCL ad banners
- Blender Game Engine “Chatbox” Integration
I simply dont understand how Oculus fit on the Facebook market. they basically sell profiles and things as farmville…were you put a virtual reality on it?
Or they develop new and very surprising tech about social, or i think that we’ll gonna see a kind of the SIMS 2.
Or Virtual Kinky Sex Simulator… Zuckerberg is probably looking for some bio-feedback company to buy just now…
Seems like Facebook wants to have it just because it can. It had come a long way from when I first saw this on Shark Tank.
It’s a corporate aquisition, they don’t really care what it is or what it’s useful for, they care if it will make money. They’re pretty confident that they will be able to make more than 2 billion dollars off of the Oculus Rift.
Off the top of my head there are at least a dozen things I can think of them doing with this to combine social networking and gaming that would make them a ton of money with their user base, and with their user information they could market those games incredibly well to niche audiences.
New reports are surfacing that irate gamers have been calling for the deaths of various Oculus employees and harassing their families.
Seriously, if people are just acting like savage beasts because of the buyout (or wish they really could act on that if not for murder being illegal), then perhaps they don’t deserve to have their voice heard at all when the Oculus guys (along with those behind any piece of hardware) are looking for feedback. It almost seems to be the wisest thing to do not if you’re looking to make a game, which is completely ignoring the general gaming community and reporting persistent harassers to the FBI. (because you might try to listen to them, but they’ll find a reason to be angry again).
It’s indeed a good thing that they usually don’t act on these threats, otherwise you might need to go into witness protection under a new name because you designed the main character to have blue armor when a lot of people wanted it to be red. It’s quite funny how they vehemently deny that violent games are having a negative impact on their general character and then comment in a way that confirm their conclusions :eek:
A few good ideas here and then, and then some luck and a dose of this and that and you get a newest billionaire