melmer

Oculus rift

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Is it wrong that I'm taking pleasure in the Internet outrage and doomsaying over this? I get that Facebook is lame and loves to collect data on everyone, but from some of the reactions I've read you'd think Mark Zuckerberg had gone around and personally beaten their mothers in front of them. The only acquisition that would have been welcomed would have been Valve. You know, that other company that loves pushing free to play games (a joke...don't kill me).

But seriously, its a weird purchase that wreaks of FB throwing money at things to try and stay relevant, but I'm happy to take a wait and see attitude on it and hopefully they'll leave the oculus guys alone enough to let them do their thing.

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Man, imagine what the generation that grows up with virtual reality facebook will be like. Maybe one of my future children will be Hiro Protagonist.

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Is it wrong that I'm taking pleasure in the Internet outrage and doomsaying over this? I get that Facebook is lame and loves to collect data on everyone, but from some of the reactions I've read you'd think Mark Zuckerberg had gone around and personally beaten their mothers in front of them. The only acquisition that would have been welcomed would have been Valve. You know, that other company that loves pushing free to play games (a joke...don't kill me).

 

:tup:

 

But seriously, its a weird purchase that wreaks of FB throwing money at things to try and stay relevant

 

I'm not really convinced by that. None of FB's acquisitions have, in hindsight, reeked of trying to stay relevant. Acquisitions do seem to remain relatively independent of Facebook; they don't suddenly start pushing those acquired users into FB. These two points are cribbed from a mailing list run by someone smarter than me:

- Facebook are most likely trying to connect everything through Facebook the holding company, not Facebook the web application.

- Facebook have an output in the form of Oculus, it's now likely they'll make some acquisitions related to 3D games, scanning and 360 degree video too.

As John Carmack and Palmer Luckey have both said, the acquisition gets them past some horrible production scaling problems too. I still don't trust Facebook and it's still made me a bit sad, but the anger I'm seeing on Twitter is ridiculous.

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I'm not sure how I feel about the deal, but it does have very definite advantages. The thing is that Oculus needed money in a really bad way and I don't think people really understood this. One of the absolute biggest hurdles OR had was being so tiny as to be utterly insignificant to panel manufacturers. It's no exaggeration to say the volume of money they were playing with was barely enough to get suppliers to even turn their heads.

 

OR was in a position where there was only one manufacturer in the world that produced panels that were suitable for their usage and that was Samsung. The problem is that currently Samsung's only customer for their high density AMOLED displays is Samsung and Galaxy phones are big business. The Samsung group's revenue is roughly four times that of the estimated size of the entire video game industry as a whole. Samsung Electronics alone comprises more than half of that revenue and the overwhelming majority of that revenues comes from Galaxy phones. Galaxy phones are generally supply limited for quite sometime after launch meaning that it would be next to impossible for OR to make Samsung any kind of deal that would make financial sense to divert some of their supply. What that means is that OR would have been relegated to using panels from older processes where there is excess capacity. Worse still, those parts wouldn't even have been a good fit for OR because they were engineered with other applications in mind.

 

Having custom panels manufactured is not cheap. Not cheap as in hundred of millions of dollars not cheap and that's if you don't need an entirely new process, in which case the cost sky rockets into the billions of dollars. I think the biggest upside of this deal is that OR now has access to the kind of funds to have custom panels manufactured to whatever specifications they require instead of being stuck with hand me downs the phone industry are no longer interested in.

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Yeah, I'm not really convinced that having a slightly cheaper OR set owned by facebook coming out earlier is better than a more expensive, potentially less optimized (for the initial release of a fairly new tech, so still, whatever) OR set without that outside influence coming out much later. I think OR is going to set a lot of the tone for VR as a commercial future, I think even the least influence Facebook can have on it (and they do intend to recoup the money they provide to improve the hardware, of course.) is going to drive the entire market in a direction I loathe, and a direction that is going to treat an entirely new experience as a fucking commoditizable market place, instead of whatever else it could have been. Every word I read that frames this as positive seems so focused on treating VR (what I would rather see as a new medium for expression) as a product that must be made profitable and as cheap and common as possible, and I just don't see why that's good. This deal made me more likely to be able to afford one, but also eliminated any interest I may have had in it, and moreso, any trust I had in the individual developers as people who cared more about a future medium than getting the damn thing to market. 

Fuck I hate capitalism.

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I don't blaim OR at all for selling to Facebook, I fully understand both the personal and professional implications for their team.  But I still find it the grossest of all possible acquisitions. 

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I'm waiting for Gabe Newell to kick down the internet's door and announce Valve's VR headset. People will go apeshit.

