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Oculus co-founder is leaving Facebook after cancellation of ‘Rift 2’ headset
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- acconrad 8y agoIt sounds like this trend is exactly what Facebook wants. They buy some software (and its people) and mold it to their specifications whether or not it costs that team its most senior management/visionaries. The more interesting thing will be to see what happens when all of these ex-CEOs have left and how Facebook has managed to maintain all of these acquisitions without the key leaders of each division.
- the_common_man 8y agoIn fairness, this is also what the founders want. They got their pay day and after sometime of golden handcuffs, they get their freedom.
- lalos 8y agoIt's more of Thiel influence of 'build a cult' on Zuckerberg and also his inability to listen from other respectable figures for their opinions. I got that vibe from the article of the Whatsapp founders. Seems that Zuckerberg has his mind set on an idea and will shut down any other opinion. Troubling for investors, it's never good to have a monoculture or one-sided opinions and it doesn't look good to have smart people (and proven successful) jump ship at this rate.
- illiac_1962 8y agoSounds like the upper management circle in Facebook is running off aquired executives, not nesseaarily zuck. Kind of hints at a toxic culture.
- SirensOfTitan 8y agoMy feeling was that FB’s desire to monetize acquired properties has put off a lot of acquired execs.
- logrott 8y agoIt's really Zuck. He hires management between the co-founders as a diversion.
- billylindeman 8y agowho says its not good? worked for apple for many years.
- wetpaws 8y agoCults work until they don't.
- mbroncano 8y agoI can name a few that are a couple of thousand years old and still kicking
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lalos 8y agoApple and Steve Jobs for that matter basically invented cross-competition inside the same company. He pushed for different teams to work on the same problem and then compared solutions. Even from the Mac vs Lisa days to the iPhone initial designs (iPod based vs what we have now as iPhone) and even on minuscule things (iOS keyboard was assigned to at least 5 different teams and then one engineer got a big breakthrough). Contrary to shutting down any other idea from the get-go and pushing away talented people.
- tinus_hn 8y agoObviously he’s not going to buy WhatsApp for billions of dollars and then keep not earning money on it. You can’t eat having a lot of users.
- bitL 8y agoI guess the lesson to learn here is "never sell your company if you want to have any controlling influence over it". So we have WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus quickly in a row. Hundreds of killed-off companies acquired by FAANG, visions lost, money made.
- Apocryphon 8y agoI know it's a useful acronym, but not quite accurate. Netflix doesn't do many [0] acquisitions [1] and isn't on the same scale as the other companies other than as a desirable tech company to work at. [0] https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/08/07/netflix-inc-just-made-its-first-ever-acquisition.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/08/07/netflix-inc-just-m... [1] https://www.thestreet.com/investing/netflix-acquisition-abq-studios-14746375 https://www.thestreet.com/investing/netflix-acquisition-abq-... A list like Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo! is probably more accurate, even if the last has itself been acquired. Term pedantry aside, your point is sound. Tech's incredible journey marches on.
- egwynn 8y agoI’d describe the acronym as ‘catchy’ more than I’d describe it as ‘useful’.
- natalyarostova 8y agoYeah, if you lose the N, it becomes inappropriate. And GAF doesn't sound great.
- MrEfficiency 8y agoI mentioned this today as I am in the market for a new phone. I am looking to avoid supporting FAANG companies... but netflix isnt quite the same as the rest.
- httpz 8y agoFacebook, Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are all West Coast tech companies that are in the top 10 largest public companies in the world by market cap. Media should really replace Netflix with Microsoft and come up with a new acronym.
- amiga-workbench 8y agoThis is worrying, HTC aren't exactly doing brilliantly and I'd like to see some more proper headsets, not these gimped smartphones glued to your face.
- jakebasile 8y agoYeah, it looks like aside from HTC, VR is a race to the bottom. I guess there's just more money in crappy low-rent headsets vs high quality expensive ones.
- Apocryphon 8y agoI suppose the ultimate crappy low-rent VR headset will be the smartphone.
- zeusk 8y agoBecause for the general populace adoption of VR hinges on affordability.
- outworlder 8y agoYes, but if they are just affordable, but crappy, VR will die again.
