Oculus Rift with SotA? Not anymore!! (Facebook bought it...)

Thanks for the Welcome post! I'm kinda sad that my first post had to be kind of negatively charged.

And yeah, I can't resist using Max Payne's ridiculous face for my avatar as of late.

 

The loss of traditional asset classes due to low interest rates means money is pumped into tech bubble 2.0 and thus a tech company like Facebook will be able to buy anything while the market still thinks it is worth ninety billion trillions. Remember the Whatsapp acquisition? 16 billion USD sale mostly in Facebook stock. Don't think of it as having a specific agenda to make Oculus into an advert wagon, even if this is the obvious long-term outcome. Oculus might be viable for SotA for a while in the beginning.

 

No problems WhiteZero

I just know that if anyone placed a check in my hand for $2,000,000,000 (is that enough zeroes?) It would probably take me a few weeks to comeback out of a my following psychological coma Which I'm told is about the same time it takes to get use to using the Oculus product.
I'm not sure that at my age, that I may have to have a doctor handy to handle any epileptic seizure if I was trying out this product, but I am someday wishing to put the Oculus to that to the test. Maybe I would feel safer using it along with one of those mouth tongue guards or 3 friends to catch me as most of the hype demo videos have in them.

But with such massive backing now, I will hope that the Oculus has gained what it needed to come to life as the Apple Computer did.
"May the Oculus Be With You!"
~Time Lord~

 

I can see it now...a white cloak with a big "like" button on it. I'd be more interested in the Poke of Prosperity Pack.

 

Imagine Garriot sold Portalarium to EA tomorrow. I suspect that is how many backers of Oculus feel right now so I understand the reaction.

And I personally think Facebook is a terrible company because of it's attitude to user's privacy and how intrusive it is. Not to mention the enormous amount of data it holds on people (including that facial recognition database which is super creepy) and what it does with it. I can fully understand why people feel the news isn't good news.

I am just glad I wasn't able to back OR at the time.

 

Just something to consider here. With this sale, they exponentially increased the chance for this VR device to become a mainstream peripheral. Until last night, the OR was just something the techies, nerds and gadgetfreaks were interested in. It took several years for mobile phones to become mainstream, but with the support of Zuckerberg, this has sped up tremendously for the OR. Visiting your grandmother to find an OR on her table which she just used to shop in a virtual environment just became a much more realistic expectation for the future. The "gadget" period of Oculus has been shortened tremendously.

Still this doesn't mean that those who backed OR shouldn't feel swindled, peeved off, sold out, betrayed, you name it. The scope of what they pledged for definitely did change, and there's a big chance for the specs of the final product to change with it. Not only "integrated advertisement" or "eye tracking to see what advertisements attract the user", but the hardware specs could definitely suffer from this. If Facebook thinks 720p is enough, and would rather invest in a cheaper, lighter weight, more reliable model than into a 1080p variation, then that is the completely the opposite of what the initial target audience was led to expect.

The whole thing could end up as extremely good for making the OR a broadly accepted product, but also end up entirely wrong, turning the OR into nothing but a GoogleGlass ripoff. I personally wasn't interested in the OR either way, and even if it were to end up succesful would never buy it, because it has its own drawbacks as an interface. Same reason why I'm not interested in Morpheus. I am half interested in CastAR though, which I feel will be closer to the ideal (actual holographic projection) than the VR solutions.

 

As someone previously said, regardless of the sale this will have a beneficial trickle effect the same way the Wii Remote did for motion sensing gameplay. Nintendo got a whole bunch of people acclimatized to new motion tech, so when the kinect and playstation move came around, people understood what it was for (regardless of how busted it actually was ).
Regardless of whether or not Oculus is successful being owned by the Devi...i mean Facebook, it has already broken the stigma associated with past VR attempts.