 

In more actual news about this, an associate of mine pointed out an interview that a couple of the Oculus Rift leads gave where they said inifnite funding wouldn't change anything about what it is or where it's going - but now with this two billion dollars they're saying 'everything changes.' So at the very least, setting aside all the doom, we can apply new filters to whatever those guys say (and maybe even what has been said in the past).

 

I can understand where Notch is coming from. If anyone has had a concern regarding corporatism, corporatism killing creativity, and/or data collection, you should be on board with his sentiment. It would make sense, at least. Remember that the goal of Oculus Rift changes from, "We're going to push boundaries in content delivery" to "How do we make money off this and support our existing money making schemes with it?"

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Twitter last night was interesting. Apparently I caught the news a bit early, at the bottom of /r/technology and figured that, since this hadn't blown up in a big way, it was probably a different Oculus, so I copy-pasted the headline to a couple of people as a «trolling» joke prank. After doing this, I actually read the article myself and found out it was real, and I was really disappointed. My gut reaction was probably similar to most others; shock and surprise, since in my head Oculus was already a success, having hired all these people and announced the DK2, and wasn't in need of more funding (obviously wrong when thinking about it in a non-knee-jerk state of mind) a feeling of betrayal as a Kickstarter backer, as I felt I had been a part of this cool indie success story and now they had sold out and it used to be about the music man (also wrong – Oculus aren't beholden to me in any way. They had sent me the DK1, which was the deal, and I have still been a part of funding a cool technology) and finally sadness and frustration that this whole thing was now owned by Facebook, a company that carries almost nothing but negative connotations for me.

 

After sleeping on it, I'm still disappointed that Facebook now owns the piece of technology I'm most excited about, and I'm worried that the Rift system/platform will now become more gross, but I can also see the advantages of having a big house full of money when trying to mass-market crazy future tech. So, basically, this is probably a good thing for the chances of VR equipment becoming an actual thing that people own, though I can't avoid feeling my enthusiasm has cooled somewhat. All in all, I give this aqcuisition a 7/10.

 

Twitter-wise, it was fun to see how everyone reacted:

  • «Oh boy, this is my chance to make a million-retweet quip! Facerift! Riftbook!»
  • «Fuck you you treacherous sell-out pieces of shit!»
  • «OH WELL I GUESS THEY UNDERESTIMATED THE RESOLVE OF INDIE DEVELOPERS. DO YOU NOT SEE? NOBODY WILL MAKE GAMES FOR YOU NOW, YOU FOOLS. DK2 PREORDER: CANCELLED.»
  • «Oh boy, this is my chance to make a million-retweet snarky meta-quip about all these quips!»
  • «OMG why so many knee-jerk reactions? Where's the in-depth analyses? What is this, Twitter?»
  • «I don't actually read Twitter, so I'm just going to announce that I'm going to stream myself playing Dark Souls II in five minutes.»

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There's a joke in all this about a social media juggernaut buying the least social development in entertainment technology since the flesh light.

 

Someone smarter than me could write something about how an already insular industry developing technology that allows customers to become more insular is actually quite a dangerous thing and I would agree with it.

 

VR has never appealed to me so I'm on the wrong side of the fence but the fervour with which people are reacting to a piece of technology that cuts them off from physical space and contact is alarming.

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I have utterly failed to get mad about this, the worst case scenario I can realistically see is ads integrated into some first party VR software. It's a hardware device and has been since day one, what's going to matter most is the software, and I highly doubt that it would be in FB's or OR's interest to put an artificial gate up where one doesn't currently exist. I think that if anything it going to "hurt" the future of VR as a technology it's all this mindless raging I'm seeing on reddit and twitter. I literally saw somebody suggest that Facebook would be selling our retina scans to advertisers...

 

The bottom line is, VR is going to be what VR is going to be. If it ever has a potential to make big money then big money was going to get involved first. I'd be more worried if nobody bought OR within the next few years. Sure I wouldn't have guessed it to be Facebook but I don't hold the same negative view of them that the rest of the internet seems to.

Side note, I really fail to understand why people hate the idea of trading their demographic data for a free service that has had an insanely massive impact on modern social interaction. Oh no, better targeted ads, the end times are nigh. NSA stuff aside because that's a rabbit hole I'm not prepared to venture into.

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Side note, I really fail to understand why people hate the idea of trading their demographic data for a free service that has had an insanely massive impact on modern social interaction. Oh no, better targeted ads, the end times are nigh. NSA stuff aside because that's a rabbit hole I'm not prepared to venture into.

I am not as concerned as some, but I think I can identify. Advertisement has formed a large amount of our reality and it's hard to detect; giving them more power to do this is kinda intimidating. Bottled water is a weird thing. You could say the same thing about religion. Oh shit, can you imagine what it would be like if the Church of Scientology had bought Oculus!

