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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 buil

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.

leoc 13y ago
There doesn't seem to be that much difference between a good general-purpose VR headset and a good gaming-focussed one though. The refresh rate, positioning accuracy, latency and so on have to hit a certain high standard or you simply have a bad, non-immersive and likely sickness-inducing VR headset. (So the situation is very different from monitors: 60Hz and high latency is "good enough" for general-purpose monitor use but poor for competitive gaming.) If anything non-gaming applications may be more demanding when it comes to resolution: games can manage with 1080p but it's not really sufficient for reading text, viewing photos and so on.
Yhippa 13y ago
I think this bothers me the most. Us gamers had our shiny new toy and then it got taken away so everybody can play with it now. I bet Facebook will figure out a way to subsidize this to get it in all of their user's hands and then gaming will take a big backseat to the Facebook Experience (TM).
saturdaysaint 13y ago
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. There's a lot of infrastructure that a gaming company needs in 2014 that doesn't have that much to do with Oculus's core gaming focus and that Facebook has very direct experience with. Look at how long it took Sony to get remotely competitive with the Xbox's interface; look at powerhouses like EA and Nintendo embarrass themselves year after year. System UX, payments, network scaling, "social", building a customer friendly game marketplace. I don't think these are the areas Luckey, Carmack and company can't wait to work on in the morning, but they're perfectly suited to Facebook. In a better case scenario, I can see Facebook (or Apple or Google, to be fair) helping Oculus build another Steam competitor years sooner than otherwise imaginable. Imagine if there were two brilliant companies competing to push the envelope on Linux gaming.

leoc 13y ago

There doesn't seem to be that much difference between a good general-purpose VR headset and a good gaming-focussed one though. The refresh rate, positioning accuracy, latency and so on have to hit a certain high standard or you simply have a bad, non-immersive and likely sickness-inducing VR headset. (So the situation is very different from monitors: 60Hz and high latency is "good enough" for general-purpose monitor use but poor for competitive gaming.) If anything non-gaming applications may be more demanding when it comes to resolution: games can manage with 1080p but it's not really sufficient for reading text, viewing photos and so on.

Yhippa 13y ago

I think this bothers me the most. Us gamers had our shiny new toy and then it got taken away so everybody can play with it now. I bet Facebook will figure out a way to subsidize this to get it in all of their user's hands and then gaming will take a big backseat to the Facebook Experience (TM).

saturdaysaint 13y ago

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. There's a lot of infrastructure that a gaming company needs in 2014 that doesn't have that much to do with Oculus's core gaming focus and that Facebook has very direct experience with. Look at how long it took Sony to get remotely competitive with the Xbox's interface; look at powerhouses like EA and Nintendo embarrass themselves year after year. System UX, payments, network scaling, "social", building a customer friendly game marketplace. I don't think these are the areas Luckey, Carmack and company can't wait to work on in the morning, but they're perfectly suited to Facebook. In a better case scenario, I can see Facebook (or Apple or Google, to be fair) helping Oculus build another Steam competitor years sooner than otherwise imaginable. Imagine if there were two brilliant companies competing to push the envelope on Linux gaming.