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This came out of nowhere. Positives and negatives to it all over the place. Not sure how I feel at the moment hehe, haven't fanboi'd over something this hard since...DBPro??

http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/oculus-joins-facebook/

I always have an urge to cry at the mere mention of social networking sites like Facebook. To see a new and upcoming technology be bound to a social networking site... I shall need a few moments to collect myself. I just don't get what people like about social networking. Granted I am a hardcore introvert, but still.

Wat.

That's pretty much all I have to say.

Being able to quickly and easily talk to people? Meet new friends?

I hate most stuff posted on facebook but it's much easier to ask a friend something rather than texting or calling them and I've met some great friends because I had a facebook account.

I still preordered it but...


Few could probably resist the temptation to sell out for such an astronomical price. still this is kind of bothersome and will frustrate many--Notch has already announced he's pulling out plans to officially support it in Minecraft

I'm reading the comments on the official Oculus announcement. They are 100% extremely negative. Nothing but hate.

A really hard decision to make I'm sure.

Not really, I was lying.


I mean, they must have known it'd get them heaps of hate mail. But serious!?!?!? Who wouldn't sell out for $400m CASH! Not to mention the $1.6 billion in shares!


But seriously? Why all the hate? Oculus poses no risk to FB, they're not even on the same playing field. So the only reason FB would buy Oculus is to expand their hold on the digital work, moving from social networking to VR gaming. This means that FB must have active plans to support and develop Oculus, which things can only get better. (ie, bigger budgets etc).

Of course, FB will likely fail miserably in their attempts to 'upgrade' things, that's what Microsoft always does Like W8/Skype etc

It seems Google and Apple are the only major tech companies who really know what they are doing!

I don't like this. FB and Google both want to gain absolute market dominance and they're doing it through information warfare. Those who wanna argue, I give you Edward Snowden (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden) who's a hero of our time. Do you honestly believe that Google and others were the only ones? I can tell you now FB are probably also dogs of the CIA. But I'll stop here as people can't handle the truth so I'm setting myself up for a flaming and even pouring gasoline on myself beforehand. Besides, I guess this is /pol/itically incorrect for this forum.

Examination of practical matters:
- FB is acquiring major resources. WhatsApp and now Occulus. They wanna link it all up. Pragmatically, this is bad because we are already inundated with social networking. I'm a loner in RL and have very few friends. Who I am here is perhaps a contradiction because I'm more my true self and, at the same time, my less so. The bottom line is I don't like how people "share" everything on FB. Consider the privacy invasion. I use fake credentials on several FB accounts to maintain contact with friends and family but when I see people's posts, "Yummy pasta with bacon bita tonight", I wonder about society. To me FB and social networking are a waste. Sadly I don't have any other means of communication with certain people in my life... Straying off topic... So, like I was saying -- or trying to -- the "everyone connected" future is dystopic and large corporations are trying to get a slice of everyone's pie (or the whole thing). This makes it easier to monitor them. But putting my philosophy aside, let's be honest. This is homogenizing the market by and by. Who gets shafted when that happens? You, the consumer, do (I'll admit there are exceptions but this is a general rule of thumb).
- Possible loss of privacy and anonymity. FB wants to connect you with all your people and networks. Most folk don't care about this so the validity in my argument here is questionable at best.
- How good is VR, really. I dreamed of it since Star Trek when I saw the Holodeck. Countless sci-fi made it awesome. But if it became ubiquitous, how would that impact on gaming? The effects on the indie market? How about the effects on classic HIDs we love like gamepads, kbds, mice, even bl**dy WII.
- Social impacts: (see: Otaku, Hikkikomori). Already people are dying of starvation locked in a room playing WoW. Check out "WoW-freakout kid" on YouTube, a case of being unplugged. VR would be even more submersive and, much like PCs should never have left the hardcore gamer and g33k realm, neither should VR become ubiquitous because I don't think society is ready. Way back, Gates wanted a PC in every home. Dunno if I like how that turned out as info tech is now geared towards the common man and doesn't cater much to the geeks who made it all possible.
/rant (abbreviated)

Watch these anime series/movies:
Dennou Coil
Serial Experiments Lain
Ghost in the Shell (all movies and series)

...They'll paint a nice picture of the future for you. Reccomend Japanese Audio with English Subtitles, dubs on some are terrible.

Listen to Machinae Supremacy's albums (most are free from their website).

