According to a person involved in the deal who was not allowed to speak publicly because he was not authorized by either company, Facebook eventually plans to redesign the Oculus hardware and rebrand it with a Facebook interface and logo.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/133241-Facebook-May-Rebrand-Oculus-Rift-Import-Interface
This is so frustrating and i haven’t even backed the kickstarted. Imagine how the people who did must feel, they basically donated to facebook.
Hmmm… so what?
The OR Kickstarter brought in about $2.4 million, nearly 10 times what they’d asked. I figure at least a couple of people with a genuine desire to make a consumer-grade VR display will have something like 100 times that in disposable income this year. They might’ve signed some sort of contract stating they can’t make another company doing the same thing for a few years… but how long do you think raising a hundred million dollars for a new and untested technology would usually take?
Even if all the money went to investors, that’ll be some very happy investors, and a lot of other investors suddenly kicking themselves for not getting in on this earlier.
The release of the first truly usable large-fov head mounted display (at a reasonable cost) might’ve been delayed by a couple of years, but a decade from now what will be not only available but commonly used will be that much better, simply due to the fact that “omg the place I go to play farmville just paid two billion dollars for something”.
These are the Infinity forums. I have no doubt we can all be patient for the sake of a nifty piece of technology.
One of my colleagues suggested today (sorry, dammit, yesterday) probably jokingly that it was simply a ploy for Facebook to hire Carmack.
I’m almost inclined to believe that.
You’re assuming far too much of them. Chances are, zuckerberg saw a bunch of posts about oculus on his facebook feed then decided he just had to have it with his bazillions of moneys.
Dude is a like a kid. Who’s publicly admitted he hates his userbase. Oculus is in a bad spot.
Honestly don’t see why people are making such a big issue out of this.
I doubt facebook are going to end up doing anything differently with it in the first place beyond getting it working and into shops (and making their own in-house software for people who want to use it with Facebook.) Even if they do screw with it, you’re going to have people making 3rd party software to use the thing for whatever you want.
I wounder if they can sue to get there money back?
Nope. On Kickstarter you invest in a project, not in a company, and you get no say in how that company handles its affairs. So long as the company pursues the project in good faith, backers have gotten what they’ve paid for. Oculus VR has been plugging away at the Rift for quite some time now. They’ve fulfilled their legal obligations to backers. The only reason to sue now would be if they cancelled the Rift, told backers that the project fell through, and then released the hardware sometime later without shipping units to those who were promised the hardware.
If people are unhappy, they should remember this when Oculus starts releasing products on the consumer market, or when the company’s management team buggers off to start some other company.
Notch blew off a deal that was pretty much set with Oculus to Bring VR to Minecraft because they are now owned by Facebook … I don’t know if I would have done that.
He’s guided by principles before money. Money isn’t an issue for him or Mojang so there’s no reason to compromise his feelings/principles.
Also it was only going to be a free cut-down version of Minecraft.
It should have been Google. Definitely should have been Google.
Google doesn’t make games. Microsoft does. I think it’s better for a peripheral to be neutral. And Google is trying to compete with FB for social anyway.
Yes, but there are many that would have found Google and equally unattractive offer.
I think the problem is that it’s not profitable to base a business entirely on hi-tech consumer hardware.
They would have needed to servicify it to subsidise the hardware.
What? Saitek, Logitech, Intel, Nvidia, Seagate, the list is almost endless.
Oh? Why equally unattractive?
I should have said (and in fact did, then edited out and simplified my post) that cutting edge hardware isn’t very profitable in this day and age.
You reduce hardware costs by scaling up and mass producing. Oculus VR has a relatively tiny market so can’t do that.
Saitek started small and slowly making chess games, then diversified after many years.
The others make hardware required by every PC - Mice & Keyboards, CPUs, GPUs, storage and they all got a good break relatively early on.
Oculus VR could have turned down FB’s offer and continued to grow slowly, but they decided not to go that route.
Accepting FB’s offer enables them to grown much more rapidly and subsidise the initial high cost of bespoke hardware development.
I think that’s part of it however they accepted ~$70mm from VC’s and VC’s want an exit. It’d be interesting to know how much of them selling is because they actually wanted to be a part of FB or because the VC’s and other board members wanted a return on their investment.
Well, firstly Google isn’t necessarily neutral. Google doesn’t make games, yes, but neither does Facebook. Google would presumably try and modify the plans for Oculus Rift to tie in more closely with the Google software/hardware environment, perhaps forcing priority for Android and Chrome OS development over the traditional gaming platforms.
That’s purely speculation, but there’s more scope for Google to meddle.
Plus, some people just plain don’t like Google.
Yes, the more I read about the developments, the more I agree. I wasn’t aware of the full amount that Rift had raised in it’s two funding acquisitions. ~100 million USD. A fairly paltry amount for such a huge engineering challenge.
Developing the Oculus Rift for the mass market properly is going to take something on the order of several hundreds of millions.
I’m starting to think they made the right move.
http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/introducing-michael-abrash-oculus-chief-scientist/