POLL: What Do You Think of Facebook Buying Oculus VR?
Sound off on your thoughts about Facebook paying $2 billion for Oculus VR!
Now that we've all had over a week to let it sink in, we wanted to open up the floor to our dear Tom's Hardware readers to hear what you have to say about one of the biggest acquisitions this year in gaming.
Our take: How Facebook's Oculus Buy Changes Future of Rift, VR
Obviously Facebook isn't the first company that springs to mind when thinking about great matches for Oculus VR, but at the same time, few other companies have pockets as deep as the social network to fund the development of the Rift and future technologies. Zuckerberg also said that the gaming aspect of the Oculus Rift -- which fuels all our collective enthusiasm for the product -- will stay the course.
Carmack's take: Oculus VR CTO John Carmack Talks Facebook Acquisition
Read more: 5 Ways Facebook Could Use Oculus Rift
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Astote-ap How about: No, it's an overhyped technology and I wouldn't want it no matter who owned it.Reply -
XaveT Results of the survey never loaded for me... I'm curious as to what the current numbers are?Reply -
dalingrin How about: No, it's an overhyped technology and I wouldn't want it no matter who owned it.
Sounds like someone who hasn't used it yet.Though to be fair it should be an option in the poll. -
MrBo The current state is overhyped, true. But it has some very interesting promise. If they can solve the input problem (regarding text as well as in games), and make them light and unobtrusive to wear, then the sky is the limit. VR+AR for example, combining cameras showing your real desk and keyboard, with the goggles giving you as many screens as you could ever want. That alone is reason for loads of companies to buy a metric halftonne.Reply -
qlum I would be pretty interested in vr like the oculus bit it all depends on software support and on that matter there are a lot of questions for me at least.Facebook owning it may add addition restrictions and over time may steer the oculus away from what I would want, big companies buying things like this over time will always result in changes. this could be exclusives to some facebook gaming platform, or otherwise steering of the tech away from the solitary process of gaming in vr to something less interesting. It could mean less openness or support for open standards resulting in fragmentation of the vr market with games working on one vr set but not on the next. This is actually more a general concern with vr. Ideally you'd want some open standard for tracking positional data and displaying 3d on a vr set. That way you'd ensure that newer games will work on older sets and new sets will still work with old sets. This is essential for vr to really break through as without it you'd get a very fragmented market with limited support per goggle and a need to upgrade just because games don't support your set anymore. Ideally you'd want any manufacturer to be able to build a vr set within a set of standards that will work anywhere and while now vr may be a small market it will break open and more manufacturers will join with each their own ideas. Personally I think I will wait for that moment either way as being an early adopter may result in much wasted money on the longer run. Personally I don't own a facebook account and don't plan to do so anytime soon, this however does not make me boycott anything owned by facebook. Personally I think facebook as primarily a software company is not really helped by vendor locked vr sets as they want the tech to be as widely used as possible and not sell as much vr sets as possible per se so that may actually be a good thing here in the longer run.Reply -
alchemy69 I think Zuckerberg's money is the same colour as everyone else's and that butthurt little kids should stop whining about a kickstarter campaign that they almost certainly never contributed to.Reply -
Fokissed While I do think all Facebook games are absolutely terrible (especially with share/like/request for progress), I think Facebook is one of the better companies to buy Oculus. I think they have the least chance of screwing it up compared to companies like EA, Microsoft, Valve, Sony, and Apple. Oculus being exclusive to any of those companies can spell doom for it, while Facebook doesn't really have much interest. (in things that could ruin it)Reply -
Inferno1217 Will it now be known as the Foculus? On a serious note I think the Facebook money should help progress.Reply -
Inferno1217 Will it now be known as the Foculus? On a serious note I think the Facebook money should help progress.Reply