 

Yes I too would feel upset about this if I was an OR backer. But then again, the backers are not buying equity in OR, they are buying a future product, right? So one way or another they must receive a product no matter who it comes from? And if it was some form of equity they were buying they would have made out well assuming they were compensated proportionally out of that 1 billion based on their share of equity. But I suppose the spirit of Kickstarter, or at least the spirit of the relationship people presume to have with a group utilizing Kickstarter, is clearly broken by this type of thing. I think along with a product, the backers should receive a nominal amount of equity, if not a token amount, to fully bind the relationship into a truly mutually-interested form. The lion's share of ownership could still go to the producer. It would be sharing risk and reward instead of just being a more advanced Groupon.

 

Just give it a year or two. It takes a while to slowly wire the borg implants.

EA made a lot of the same promises...

 

The possible integration with the Rift is one of the main reasons I backed this game. I backed the Rift too. I have a dev kit that I can make neat VR apps with (I've made some stuff but the limitation is me, not the tool.) I had planned on making a plugin for this game but any plans of an SDK/mod tools have mysteriously vanished and the excuse that Portalarium is going to refocus towards other stretch goals instead of continuing with goals that will solidify their longevity.

I sure would prefer Rift support or mod tools over watching a sword fight in puffy shirts or some of the things folks are clamoring for. That is the risk we take when backing a Kickstarter project. I've already gotten the value of the little bit that I put in for the Kickstarter. I hope we'll be able to say the same for this project but bear in mind this:
The Rift delivered MORE than they promised during the Kickstarter. We are getting less. In fact there really is no guarantee that the game will launch even. Kickstarters are worded so that you have to try to deliver. They say that you have to refund your backers if you don't make good on it but many project creators have managed to take the money and run. Would they get away with it on this scale? Probably not but there is still no guarantee that you'll get the game or your money.

I am saddened about this deal because whatever agreements have been made to keep OculusVR on track in Palmer Lucky's eyes could easily be undone with a simple resale or even cutting his funding in a way that would leave his work dead in the water. They could sell it to Sony who would then roll the technology into their headsets or we'd never hear from it again.

I backed to get a dev kit and to see the project visualized. I don't feel slighted in anyway. Now how do I feel about my backing of this project? The jury's out. I wish our team the best of luck. Portalariun has done key things I don't agree with and I feel much better about my backing of the Rift than this project right now even with my disappointment over the Facebook deal.

 

Raph has an interesting take. He says anyone can create VR, but not everyone has the networking power behind it. Facebook has that networking power.

http://www.raphkoster.com/2014/03/25/musings-on-the-oculus-sale/

 

I am happy that i haven't pledged for Oculus Rift now. I donno if this is even legit, because i doubt that the pledgers who financed the project have agreed to it. But thats one of the problems with Kickstarters.

Planed aswell to buy a Oculus Rift after the market release. Now not anymore. Facebook is known to sell all informations they got to the industry and politics. With Facebook now owning Oculus Rift, the software would most likely collect and send information to Facebook like crazy for selling.

So i canceled my plans to buy a Oculus Rift. But i think there will be some competing product sometimes and then i will go for this one.

Unfortunately things like Watch Dogs and the so called "mass surveillance", we have seen in the darkest movies about sci-fi are getting more and more real. Google bought Nest Labs, home appliances are getting more and more engineered, it would be most likely only a question of few years until they collect datas aswell like crazy. Smaller and smaller microchips with more power are getting developed aswell, even implanted. Peoples asked, if things are getting as worse as in the movies. No, they won't it will become even more worse. :/

@Devs:
Is there a chance, that Shroud of the Avatar isn't only developed as a game and more as some sort of portal, that we can go in another realm in reality?

 

Sorry, I'm just having some flash backs



~Time Lord~

 

And at what price does this capital come? F-Book surely wants its investments back, i heard they even plan to rebrand it.
Zuckerberg dreams of Virtal Reality schooling, games watching and commerce... Somehow looks like Facebook 3D for me. And what can such a platform do? Right, the same stuff F-Book does now. Collect data off people and sell them.

Now imagine, you are were backer, believing in VR and chippig in help an upstart company develop it... how would you feel, getting your dream whored out to become the next Facebook, now with 3D Farmville.

