Somewhat Old, But Surprising News About Oculus Rift

Yes, I know this isn’t a Gaming News site, but, I just wanted to tell you about this, seeing as no one here has talked about it, and because I need to make a new thread.

Yes I heard of it from the 26th of March, but that’s somewhat old, somewhat new in my book.

Anyways, seeing as we are all part of the Gaming Community, and seeing as we all know what the OR is, I decided to give you the most tragic gaming news of 2014!

Oculus Rift Sells Out To Facebook!

No, this isn’t some cruel April Fools joke. It’s all true.

It’s not tragic yet. Nobody knows what Facebook is doing with the tech or how it will affect development of it. I think a lot of indie devs are pulling out way too quickly. Notch acted like a downright child pulling all Minecraft Oculus support on announcement. It’s really sad considering there are no details on the future of the rift. I would tell people to wait and watch. Facebook may be very controlling of their properties and their practices may be questionable but they want to make money.

You don’t spend 2 billion to piss people off and dump your earnings on something you’ll never use. You buy out a company to build it and sell product.

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Well, everyone is saying so. Many people are saying Facebook will probably try to make it a “Social Hub” based on what Mark said on the day Oculus VR was sold to Facebook.

They also say it will be flooded with ads, much like how Facebook really is.

I’ve heard reports that Oculus could be used for Data-Mining, which is one of the reasons Facebook is infamous.

And last, but not least, if you look in the Oculus Kickstarter Comments, The Subreddit, and many other places, you will find enormous amounts of angry Backers and Fans, furious at the people working at Oculus VR, like Palmer Luckey, and people working at Facebook, like Mark Zuckerberg.

There have also been reports that angry Backer and Fans sending Death Threats to Palmer and Mark.

Oculus is a piece of hardware not a piece of software. You don’t plug in a printer and have it flood you with ads. The end user experience is given by the software you run in tandem with the hardware. They may make a social application and that’s perfectly fine that they want to flood that with ads, but adding a peripheral to your computer doesn’t force you to use those applications. My sister recently bought an Acer laptop. It had Acer software, so I uninstalled the bloatware. The laptop works as intended.

Facebook will continue to make the Oculus better because they want to develop a social platform but the Rift is still a peripheral. You can easily still use it on games. Just because it changed owners doesn’t mean the input device ceased to work as it did. They can’t even mess this up because all the Oculus is at the moment is a screen with an accelerometer or two. This kind of stuff has happened in the business world plenty of times. As of now Oculus has no way of datamining, because datamining can only happen through software. In other words drivers for Oculus can datamine but it itself cannot and the same can be said for any piece of software. In fact if Radiant was so inclined they don’t need to ask you if you want to submit anonymous data, they can simply take it. You installed the software and agreed to the EULA terms.

If I was offered two billion for a VR company that I didn’t spend two billion on you’re right, I’m going to sell it. As for the backers sending death threats they DONATED. They chose to donate money for development. They don’t own the company, they have no say in it. The same way you don’t choose how the Salvation Army spends its cash or have a say in what they choose to do.

It’ll be developed the same as any other peripheral. Same as a monitor, keyboard, printer, joystick ect.

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I’m 50-50 on this. I hate Facebook, but I somewhat like Oculus VR.

I think most of the hate comes from is that Facebook has such a bad reputation because of them Data-Mining and selling Private Info and trying to force useless stuff that yo don’t need on you. May I also add that Facebook has no business being in the Game Industry? I guess people are also afraid that now Facebook practically owns the whole Oculus Rift Project, they have complete creative control over it. To add to what I have said, I heard many people say that Facebook has no intention to work with the Rift and innovate with VR Technology, but to maximize profits.

But, Facebook is a huge company with lots of money, which they can use to fund the project and make is possibly even better.

Oh, and here is a funny video I found about what Facebook Oculus Rift could possibly be like.