That should make you as messed-up politically and as paranoid as me

Seriously though, I don't like when companies start acquiring lots of things. Aside from my little hissy-rant, it creates an anti-competitive market which will harm conaumers and developers invthe long run.

Social networking makes it possible to stay in touch with people you just wouldn't be able to. Modern life makes it very difficult to even spend time with friends...

There's no need to go shopping, it's all online and cheaper.
There's no need to go looking for music, it's all online.
There's no need to go to the movies...

Anything that we'd do with friends 10 years ago is gone, now we gather and drink over-priced coffee while we bury our faces in our phones, ignoring the people who are right there. It's society, and in this society I'd rather have Facebook than not... although maybe people could be a bit more considerate when in actual human company.


Anyway, I'm not bowled over by this news - I'd much rather have seen Valve buy them out, or someone like that, someone who doesn't just see gaming as a vehicle for advertisement. It might not be a bad thing in the long run - the worst thing that could happen is that the Oculus hits financial trouble without Facebook style funding to keep it going. I know it's going to be big, but we've had VR before, in numerous incarnations, often supported in DBPro etc - but they never get big enough to stay big. As amazing as this stuff looks at shows, people still need to buy them... I guess the question is are consumers actually ready for home VR, like ready to pay for it and make space for it. Maybe things like the Wii and Kinect have adjusted peoples perceptions of gaming enough for it to stay big.

iOS 7 would make me believe otherwise.

Ever since Tim Cook took the helm, Apple has lost pretty much all of its charm and innovation. Quite sad! I'm not an Apple proponent, but Apple was a pretty neat company with Steve Jobs.

I never wanted to be a 'back in my day' person.... but I miss all the things my friends and I used to do before everything went digital. A few of my friends have hit the mythical disable account fb button and say they don't miss it at all.

This right here is just a down right almost sickening attitude, as you're very much saying: "I'm right, and if you deny me - you're stupid".

On the topic at hand though, I have my worries - if they'll just "take over" the device and make it like it was supposeed to then that's great

however, if they decide to mess with it i'll be gravely disappointed :/ I'd rather not log in with my facebook in order to use the thing.

I know. It really, really, ultra-super-one-hundred-percent-really is. Absolutely disgusting. In fact there's only one thing I can think of that's worse: picking out the same person over and over, taking offence at things they didn't even mean seriously or situations that had nothing to do with one. Aye, it's those two things I hate most about people.

Solution: don't deny me


Seriously, I was lampooning my own paranoia with a side comment. The cliche of "them not being able to handle the truth" is an old one that is typically spouted by delusional people in various media, especially lately with regard to the digital age. That is why nobody bothered to take offence -- including two moderators. But, if it helps, then I apologise for any ambiguity in my post and will totally concede that it was, in hindsight, open to interpretations beyond my intentions. As an aside, I get the odd notion you've an axe to grind with me. I'd really am sorry, both for the fact that I have no clue of what my transgression was and for the transgression itself. If it's my general attitude you dislike, I'm afraid there's little I can do for I am severely abnormal and cannot help myself. It's best to think of me as the Royal Fool by day and a ninja by night (although that is a gross simplification since it accounts for only about two of my thirt-something personas).
tl;dr: I didn't mean it literally, was lampooning my own paranoia and it was naught but a passing comment my good sir.

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

Virtual Reality is going to change the world
March 25th, 2014

It’s amazing. You strap on some gear, and then you’re inside whatever world you want. It showed up in books, it showed up in movies, and everyone dreamed about it. Problem was, it kinda sucked. I tried Dactyl Nightmare at an amusement park, and it kinda sucked. Huge wires, unconvincing tracking, horrible visual fidelity. VR kept sucking for a long time, and people kinda gave up on it.

But then something happened. Or, well, it had already happened, but nobody realized. The technology was finally here to do proper virtual reality. The team behind Oculus Rift realized this, and built the first prototype of VR that was finally just good enough to be usable, and it was only going to get better and better. They set up a kickstarter to fund their enthusiasm, and a lot of people got excited. They made about ten times the money they asked for, and I was one of the top-level backers.

I got my oculus rift dev kit, and played around with it. It was convincing. It presented a lot of design problems. It made me nauseous. It was signed by the entire Oculus Rift team. I got super excited and worked on a couple of prototypes before moving on to other things. Perhaps I would pick it up again closer to the consumer version release.

A couple of weeks ago, they reminded me that I still hadn’t visited their office, one of the rewards from the kickstarter. John Carmack would be there. The combined opportunity of seeing their latest tech and getting to talk about vr (and doom) with John was overwhelming, so I took the 12+ hour flight there. What I saw was every bit as impressive as you could imagine. They had fixed all the major issues, and all that remained was huge design and software implementation challenges.

