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Oculus rift

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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

 

It's fair to say that the Oculus Rift already has applications outside of the video game sector, especially in architectural, interior or vehicular design. Naturally, those commercial applications aren't as well popularised or perhaps not as widespread as the more obvious gaming ones.

You do make a good point in that it makes sense for Facebook to be highly invested in widening the Oculus's use beyond games and into other consumer(-)friendly areas.

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Or Facebook could just cancel the project when it looks like it isn't going to make enough money.

 

Would you spend 2 BILLION dollars on something and then just cancel it a year or two down the road? I mean, I don't particularly like the company, but I don't think they're morons. The deal seems like an all-in move to me. 

 

Or Facebook could force them to release early and ruin the whole thing.

 

From what some of the Oculus folks have written, it sounds like this is what was slated to happen if they hadn't gotten funding from facebook.

 

 

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.)

 

I agree that this is at least cause for concern. But I don't think that we should be worried about this in the same way that we would be a game studio, or a company making some sort of creative software; I wouldn't give a shit if facebook bought my TV manufacturer, because the quality and reliability of the hardware is basically the only thing that matters there, and lowering the quality only hurts sales (especially since it looks like Sony and Valve will soon be providing competition). In order for this to succeed the hardware has to be amazing, and the selection of experiences on it has to be numerous, varied, and broadly appealing. I think the facebook acquisition makes these more, not less likely.

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Hey, here's a thing. How do people who want this plan to incorporate it into their lifestyle?

 

My girlfriend ended up getting annoyed when I played Demon's Souls because I couldn't pause when she needed a hand with something so wearing a headset (and I'd imagine most people would wear headphones too) seems unfathomable.

 

Would you organise set times when you can "jack in to the Rift" or would it be on a situational opportunity basis?

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Would you spend 2 BILLION dollars on something and then just cancel it a year or two down the road? I mean, I don't particularly like the company, but I don't think they're morons. The deal seems like an all-in move to me.

 

Not the same scale, but a company i worked for was bought for $44 million, and shut down 15 months later. Our CFO told me that it didn't matter a shit to them, they had our IP, we would be written off as a loss and the money would be recouped through various tax schemes due to the way we were written off.

 

 

 

Hey, here's a thing. How do people who want this plan to incorporate it into their lifestyle?

 

My girlfriend ended up getting annoyed when I played Demon's Souls because I couldn't pause when she needed a hand with something so wearing a headset (and I'd imagine most people would wear headphones too) seems unfathomable.

 

Would you organise set times when you can "jack in to the Rift" or would it be on a situational opportunity basis?

 

She will just send you a FB message, duah!

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If the consumer version of the Rift is awesome, then I don't really care. Unless they start doing gross things with the hardware/software I'm alright with it. I probably had that same gut sinking feeling a lot of others had. Still, VR is just way too cool and if anything, Facebook's deep pockets will let them do some pretty cool stuff, no doubt. Time will tell how decision will pan out, but I remain optimistic. If Oculus gets to do what it wants to do (as is supposedly the case) then it's gonna be pretty sweet.

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Google bought Motorola in 2012. Motorola was largely a hardware company with a stable of patents that didn't have much value in a litigation-forward sense. They were given all kinds of room to make great devices by Google. The Moto X was well reviewed, considered to be on the best Android phones on the market and introduced new technology ideas to phones that differentiated it from competitive devices from Samsung and HTC.

 

In January 2014, Google sold Motorola to Lenovo. The original purchase was for $12.5 billion, the sale to Lenovo was for $3 billion. They owned it for almost 2 years, released a critically acclaimed stable of products, but the division lost money due to not appealing to a mass audience.

 

Google basically threw $10 billion into the abyss on a whim. Facebook is the same size company with a relatively similar cash-on-hand situation that buys practically the same amount of companies at the same rate in a similar range of interests. $2 billion is undoubtedly a large number, but don't think that such a big number means that it's an "all-in move".

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I thought Google bought Motorola just for the phone patents. I'm pretty sure they always said they were not that interested in the hardware.

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Google basically threw $10 billion into the abyss on a whim. Facebook is the same size company with a relatively similar cash-on-hand situation that buys practically the same amount of companies at the same rate in a similar range of interests. $2 billion is undoubtedly a large number, but don't think that such a big number means that it's an "all-in move".

Motorola never did pan out for them with their patents and technology, but it wasn't as bad as $10 billion. The actual breakdown is as follows:

-$12.50 billion - Purchases Motorola Mobility

 +$3.00 billion - Motorola Mobility's cash on hand transfers to Google

 +$2.35 billion - Sold Motorola Home to Arris

 +$0.07 billion - Sold manufacturing to Flextronics

 +$2.40 billion - Tax deferred assets

 -$2.00 billion - Motorola Mobility's operating loss during the owned period 

 +$2.91 billion - Sold Motorola Mobility

===========================================================

 -$3.77 billion - Loss

So what that means is that Google paid about $3.77 billion for the majority of Motorola Mobility's patent portfolio and Motorola's Advanced Technology & Projects Group. I don't think that those are worth $3.77 billion, but $3.77 billion is not $10 billion.