- luckydata 8y agoPrice is the least of VR's problems. The biggest issue is there's no way to produce an immersive experience without ridiculous space requirements or requiring the user to sit down. I'm extremely skeptical VR will become more than a novelty accessory for gamers and that overall it won't make much of a dent.
- freehunter 8y agoPersonally I feel like gaming is the least interesting application for VR/AR/MR. There are plenty of use cases I can imagine where the user does not have to suspend their disbelief to forget they're not actually running, walking, jumping, shooting, ducking, etc. And most of those use cases are in industries where buying a $4000 specialized tool would be considered cheap and easy to get a return on investment. I'm still waiting for "virtual monitors" in AR/VR so my entire office wall becomes a giant screen.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- justfor1comment 8y agoCan't believe there is a rift among Facebook upper management.
- cagenut 8y agoBetween this, the 2080's performance being 'eh', the vive pro having a very mixed reaction (mostly price), and the pimax sets running face-first into gpu limitiations, PC VR is in a bit of a slump. The best thing to buy today is almost exactly what it was a year and a half ago.
- TomMarius 8y agoSo GPUs are the bottleneck? Are there any roadblocks in GPU development we'll hit soon?
- icelancer 8y ago> So GPUs are the bottleneck? Not really, no. It's pixel density and refresh rate as always, and that is driven from the display. > Are there any roadblocks in GPU development we'll hit soon? We already have. The 2080 is a negligible improvement to the 1080ti platform with regards to compute power.
- Retric 8y ago2080 Ti has a lot more power than the 1080ti, it just spends most of it on ray tracing. Consider the 2080 Ti has 18.6 transistors the 1080 Ti has 12 billion. The issue nVidia saw is games are less limited by polygon counts and 4k is still not mainstream so they needed something else to keep the treadmill going.
- fyfy18 8y ago4K is a bit of a catch 22 situation - hardcore gamers don't want 4K as the GPUs don't have enough performance for it. Monitors don't support higher refresh rates as there is no demand from gamers for a 144Hz display. Intel iGPUs have supported it comfortably for the last couple of generations, but Windows is still a POS when dealing with 4K, so businesses aren't going to bother upgrading their trusty Dell 24" 1080p monitors anytime soon.
- koiz 8y ago
- pmoriarty 8y agoIs John Carmack still there?
- quakeguy 8y agoAs of now, yes.
- rpdillon 8y agoHe's been really clear for multiple years now that he signed up to put a billion people in VR. I don't think high-end PC-powered, room-scale rigs have any real part in that mission. Are you suggesting he would leave?
- joaomacp 8y agoAs a VR skeptic, I think his expertise is being wasted in that space.
- pdpi 8y agoI’m a skeptic too, but if there’s one person who can make this sort of moonshot project happen, it’s him. His expertise is right where it needs to be.
- wvenable 8y agoHe's clearly doing what he loves there; I watched his key note on the Quest and while he's not the greatest speaker it's pretty riveting and in the end I disappointed they had to cut him off for time.
- icelancer 8y agoPerhaps, but Carmack works on things he likes and is best driven by seemingly-impossible technical tasks. It's pretty unlikely he'd be anywhere near as productive in any other space if he truly loves VR.
- quakeguy 8y ago
- dgritsko 8y agoCancellation of the "Rift 2" seems like a pretty big deal, is this confirmed anywhere else?
- cheeko1234 8y agoClarification from the author on twitter[0]: this edition of Rift 2 may have been cancelled but that does not mean Facebook is no longer making PC VR headsets. [0]https://twitter.com/lucasmtny/status/1054436110661754880?s=19 https://twitter.com/lucasmtny/status/1054436110661754880?s=1...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- acjohnson55 8y agoAre we back in VR winter? It feels like it hasn't caught on aside from a segment of gamers.
- k__ 8y agoWell, if the Oculus Quest is good, it's more to the Rift like the smartphone was to the desktop computer.
- istorical 8y agoNope, porn (and you would expect TV/movies to follow in their footsteps) will ensure it doesn't disappear and continues to grow, although it's possible it grows slowly.