As someone who always felt like they were born five or ten years too late, I felt like we were on the cusp of a new paradigm that I might be able to play around with. I could be part of the early efforts to work out best practices, and while I have no doubt that in ten years we’ll look back at the problems with early VR applications in the same we look back at GUI problems with early PC games, it still felt exciting to me. My head started spinning with potential applications and how to deal with all the issues (how do you do gui? how do you deal with locomotion? what input do you use? what happens if the player leans far enough forward to clip into a wall? how do you prevent vr induced existential crisis?)

Of course, they wanted Minecraft. I said that it doesn’t really fit the platform, since it’s very motion based, runs on java (that has a hard time delivering rock solid 90 fps, especially since the players build their own potentially hugely complex levels), and relies a lot on GUI. But perhaps it would be cool to do a slimmed down version of Minecraft for the Oculus. Something free, similar to the Minecraft PI Edition, perhaps? So I suggested that, and our people started talking to their people to see if something could be done.

And then, not two weeks later, Facebook buys them.

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.

Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social. In fact, I think social could become one of the biggest applications of VR. Being able to sit in a virtual living room and see your friend’s avatar? Business meetings? Virtual cinemas where you feel like you’re actually watching the movie with your friend who is seven time zones away?

But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games.

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.

And I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition.

I have the greatest respect for the talented engineers and developers at Oculus. It’s been a long time since I met a more dedicated and talented group of people. I understand this is purely a business deal, and I’d like to congratulate both Facebook and the Oculus owners. But this is where we part ways.

If you want to experience Minecraft in VR, there’s an excellent mod that does this. It’s called Minecrift, and you can find it here.

It would've been better if you'd put that in "" since I was very confused there a while

Great post from notch tbh, great great one.

I'd say - we will see where it goes. I mean, as notch said - social might be really beneficial for the Oculus Rift, however, too much focus on that and I might just go looking at it's competitors instead.

Until I can walk into a holodeck room, I have no interest in VR!

I think this is a good thing for VR. Facebook have no reason to screw with the hardware, and they say as much. They are a software company, and will allow the tech to mature properly. The now deep pockets that OculusVR can raid will mean creating cheaper, better hardware. But even those benefits pale in comparison to the coverage that VR will now get. It will be everywhere, and everyone will know about/experience it. That's the real power of this business deal. VR wins with this.

It is a bit sad that an independent posterboy has been sold to a less-than-loved company, but it's a net positive for VR in the end.

For all the people worrying about ads and other facebook related maladies, I don't understand entirely what the fear is? That stuff exists right now in almost every major internet portal, and we can all block it easily with the right browser plug-ins.

This is a positive thing that will lead to cheap, revolutionary, pervasive VR. I'm excited.

Some comments can be found from Palmer Luckey (founder of the oculus dev company) on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/21ecad/27_responses_from_palmer_lucky_in_the_reddit_post/

Regarding Notch, it's very important to take what he says extremely lightly - the guy has been known to be unprofessional and sometimes emotional through twitter and even he admits that:



Luckey responded to Notch's blog post by saying:



I think it's worth considering two sides of the story here. We need to trust that with smart guys such as Palmer Luckey and John Carmack, Oculus is well aware of the concerns people have about this whole thing. They aren't new to the industry, and I believe they will be fine.

The bottom line is that this will help Oculus more than hurt the end product. The purchase provides them with the funding and resources they need, and Facebook has a track record of not interfering too much with the companies they acquire (See Instagram, WhatsApp)...

Facebook stock is down 7% today.

No Surprises there

Must be that time in the cycle again, as it seems every 5 or so years the PR guys roll out the VR buzz word and it all rolls around again into nothing.

I don't understand all the hate towards social networks, because you only get as much as you put into them. I have friends there that have 20 friends and they haven't updated their timelines in years, and they just use it for messaging. Other friends post every single thought in their heads to their 500 friends and they have their fun with that. If you don't want to sign up and use Facebook, then why drag others into your conspiracy-theory negativity?

I will say that it will be interesting now that John Carmack is a Facebook employee.

The only time I've had to disable my Facebook account was when I was gainfully employed and went for an interview in San Francisco... my sister posted on my timeline "Good luck with the interview!" or something like that, and my boss and coworkers were on my friends list. I just deactivated it in fear for a few days!