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Google bought Motorola in 2012. Motorola was largely a hardware company with a stable of patents that didn't have much value in a litigation-forward sense. They were given all kinds of room to make great devices by Google. The Moto X was well reviewed, considered to be on the best Android phones on the market and introduced new technology ideas to phones that differentiated it from competitive devices from Samsung and HTC.

 

In January 2014, Google sold Motorola to Lenovo. The original purchase was for $12.5 billion, the sale to Lenovo was for $3 billion. They owned it for almost 2 years, released a critically acclaimed stable of products, but the division lost money due to not appealing to a mass audience.

 

Google basically threw $10 billion into the abyss on a whim. Facebook is the same size company with a relatively similar cash-on-hand situation that buys practically the same amount of companies at the same rate in a similar range of interests. $2 billion is undoubtedly a large number, but don't think that such a big number means that it's an "all-in move".

 

Yeah, the performance of such aquisitions can also vary wildly based on how the purchasing company does (or does not) integrate them. Interviews with the Motorola team says that they were cordoned off from the rest of Google and had to request info and tech like a third-party company. Some lead said he knew the sale was coming about a year out. Really a shame, because I have a Moto X and it is a fantastic device, maybe the best piece of consumer electronics I have ever owned.

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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.

 

None of people's usage of the OR points to it being as ubiquitous as phones. People tend to use it for short sessions, and even the most dedicated VR developers and journalists I know can only handle it for an hour or two at a time. For every other argument in your post, I see opposite trends: Communities getting better and faster at appropriating the slurs thrown at them, friend groups who consider it rude to be on a phone while in a group, etc.

 

I think very similar arguments to yours could have been and sometimes were made against novels, telegrams, rock'n'roll, comics, the walkman, videogames, and the internet. They were all wrong and none of these things that could make us more insular or change the way we socialise ended socialisation. It's very simplistic to take pathological behaviour and draw a line of causation to whatever's new, but the fact is we've been suffering from psychopathology for aeons and new technology just expresses it in new ways. We'll be okay; we're sometimes fucked up and evil, but we're not that psychologically fragile as a species.

 

For this to be worthwhile for facebook, the Oculus products have to really be mass market.

 

Yep. Facebook are gambling 2Bn of their 156Bn market cap on something that might be big.

 

Given my experiences with first person video on it so far, it's enormously relevant for other forms of entertainment, and I can see a major application would be live events fed through camera arrays. What's currently lacking is the recording and transmission hardware; the closest things are google streetview cameras and RC FPV hardware. The former is horrifically expensive, and the latter is relatively cheap but all analogue at the moment (and the goggles are shit compared to the Rift).

 

Given how they've not fucked up Instagram or Whatsapp yet, I'm not worried about the OR being screwed like that. It's more a worry FB will shitcan it the way Cisco did with Flip, then sit on some patents.

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Hey, here's a thing. How do people who want this plan to incorporate it into their lifestyle?

My girlfriend ended up getting annoyed when I played Demon's Souls because I couldn't pause when she needed a hand with something so wearing a headset (and I'd imagine most people would wear headphones too) seems unfathomable.

Would you organise set times when you can "jack in to the Rift" or would it be on a situational opportunity basis?

This is a limitation for me. I won't be able to use the Rift as easily as I would play a single-player game or browse Facebook on the desktop. But I already have to demarcate priorities when I play multiplayer games, so I have a good idea of how often I will have opportunites to use it and for how long. I gotta be real careful about not burning the house down by leaving the percolator on the stove and forgetting about it though.

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Motorola never did pan out for them with their patents and technology, but it wasn't as bad as $10 billion. The actual breakdown is as follows:

-$12.50 billion - Purchases Motorola Mobility

 +$3.00 billion - Motorola Mobility's cash on hand transfers to Google

 +$2.35 billion - Sold Motorola Home to Arris

 +$0.07 billion - Sold manufacturing to Flextronics

 +$2.40 billion - Tax deferred assets

 -$2.00 billion - Motorola Mobility's operating loss during the owned period 

 +$2.91 billion - Sold Motorola Mobility

===========================================================

 -$3.77 billion - Loss

So what that means is that Google paid about $3.77 billion for the majority of Motorola Mobility's patent portfolio and Motorola's Advanced Technology & Projects Group. I don't think that those are worth $3.77 billion, but $3.77 billion is not $10 billion.

 

The patents are practically worthless.

 

Interesting information re: the individual sales of parts of Moto, and you're right. I still think it's illustrative of my point, that paying big money for potential doesn't mean that a company is "locked in" to sticking with their acquisition. That being said, I did some additional research and Google does have a lot more cash-on-hand than Facebook (5x, in fact) so my example is pretty much 1:1 with Facebook's acquisition of OR in terms of money spent relative to cash-on-hand.