- freehunter 8y agoPorn, sure. That's a place where being immersed in the scene is unique and possible desirable. Movies, though... I'm not convinced. 3D movies already suffer from having to force the viewer's attention to the appropriate part of the scene by changing the focus so undesirable locations are blurred out. How do you represent an action scene where the viewer could potentially be looking 180 degrees from where the action is taking place?
- jobigoud 8y ago> How do you represent an action scene where the viewer could potentially be looking 180 degrees from where the action is taking place? You put the viewer in the middle of the action.
- Flenser 8y agoHalf Life managed to do it. I imagine if you played a VR version of Half Life the story/"cut scene" parts would work even better than with a mouse and keyboard.
- acjohnson55 8y agoIf the idea there is just immersive field of view, seems like Google Cardboard is probably sufficient. I don't really see people wanting to navigate the space.
- jryan49 8y agoAs sad as this makes me being a person that has a powerful gaming PC and would want the best VR experience, maybe for now it's more important to make VR more mainstream, and profitable so it does not die out all together.
- anjc 8y agoWhy are people saying "it makes more sense to make it affordable first"? When has an advanced new tech ever proliferated from the bottom-up? New tech is always unaffordable, and becomes affordable as it matures. Advancements trickle down. I fear that this move towards cheap low-barrier VR will make it unattractive for users.
- nafey 8y agoSmartphones?
- ghaff 8y agoNot really. The iPhone really drove the modern smartphone and, even if the price has tended to increase (but that's partly because of the phasing out of carrier subsidies), it wasn't a low-end device. And Blackberries and Treos weren't cheap either.
- cmiles74 8y agoIMHO, there's not much of a market for a tethered VR headset. Some of the big components of a compelling and immersive VR environment include some ability to move around and interact with the virtual environment and (again in my opinion) a tethered headset really gets in the way of that. I don't think that means this needs to be a race to the bottom, but when you move to a portable device it looks like everyone starts looking really hard at smartphone-like hardware. That's a big jump from a custom desktop workstation and, for a lot of people, smells like a race to the bottom.
- IshKebab 8y agoThis seems like a smart move from Facebook. They clearly stand to make more money from standalone VR headsets with good-enough graphics and low prices (i.e. the Quest) than from super high end wired headsets that require a $2k PC.
- sanderjd 8y agoSure, but if that was their strategy, they could have just developed something good enough internally or acquired someone going after that market. It's disappointing that they bought a company (arguably the most prominent) with the opposite strategy, and then didn't commit to it. This would make more sense if they were acquiring competitors to consolidate their position, but they didn't have a position, this is how they entered the market. It may suggest that they have gathered enough evidence to be pretty certain that the high-end VR market just isn't workable. But it doesn't seem to me like they have given it enough time or energy to know this yet.
- IshKebab 8y agoI don't think Oculus had the opposite strategy though. Standalone 6 DoF tracking with on board processing simply wasn't an option for them in the past.
- man2525 8y agoFeels more like Oracle than FAANG with some of these moves.
- cheeko1234 8y agoFacebook denies techcrunch report regarding Rift 2: https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/oculus-co-founder-brendan-iribe-is-leaving-facebook-1202988298/ https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/oculus-co-founder-bren...
- Ajedi32 8y agoStatement from Nate Mitchell (head of Rift at Oculus): https://twitter.com/natemitchell/status/1054460295697944578 https://twitter.com/natemitchell/status/1054460295697944578
- WillPostForFood 8y ago“Yes, we are planning a future version of Rift.” That's not really a denial that Rift 2 was cancelled.
- RoyTyrell 8y agoI would guess, based on the article, that PC headset sales aren't anywhere near what the division needs to stay alive. The cheaper mobile headsets are more affordable and easier to use, even if the technology isn't as advanced as what the PC headset would offer. If Carmack leaves, then you know Occulus is fucked.
- evan_ 8y agoAs of an hour ago he says he’s staying: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1054451469674598400 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1054451469674598400
- koiz 8y agoThe funny thing is Carmack only works on the mobile headsets and has been for awhile. He knows that's the future.
