See Video @ http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/breakout/facebook-s-oculus-purchase-could-prove-zuckerberg-is-a-true-tech-visionary-131100620.html Facebook's Oculus purchase could prove Zuckerberg is a true tech visionary
By Philip Pearlman March 26, 2014
Last night, Facebook (FB) announced that it has acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion in stock and cash, which some pundits view as a lot of money for a company at such an early stage of its product development. Facebook paid the majority in stock though, a powerful currency given its high valuation, which is smart.
With Instagram, Zuckerberg proved that Facebook has the ability to acquire a company without ruining its product. This might seem elementary, but it is no small point, given that corporate America is paved with deals gone bad.
In that regard, preserving the awesomeness of Instagram ultimately allows Facebook to make advertising deals with increased diversity and scale while also securing leadership in social image sharing which is fundamental for the company.
Many early Oculus proponents, some of whom financially supported the company on KickStarter early on, feel slighted that the company sold for so much and so quickly to the social behemoth.
However, these folks likely do not understand that without vastly increased resources, Oculus would get run over by others with deeper pockets such as Sony who is working on similar solutions. In addition, you have to figure that in a warehouse somewhere, Google has smart guys at this moment working through virtual reality as well. So its a race, a war.
The Natural Progression of the Social Internet
Once again, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shows that he is willing to be aggressive in terms of "operationalizing" strategic vision. He appears to be thinking about online social interaction from a longer term perspective and what virtual interactions might look like five years from now rather than today or tomorrow.
Zuckerberg is likely already modelling a future in which the social internet includes a vivid 3D experience where friends sporting Oculus eyewear meet in a virtual environment and interact almost as if they were in the same room together.
In an interview last year, Recode’s Eric Johnson recounts a conversation he had with Oculus VR CEO, Brendan Iribe:
(Iribe) described in that interview a hypothetical social/messaging application for the Rift that would let people be “finally free of this 2-D monitor.” The application, he said, would let people communicate in a 3-D, 360-degree virtual environment, as though they were standing in the same room. “Kids will one day look back and laugh at FaceTime,” Iribe said
That would be pretty cool.
NYT
By Vindu Goel
September 21, 2014 10:52 pmSeptember 21, 2014 10:52 pm
John Carmack, Oculus’s chief technology officer, spoke at the company’s developer conference in Los Angeles.Credit Oculus
LOS ANGELES — Virtual reality is virtually here — although its first incarnation will come with short battery life, images that do not quite track eye movements and a tendency to induce motion sickness.
In the next few months, Samsung intends to release the Gear VR, a headset that combines software from the virtual-reality pioneer Oculus VR and Samsung’s coming Galaxy Note 4 smartphone to create a portable virtual reality experience.
And within the next year or so, personal computer users will probably be able to buy a more powerful headset from Oculus itself that will allow them to plunge more deeply into three-dimensional virtual worlds, from outer space to the Egyptian pyramids.
Oculus showed off the latest versions of both devices over the weekend to developers in Los Angeles. Two things were clear: Serious technical challenges remain, but Oculus is closer than any other company to creating a product consumers can use to explore computer-generated environments that seem so real that you almost forget they are fake.
Photo
Last week, visitors at the Tokyo Game Show tried Oculus headsets.Credit Christopher Jue/European Pressphoto Agency
Trying out Crescent Bay, the new prototype of the Oculus PC headset announced on Saturday, I was struck by how menacing it felt to be charged by a full-size Tyrannosaurus rex and how my stomach flipped as I peered over the edge of a city skyscraper. Even the Samsung headset, which shows images in lower fidelity because of cellphones’ limitations, transported me briefly to faraway places, like Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania.
“When it’s good enough, suddenly the back of your brain believes you’re there,” Brendan Iribe, chief executive of Oculus, said in his keynote speech to the hundreds of gathered developers.
Virtual reality has certainly become real enough to attract the attention of the big boys. Facebook bought Oculus in a $2 billion deal that closed in July. Samsung is putting its reputation and technical prowess behind the Gear VR, which will cost more than $1,000 for the phone and headset before carrier subsidies.
Sony, maker of the PlayStation game consoles, is working on a VR system, Project Morpheus, which it demonstrated at the Tokyo Game Show last week. Nvidia, a leading maker of graphics chips for personal computers, announced last week that its newest products would include technology to improve the speed and quality of virtual reality.
But virtual reality is not much of a business yet. It is still wide open to hackers, hobbyists and tiny companies that raise money through Kickstarter projects, not pitches to venture capitalists.
Their inspiration is Palmer Luckey, Oculus’s founder, who taped and glued together the first prototype in 2011 in his garage, raised the first money for his Rift headset on Kickstarter, sold Oculus to Facebook and turned 22 on Friday.
“For a lot of people, this is their lifelong dream,” Mr. Luckey said in an interview. “They’ve been watching and reading science fiction novels their whole lives, and this is the technology to make some of those fantasies real. This isn’t the most profitable thing they could be working on, but the most exciting thing they could be working on.”
Karl Krantz, founder and organizer of Silicon Valley Virtual Reality, which hosts monthly gatherings of enthusiasts, compared the industry to the early days of personal computers, when tinkerers like the Apple co-founders Steven P. Jobs and Steve Wozniak met with like-minded souls in the Homebrew Computer Club. “Computers had existed a long time, but they were at big institutions and were not affordable to people who were just passionate about it,” he said. “V.R. has hit that inflection point where enthusiasts can hack it.”
That enthusiasm was palpable at the Oculus conference. Developers set up laptops and headsets at the Loews Hollywood Hotel to show off buggy demos of their games and software. They traded tips on solving common problems like jittery images and making sure that what was on screen tracked a person’s eyes.
Mike McArdle, a technology tutor and trainer in North Carolina, was one of the amateur developers soaking it all in. He has been working on a volcano simulation that he hopes to use to teach elementary school students about science and math. “It’s never been easier to build V.R. games than it is now,” he said.
Despite the excitement, there is acknowledgment of the many problems yet to be solved.
John Carmack, a famed game developer who is now Oculus’s chief technology officer, went on stage and rattled off problems with the Samsung Gear VR, his pet project for the last year. It doesn’t track eye movements, which can cause the image to lag and nauseate the user. The display flickers. It’s built on Google’s Android smartphone platform, which slows graphics.
And oh, yeah, an intense virtual reality video game can draw so much power that the phone will overheat in 10 minutes.
Oculus is also trying to address several other problems. “Inevitably, you want to see your hands, and they’re not there now,” Mr. Carmack said. Tracking hand movements and bringing them into the virtual picture could help people feel less disoriented and would provide a more intuitive way to control the interface than the multibutton game pads that developers use now.
Atman Binstock, chief architect of Oculus, quite succinctly summed up the biggest challenges facing Oculus and virtual reality in general: “actually delivering compelling experiences and not making people sick.”
NYT
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