To be fair, Facebook’s ads are the least annoying of any major site that uses them on the entire internet. “Shoving ads down your throat” is a little exaggerated; they put 6 or so ads by your news feed on the right that don’t get in the way of your scrolling or anything. I hardly ever even look at them. It does its little ‘Suggested Posts’ but those are actually weirdly accurate to my tastes so I don’t mind them either and they’re not exactly frequent.

The backers don’t really have much of a right to be angry. As far as I’m aware, they funded the hardware, no? And they’ve got it. They donated and got what they wanted. Facebook owns it now. Big whoop. Quite frankly Facebook has the money and resources and knowledge of social networking to do something pretty good with it. People need to cut them some slack.

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And that is exactly one of the (good) reasons people are afraid of. Facebook has produced little of value so far, especially nothing in the hardware sector. Their current main revenue is a more or less dying business with social media, so they try to diversify their current portfolio so when (not if) Facebook itself dies, the company (or rather, the money printing machine) continues.

How it will affect development is not known, but the direction we’re heading is vaguely known. Before the acquisition, the OR was seen as a revolution to (PC) gaming. Now, the OR was announced to be the thing for social media. Chat with your friends! In virtual lobbies! Because you need absolutely no social interaction with people anymore whatsoever!

Yes. They will certainly continue to develop it, but that’s (as mentioned above) the issue: Is it going to be developed for gaming or for some social mumbo jumbo? The requirements differ enormously.

The scary thing about the OR is that it has access to your complete screen - not just a game, everything you possibly do. Connect this to Facebook’s data mining behaviour and it becomes a really scary thought.

The argument “IT’S JUST SOFTWARE!!!1” is, in my opinion, really stupid. Yes, it’s software, maybe you can even re-write it to remove those parts - who’s going to care? Who is jailbreaking their iPhone? Who is rooting their Android to install a more current version that offers them more privacy?

By far not even anything close to an minority. And this is the issue: If it’s endangering your warranty or is simply too annoying to install (or not trustworthy enough), people are not going to bother. Assuming the homemade driver is not malicious, it will be a few people “safe” from it against hundred (thousands or even millions) who are not. It becomes a sort of ethical thing.

EULA are worth nothing, at least in Europe. Unless you were aware of the EULA before you purchased it - as far as I know, simply putting “BY BUYING THIS YOU AGREE TO THE LICENSE AT HTTP://BLORP” does not hold up, it’s void. It’s a huge attack on privacy and I’m sure that it would be ripped apart here.


As of now, this can go both ways. Facebook has little to lose, reputation-wise, so if they realy want to push social media into some weird, virtual state I’m sure they’ll go for it. They could continue the project as it was and really develop it for gaming primarily, social media secondary - but the stakes for that are not very high. They have no real experience in hardware development and their customer service (as well as customer interaction) in the past was rather questionable.

Therefore, I am disappointed about this turn of events. I’m looking forward for Sony’s project and some others. But in the meantime,

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How Facebook, a company that focuses on software based on Social Media, can introduce something new and revolutionary with Oculus Rift is beyond my comprehension. The possibilities you can do with VR are amazing, but with a company like Facebook behind the whole thing, you cant really expect much.

Facebook is just as bad a Google. They both force you to use useless stuff like Google+, both try to buy other companies with potential, like what happened with Youtube, and both seem like they want to take over the world.

QUICK EDIT: Hey guys, I just posted this, and it says I posted it 2h ago. You may want to fix this.

I don’t have much to say on the matter but @epicdwarf you need to stop making such damning claims :stuck_out_tongue:

My understanding is that the Oculus Rift team haven’t changed? Granted with the investment Facebook has put into it they will have some (if not all) say on the direction it goes, but that doesn’t mean it’s just going to be a worthless tech.

‘Bad’ - Whilst I don’t necessarily agree with all the things these sites do, they obviously have their specific reasons for doing what they do, it is in Google’s best interest to push Google+, and is a unifying platform for all Google services. It’s not useless.