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I don't blaim OR at all for selling to Facebook, I fully understand both the personal and professional implications for their team. But I still find it the grossest of all possible acquisitions.

Incorrect. The grossest thing would have been if King or Zynga had bought them.

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It seems like a lot of you are touching on my biggest worry: facebook is a company with a primary goal of increasing profit for their shareholders. As a result, their goal with Oculus is not really the things that Marky Z declared in his cute facebook post. You can bet there's already a committee of 20 - 30 year old white dudes sitting around some San Francisco board room talking about how to leverage the Oculus Rift for new money-making experiences. There's a white board on the wall where they're just blue sky imagineering all kinds of stuff that would make everyone in this forum cringe. This is a universe that did not exist a day ago, wherein the Oculus guys were concerned with "making money", but presumably this need was farther down the totem pole than "crafting the ubiquitous VR experience." I think that I am indeed playing the cynic, and I know zero about this deal beyond what everyone knows, but it's just a little disappointing that a company so obsessed with being capitalist has suddenly swooped in and thrown an absurd amount of money at like, Real Future Technology that is seemingly so unrelated to its core principles. 

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Side note, I really fail to understand why people hate the idea of trading their demographic data for a free service that has had an insanely massive impact on modern social interaction. Oh no, better targeted ads, the end times are nigh. NSA stuff aside because that's a rabbit hole I'm not prepared to venture into.

 

Except for the fact that lately the nay sayers have been spot on about potential abuses of privacy and power by government agencies and cloud/social media companies.

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Incorrect. The grossest thing would have been if King or Zynga had bought them.

 

Keep in mind that both King and Zynga own much of their gross success to Facebook in the first place, so Facebook seems to be the most gross to me just by potential of grossness it fosters in other companies.

 

Edit: avoiding a double post.

 

Notch has released a statement/blog post re: his thoughts on Facebook and he puts it better than me in a much simpler way, not to mention from the perspective of a developer:

 

http://notch.net/2014/03/virtual-reality-is-going-to-change-the-world/

 

Highlights I thought were important:

 

Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build. [...] Fortunately, the rise of Oculus coincided with competitors emerging. None of them are perfect, but competition is a very good thing. If this means there will be more competition, and VR keeps getting better, I am going to be a very happy boy. I definitely want to be a part of VR, but I will not work with Facebook. Their motives are too unclear and shifting, and they haven’t historically been a stable platform. There’s nothing about their history that makes me trust them, and that makes them seem creepy to me.

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Zygna owns one of the most advanced animation systems used in games, Facebook owns the most important step in VR in a decade.... the world is weird now.

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Side note, I really fail to understand why people hate the idea of trading their demographic data for a free service that has had an insanely massive impact on modern social interaction. Oh no, better targeted ads, the end times are nigh. NSA stuff aside because that's a rabbit hole I'm not prepared to venture into.

I think part of the ick factor comes from the fact that you give more valuable demographic data when you're unaware that you're taking part in that arrangement. There's a market necessity to make people forget that they're taking part in an exchange and to do as little as is legally possible to help them to protect themselves.

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Why?

 

We have phones in our hands all of the time these days and yet more and more people seem to hate physically communicating with people using them. Witness people complaining about having to phone Microsoft to cancel their Xbox Live subscription. You could argue there's a matter of inconvenience to it but the subtext always seemed to me that people didn't like having to actually talk to someone.

 

I've seen posts on NeoGAF that say cultivating and sustaining friendships are not worth the hassle. I have never had the need or desire to purposefully troll or bully online and yet that seems to be more prevalent with each day. If ignoring the world around us with just an iPhone in our hand is bad enough, then strapping the phone to our face and blocking out the physical world is another step further.

 

Basically oldmanyellsatcloud.jpg.

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We have phones in our hands all of the time these days and yet more and more people seem to hate physically communicating with people using them. Witness people complaining about having to phone Microsoft to cancel their Xbox Live subscription. You could argue there's a matter of inconvenience to it but the subtext always seemed to me that people didn't like having to actually talk to someone.

 

I've seen posts on NeoGAF that say cultivating and sustaining friendships are not worth the hassle. I have never had the need or desire to purposefully troll or bully online and yet that seems to be more prevalent with each day. If ignoring the world around us with just an iPhone in our hand is bad enough, then strapping the phone to our face and blocking out the physical world is another step further.

 

Basically oldmanyellsatcloud.jpg.

 

For what it's worth, I hated it because they tried to sell me a cheap 3-month gold subscription that would auto-renew. I refused, and they canceled. I then asked them to remove my credit card information from their system, and they acted like it was impossible. I argued on the phone for 20 minutes, went through three different reps, and the Tier 3 rep admitted it was possible and removed my credit card from the account.