 

Re: the social impact of having a technology like Oculus in your life, I agree that it's probably very jarring to use a device like this if you're a normal person with a partner and/or kids. I know that even when I'm playing a multiplayer match of Titanfall, I'm basically committing myself to not communicating with my wife or moving from my desk for 15 minutes straight. I have my headphones on, controller in hand, eyes locked, and it sometimes causes some trouble when she's trying to talk to me and doesn't know I'm "jacked in". It can only be worse with Oculus/other VR, which literally fills your field of view.

 

Also, does anyone ever use Oculus when they live alone? I'd probably be terrified to basically deprive myself of all senses with regard to the outside environment, if only because I don't want someone to break into my house completely undeterred.

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This is such a strange test case on so many levels.

 

As a crowdfunded project that hasn't quite finished I can understand backers feeling bad vibes, even though they are explicitly not investors. I be a good lawyer could make a case out of that though.

 

Facebook seems like a not-great choice, but I also can't see OR scaling production or reaching a wide market without a serious backer. Few 3rd party peripherals ever catch on in a broad way as it is.

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Also, not to derail but I think part of the Google/Motorolla thing was Google both fishing for some missing link ground zero touch screen patent to fight off Apple in the great smartphone lawsuit war of 2011/whenever, or to just leverage Moto's tens of thousands of patents as existing tech.

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Also, does anyone ever use Oculus when they live alone? I'd probably be terrified to basically deprive myself of all senses with regard to the outside environment, if only because I don't want someone to break into my house completely undeterred.

 

Yes. Not very often, and I'm already careful about leaving things that might cause fires, etc. I'd probably lock the door too. I've spent more time at friends places looking at small demos on it with them though. I can't see it being great for anyone who's a parent. One guy I lent it to, who does software development with interesting prototype tech, is also a relatively new father and has had only one chance to use it briefly in the past two weeks.

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It's fair to say that the Oculus Rift already has applications outside of the video game sector, especially in architectural, interior or vehicular design. Naturally, those commercial applications aren't as well popularised or perhaps not as widespread as the more obvious gaming ones.

Not to mention military applications. Before Oculus the biggest investor in VR technologies was the US military for training and simulation purposes. When I met some of the Oculus team at CES 2013 one of the guys I spoke to was responsible for military applications and dealing with officials. I'm not pro-military really (being Canadian and all) but anyone who thought that Oculus was going to be used purely for games wasn't really thinking it through.

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Not to mention military applications. Before Oculus the biggest investor in VR technologies was the US military for training and simulation purposes. When I met some of the Oculus team at CES 2013 one of the guys I spoke to was responsible for military applications and dealing with officials. I'm not pro-military really (being Canadian and all) but anyone who thought that Oculus was going to be used purely for games wasn't really thinking it through.

 

Anyone who thought they were making the Oculus for games did so because they trotted out a bunch of gaming tech titans like Carmack and Newell in their pitch video. They had gaming written all over their pitch and the vast, vast majority of their support was coming from the gaming community. I don't think it's a stretch for that community to feel a little duped. Maybe we were naive, but the backlash is still their problem to deal with. If they meant for the Oculus to be used for a lot of non-gaming applications, they did a really shitty job of communicating that.

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This is so cyberpunk. Next thing you know Google and Facebook merge and labor in wealthy countries will be done by rift-controlled robots operated by low-paid workers in poor countries. It's a race between wages in poor countries and A.I-advancement. Facebook is just making it happen sooner.

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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.»

 

Yeah, this is a gold mine! My Oculus-Facebook tweet got 18 RTs and 16 favourites!

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The patents are practically worthless.

 

I wouldn't say worthless, but they're wildly overvalued as demonstrated by the various court cases they horribly lost.

 

 

Interesting information re: the individual sales of parts of Moto, and you're right. I still think it's illustrative of my point, that paying big money for potential doesn't mean that a company is "locked in" to sticking with their acquisition. That being said, I did some additional research and Google does have a lot more cash-on-hand than Facebook (5x, in fact) so my example is pretty much 1:1 with Facebook's acquisition of OR in terms of money spent relative to cash-on-hand.

 

I agree with your point that these kinds of purchases are not as massive to large corporations as some people might think; it's just that the details of how you got to that conclusion are a bit murky. Cash on hand can be a bit misleading, especially in these kinds of deals.

 

For instance, the Oculus deal itself was actually for $400 million in cash and 23.1 million Facebook shares, which means that they only converted $40 million of their liquid assets and paid the rest from their market cap. That means that 80% of the deal came from outstanding shares, hence it would be more apt to look at their market cap instead of cash on hand since only 20% was paid outright.

 

When you look at those numbers, it becomes 21.1 million out of 2.55 billion shares. So they expended less than 1% of their market cap and around 3% of their cash on hand.

 

If I recall correctly, the Motorola deal was a flatout buyout. They agreed on a price per a share then Google paid in cash.

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This is so cyberpunk.

I was thinking about that just today!

 

Someone somewhere (I have no idea who!) recently (as in the past couple of years, which isn't really that "recently") said to me (or in my presence) that cyberpunk no longer worked as a genre because it's not as relevant in today's world where people don't fear giant corporations taking over the world.

 

In one sense, that's sort of true. People don't fear it anymore...

 

 

 

Uh okay back to your regularly scheduled Oculus talk!

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