 

here's a pretty good article on it,

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2112...ds-what-kickstarter-truly-does-fund-hope.html

 

I can understand backers being upset. However, again, no one really knows what the repercussions are of this acquisition. If anything, the only precedence of an non-hardware based Internet company (that everyone was afraid of their privacy and advertising practices) buying out acquiring another company like this would be when Google bought Android back in 2005, and that worked out for the better. You don't see Android devices plastered with Google Ads, etc.

 

Adds.. no. but Google is an integral part of Android.
Every Andrid makes it very easy to connect to Googlemail (you need an account to even use the Playstore, your main source of Apps) or use google servicves like Hangout, usually pre-installed by every Phonebuilder. Even games like "Ingress", made by a google company suddenly can use an interesting range of Androids functions. In-app Adds are controlled by Google, etc.

Now imagine the same for Oculus Rift. You might need to use a Facebook-Account to qualify for softwareupgrades and patches, Facebook provides Background service "you of course want as a serious gamer", of course you get an icon "connect to Facebook vitual Shoppingplace...", the opt-out is in the 23rd layer if the menu, Game highscores are auto-posted in you F-Book account.. if you are not connected, you get asked after each game.. etc etc..

Surely Cynic but entirely possible.

 

the point is (the) people distrust facebook because they have very dubious ways of handling privacy and are not even interested in making it more transparent.
(this case is intresting to follow: http://europe-v-facebook.org/EN/en.html)

i was interested in OR mainly because of the possibilities it has in construction. now that that they are in hands of facebook my interested is gone and replaced by distrust instilled by having FB as parent company. so i wont buy use it anymore unless FB proves it will not use it to collect data and invade our privacy. not only personal privacy but also the privacy and security of any trade secrets companies that use this technology might posses. cause industrial espionage is also a reality these days...

 

That reminds me of when AutoCAD came out for Android. Everything had to be stored on their cloud and I just threw a fit with them. I am an Autodesk minion through and through but that was a total line I wouldn't cross. I started asking them about security and I said "Look, it's all good and transparent to have documentation about public buildings and such but what about the private spaces? What about the security features? You want that out there for anyone who's just slightly more tenacious than your security people?" It didn't take them long to provide people with the option of storing their work locally.

 

The fallout is very, very understandable, and for many different reasons.

Point 1: From the most PRACTICAL perspective, Facebook is not a gaming company. They do not produce games or gaming hardware or anything related to gaming, really, except a website that hosts a couple web-based games (exclusively for revenue purposes). Facebook has never produced a gaming peripheral of any kind, nor have they, to my knowledge, produced or helped to produce even the smallest USB memory stick. Their business acumen is facing the entirely different direction than "cutting edge gaming tech". This point can be moot if Oculis VR retains all of their autonomy, which everyone is hoping and praying for. Presumably, FB has left alone their other acquisitions, but that doesn't mean they will for such a big and different kind of acquisition like Oculis.

Point 2: Facebook is an adspace. It's not for communication anymore. The recent trend of turning our gaming spaces into adspaces has turned everyone queasy. If people have to see a "fb" symbol in the corner of their vision every time they put on a headset, or ANYTHING ELSE remotely intrusive, it will only hurt the Oculis Rift and make plenty of room for new, "open" VR headsets. Oculis has to remain cutting-edge to remain relevant once more companies start releasing headsets based on this tech.

Point 3: Capitalization. Facebook is all about being in your face, everywhere, all the time. This can be a bit more literal with help from the OR. The entire business model could change with enough pressure from FB: maybe the Rift starts being modular, like Nintendo peripherals. You gotta buy 2-3 things just to get it working. Maybe those extra lenses that make the unit actually usable for people with glasses are sold seperately now. Maybe they release a low-resolution model next to the high-resolution model with juuuust enough of a price disparity to max out profit margins.

If Oculus PR is to be believed, all three points are not going to be an issue, and the FB merger is nothing but extra funding in their pockets.
I find that really damn hard to believe.