 

So, anecdotally, I hate this particular experience not because I'm antisocial but because I was being sold a crock of shit and had no choice but to endure it.

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Ok I really don't understand what everyone is so worried about here. To be clear, I hate facebook, but I think the acquisition has major upsides for basically everyone except facebook. Here's my reasoning:

 

For this to be worthwhile for facebook, the Oculus products have to really be mass market. If it stays a niche product, it would be useless to them, judging by the ambitions Zuckerberg appears to have for it. So, for it to be sufficiently popular, it is going to have to be really polished in every respect. That plus the massive wads of cash they've just stumbled into basically guarantee that it will be a great device when it ships.

 

I think of it like a television or a computer, technologies where you can have a variety of experiences, with one of them being video games - improvements in one area often spill over into others. The types of situations Zuckerberg claimed interest in ("enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face") pose an almost identical set of technical challenges as do immersive video games. Making an immersive basketball-watching experience is technically very similar to making an immersive first person video game, in terms of getting your brain to buy that you're in the space.

 

People seem worried about the apparently sinister sentence "After games, we're going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences," but this too seems great to me. How good can a VR headset get, as a theoretical maximum? Once the core issues are solved, there's not much to do besides tweaking here and there. I mean, how do you make it more immersive than a very well-tuned 3D headset? To get much better you would probably have to make a neural interface. So once that's nailed down, you can turn your attention to supporting a wider variety of experiences, making it a true platform for all sorts things other than games. And furthermore, the broader exposure that facebook is certain to bring guarantees that a much wider set of experiences is possible than would have been if the rift stayed a gaming peripheral. Imagine tours of the Louvre, or walking tours of Budapest, or really immersive nature documentaries. Those (and so many others) all seem amazing to me, but how many of them do you think would have been produced were the rift to have remained a gaming peripheral?

 

I can see only one potential downside, which is that facebook could decide to turn it into a closed platform, making it a hassle or expensive for game developers or anyone else to make content for it. But I think this is extremely unlikely for two reasons: first, facebook is probably going to want as many creators as possible to be making stuff for it, because their social stuff alone doesn't seem appealing enough for it to be successful - second, I genuinely doubt the Oculus people would have agreed to the buyout if this were the case.

 

Anyway, I've rambled too long and forgotten some of the things I was going to say, so maybe this is an incoherent mess. But either way, I was and remain excited and optimistic about the Oculus Rift.

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I personally don't care too much about OR so I'm not upset by this, but I do suspect that in the long run it will make OR a worse product. I expect in 6 months we'll hear about a number of high profile members of the team bailing for example. Facebook's gaming platform is kind of garbage - it constantly breaks for one thing. And despite talk of OR operations being unchanged that's rarely how these things work out.

 

I do find the defenses of it on Twitter a little odd. Without using the word "entitled" it's basically a dismissal of entitled backers - you gave them your money, you got your backer reward, now pipe down. This seems to ignore that KS is fundamentally based on trust and a number of unspoken mutual agreements. If you give someone KS money to make Shadowrun and the game they make it 30 seconds long technically they've fulfilled their promises - so that makes backers entitled when they complain?

 

Many KS are pitched such that the backers, while not investors, are made to feel like part of the process. The OR KS is one of those. To then ignore the wishes of the backers is obviously going to upset people - and I think it should. Most of the people defending this on Twitter are ultimately probably doing more harm than good, because in "educating" people on what KS is they are basically telling people that KS is for suckers. If KS is just about buying backer rewards that only have to technically meet the requirements then KS will die, because that's not why people want to give money to KS projects. That's just an overpriced store.

 

If you read the backer rewards for the Idle Thumbs Kickstarter they only include pre-launch podcasts. In theory they could have taken all the backer money and never actually recorded a non-pre-launch podcast. (Or maybe just one, on which they discuss mandated topics) Somehow I doubt people would have been ok with that.

 

Perceived betrayal of trust is very important to KS because trust is the foundation of KS.

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For this to be worthwhile for facebook, the Oculus products have to really be mass market. If it stays a niche product, it would be useless to them, judging by the ambitions Zuckerberg appears to have for it. So, for it to be sufficiently popular, it is going to have to be really polished in every respect. That plus the massive wads of cash they've just stumbled into basically guarantee that it will be a great device when it ships.

 

Or Facebook could just cancel the project when it looks like it isn't going to make enough money. Or Facebook could force them to release early and ruin the whole thing. Just to be clear, I'd be just as bummed if Microsoft purchased them. They have the same track record of playing with something for a little while and then loosing intrest and moving on. I understand that they weren't getting the display panel tech they needed and so this purchase makes sense but, fundamentally, you are taking a company that existed for the sake of making good technology and turning it into a company that exists soley to make money (and if making good technology leads to that, then that's good too I guess.)

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