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Facebook acquires Oculus VR

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Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR

#721

Post by 72deluxe »

anon4 wrote: post #709
heurist wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could make VR services for person-to-person communication. Be in the room with someone a thousand miles away, rake in cash for in-world ads and purchases... it could essentially become a future iteration of facebook (for when VR catches up to mobile). If nothing else they could follow the original plan and sell a standalone rift for a profit.

How would you do face-to-face if both of you have giant goggles strapped to your faces?

That's made me laugh, thanks!

"You look really good today!"

"Thanks! Nice goggles!"

At least if Google bought them, they would have had Google Goggles. The mind boggles at the goggles, it gives me the giggles.

Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR

#722

Post by 72deluxe »

mediocrejoker wrote: post #642
jpadkins wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google acquiring Nest has a plan: collect data on electricity usage, presence in house and have a basis for inferring what people are doing generally all day. OK I'll bite. What does google do with this data? I don't see anyway this helps their ad business.

They see you're up when most people are asleep, assume you work night shifts, and then advertise sleep aids and the local 24 hour gym. There's very little personal info that's not valuable to someone, somewhere.

I would throw them off scent by boosting the heating at night and sleeping with the lights on.

Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR

#723

Post by 72deluxe »

endgame wrote: post #630
lawl wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really in a clinch now. Because I boycott Sony over the geohot incident[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_Am...

It's the rootkit CDs that do it for me.

I remember that well. I was running Linux and didn't buy particularly mainstream music so I was alright, but all the pesky "CDs" that were released with copy protection on them so that they didn't play in ordinary CDs really wound me up. Deep Purple's Rapture Of The Deep was one of these; no idea if it was through Sony though haha. Sounded like it was recorded live in one room with microphone bleed all over the place, so no great loss eh!

Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR

#724

Post by angularly »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #580

For fuck's sake will you FB hating fanboys stop crying for a moment and realize that this is what makes VR legit. This. Is. An. Enormous. Opportunity. It's like the moment when I was teaching a game design course and I realized that all the students already used Dropbox. I though I was the only one who knew about Dropbox. If you want VR, then you should be happy. This just made VR real.

So only now that FB is on board it is real? Sony, Valve, Microsoft and god knows what other big companies, who were working hard on VR, wasn't real?

I think everyone are pissed off, because they were rooting for the first mover and underdog that Oculus was.

Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR

#725

Post by Springtime »

HN needs a better system to deal with a flood of comments for such articles. Currently it's pretty borked for so many comments.

Simply having the most upvoted comment in the short-term leads to the effect of other, possibly more relevant and current comments being lost beneath the ever upvote-collecting top comments.

It works well for up to 150 comments, but at close to 700 comments in such a system the conversation and HN user input becomes vastly less effective (and navigable).

Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR

#726

Post by mschuster91 »

72deluxe wrote: post #719
s3r3nity wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm that's not quite how Facebook works -- not everything needs final approval from the C-level suite (hell, that's their selling point to new hires.) And having some structure isn't always a bad thing - as long as it's the right kind. And I think it is in this case.

Call me out of touch, but why do Facebook employ so many people? After the main structure of the site that permits you to have a wall and a feed, what else needs writing? I don't get it.

Scaling that infrastructure to literally billions of simultaneous users, spread over the whole planet, is something that needs constant innovation and maintenance.

Just one example for "what needs writing".

Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR

#727

Post by 72deluxe »

SixSigma wrote: post #705
clef wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because money. More seriously, VR is the future of a lot of things, if it hadn't been FB, it would have been son either company. Microsoft and google were probably looking at it too but lost to FB (again),

Microsoft is a minor shareholder in Facebook, there will be an Xbox tie in at some point.

Hopefully Sony will join in somehow and their "roll-on deodorant" sensor for gaming that involves waving your arms around will be joined with a massive headset. I don't see how sitting with a massive hat on can be considered great gaming.

Perhaps I will go outside and enjoy the sunshine.

Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR

#728

Post by 72deluxe »

krick wrote: post #353
aeberbach wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect Carmack is the sort of guy to say "fuck your golden handcuffs, I'd rather work on interesting problems". If it turns bad he'd go.

This is why I'm astonished: it also seemed to me that Carmack is that sort of guy, you know, real programmer . idealistic, stubborn. Maker, not businessman. But whatever be all that "Mark and his team share our vision for virtual reality’s potential to transform the way we"… blah blah — I cannot really imagine why he would do so if not only for the sake of business. Well, it might be easier to make stuff when company…

What makes a "real programmer" though? Do you think he'd be programming in a hut for no money? He isn't daft.

Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR

#729

Post by tinco »

baq wrote: post #266
nosequel wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect Carmack got some pretty shiny golden handcuffs in the deal, I wouldn't expect him to jump ship anytime soon.

carmack doesn't need golden handcuffs. he earned fuck you money back then in the '90s.

And he subsequently lost a lot of it in passion investments. He has a talk about it somewhere.

Re: Facebook acquires Oculus VR

#730

Post by 72deluxe »

briantakita wrote: post #472
enneff wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ray Kurzweil was hired by Google's current management to work at Google. How is this in any way analogous to Carmack's situation at Oculus, now Facebook?

The similarities are they are legendary & forward thinking technologists given a large amount of capital to pursue their passion and scale their vision. Corporate title & organizition wise, they are different. Though I doubt Kurzweil worries too much about the current Ads, Search, Email, & Android platform. I would expect his role to be more forward thinking. I get the impression Carmack has a forward thinking role a…

But where are his keyboards now??????
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