- ss248 8y agoNot really actually. Originally he started doing all that mobile stuff mostly because of Zenimax's lawsuit.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoDo you have a source on that? It seems like a much better fit for his talents than the PC stuff. He's doing low level super critical performance optimization, and technical product direction. Performance doesn't matter nearly as much on the PC side, because there's so much more headroom in the hardware, and the technical product direction can just flow out of what game companies need. The mobile side is a true technical challenge where a person like Carmack can literally make the difference between go and no-go.
- utopcell 8y agoNot sure how important this is. Is there a doubt in anyone's mind that FB got Oculus for John Carmack ?
- metalliqaz 8y agoI don't believe that at all. If Facebook wants a rockstar dev, they can offer that one person a lot less money than it would cost to buy a company. Facebook bought Oculus because they wanted to expand into the VR space. I imagine it had nothing to do with games, but rather the possibility of a future application platform. In my mind, VR is not the future, but rather AR will be. In that case, Facebook wants to be the provider of ads and metadata that is laid over other people's faces and brick-and-mortar storefronts while people walk around wearing thin AR glasses.
- buboard 8y agoI 'm glad people are finally quitting the VR hype. The amount of money thrown in the hopes that people would strap a horrible vomit-inducer in their skull is astonishing. What's worse, it has distracted people from incremental progress in what is "classical" metaverse and kept it behind by a few years. Example in point is Second life's pivot to VR called Sansar and its open-source twin called HighFidelity. Both are going nowhere, and the only thing that kept people from seeing their obvious flaws was the mountain of money they got thrown. Highfidelity now pays its users with cryptocurrency in order to be able to stress-test their servers. The project has received 75M to burn, and is unable to retain any users after 4-5 years of trying. Its users are complaining about the lack of a decent desktop experience, yet they are stubbornly refusing to listen. On the other end, opensimulator, a poor secondlife-clone is struggling to fix its bugs with $0 funding, yet it still keeps thousands of users interested. Someone should just knock some sense into all this hype. I guess the guys leaving oculus are smart enough to know that the party is over ... for now.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- koiz 8y agoYa know there are other people making content in VR beyond total rip offs... No one is "quitting" VR, people sure as hell are doubting it though. "in the hopes that people would strap a horrible vomit-inducer in their skull is astonishing." This shit reminds me of the pc days... "why would I want to play this game, it doesn't even look real"
- koiz 8y agoI find this report funny because the quest is the real rift 2. I don't buy this rumor one bit, if we saw carmack, mitchell or abrash leave then maybe I'd be worried but what does Iribe really have to his name? When I think back I see a botched launch of the original rift... that no doubt had a part in his "stepping down" as CEO towards the end of 2016... In other words nothing to see...
- evo_9 8y agoI would say the something to see here is that Facebook is betting on stand-alone VR and not PC based VR going forward. I think this is a good bet as the main reason most of my friends have not gotten into VR is the necessity for a high-end gaming PC and the associated costs of VR in general. The Quest, while not cheap, is priced around the new norm for gaming machine which is much more palatable than the current VR cost/PC approach.
- kabacha 8y agoI'd say is pretty bad bet as stationary beasts are often not powerful enough for decent experience so stand-alone device is just a 100 steps back. I wouldn't be surprised if stand-alone VR user retain is in single digits. Some people watch movies but that's pretty much where real use case ends.
- deltron3030 8y ago>the quest is the real rift 2. They might consolidate the Rift and Quest into one device in gen2. The Quest with an PC interface or some kind of 5g dongle.
- nameisu 8y agolizard strike
- kapauldo 8y agoVr is still a solution looking for a problem
- karmakaze 8y agoCouldn't they have compromised by having an external input on one of the models, like the 27" pre-retina iMac used to b come a monitor? I suppose that's could still be perceived as a problem of fracturing the target platform. But really that's unavoidable in any leading edge technology.
- zarriak 8y agoI think the biggest hindrance to VR is that Apple doesn't have the equivalent to Cardboard/Daydream. I don't know how many of you have introduced people to VR but every person I have shown VR to has enjoyed it. There is a lot of variance in the enjoyment but 1/5 really enjoys it. I think once smartphone VR gets bigger, especially when Apple does something it will funnel many more people to more expensive VR headsets.
- fipple 8y agoHaving used both types of headsets I can say that there is probably no entertainment market for tethered headsets.