Both trying to take over the world? No. Both trying to make money? Yes.

The time is fine for me …

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I don’t mind having an single account to access all Google services. I like and approve of that.

But when I need to have a “real” social media profile in order to make a comment on YouTube, inarguably the filth of the Internet, that’s somewhere to draw the line. I should not be required to have any sort of social media attached to my account unless I want to.

I think the logic behind that comes with the idea that if you use an authentic social media profile then you are less likely to be uncivil and post abusive/ aggressive content etc.

Unfortunately it hasn’t quite worked and is primarily seen as imposing something that isn’t needed for Youtube, and I’d have to agree it is a bit of an obstacle.

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am i the only one so disconnected from this drama? surely there are others that couldn’t care less about either the Oculus Rift or Facebook’s involvement in the products future? :blush:

not discrediting the need or interest to discuss/debate… i just, have so little interest in either party involved…

maybe im missing out on something here? :smile:

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The OR is seen as the first, real step into virtual reality. It was supposed to be cheap enough so the average gamer, not just VR freaks, could afford it. It would take games to the next level, immersion-wise. Sure, there have been attempts at that kind of thing before, but the OR was the first one that was both achievable for the masses and good. Nobody wanted to really get into that business before.

Now there’s Sony and at least one other company starting their own research on VR.

On that note, I think the video is… rather… silly and a bit poor executed, but it gives you a great idea about how games could work if VR became a thing.

Of course, if you are not into FPS games then the OR offers rather little for you (besides fancy 3D). There are games that would simply not profit from it, such as Stonehearth. However, I’d love to play EuroTruck Simulator/Train Simulator with such a thing…

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They really don’t differ the Oculus is a monitor as I stated before.

No, it IS your screen. Your monitor doesn’t control your computer. You’re very mistaken with what the Oculus Rift is. Like I said before peripherals can’t datamine and give you ads. Your monitor is not responsible for the ads on your screen, the site or application is. Furthermore the Oculus doesn’t “control” anything, the absolute most input it has on your computer is an accelerometer. I’ve never heard of a mouse datamining or causing ads upon clicks.

The EULA is the nice piece of text that pops up before you install anything and that you need to click the box in order to continue thus accepting its terms. Legally it means a lot anywhere. You’re always aware of the EULA because you checked the box that pops up and if you didn’t then you didn’t install the software. If you checked it you agreed to the terms. Just because you don’t read it doesn’t mean it’s not a legally binding contract.

A monitor screen is a static device. Its sole purpose is to display data. Any serious VR needs to be capable to do more: It needs to interpret your position and rotation and pass that data to the game, which needs to make sense out of it.

You can compare this easily to a movie versus game thing: A movie works fine with 24 FPS, a game doesn’t. For a “social media experience”, you can optimize quite a few things: You likely won’t need more than 30 FPS for a glorified VR browser, nor do you need to anticipate fast head movements accurately. Therefore, you can save money or simplify the design by omitting things that won’t be necessary. Nobody is going to produce a 400 Hz TV screen if all the movies are 30 FPS at most anyway.

You’ve misunderstood me. It’s not about that the OR could possibly control anything other than the 3D application currently running - it’s about the fact that it has access to what I see and more specifically, what I’m looking at. Especially the latter is worth a lot of money because it allows design (and marketing people) to optimize their products. Place advertisments where most users are looking at, revamp space that isn’t used…

These are all things that a boring normal montior can’t do, but is a very vital task of the OR. What the OR effectively sends back to the computer is beyond my knowledge and I don’t want to speculate anything, I am merely pointing out that there’s a possibility that this data can be used to mine data.

It’s done all the time and has been for quite some time. Ads might not be the number one reason, but they come in close second.

I’ll translate (badly) the German Wikipedia entry for the situation in Germany:

In Germany, EULAs for software can only be part of a contract if they have been established between consumer and vendor prior to the purchase. Conditions that are established after the purchase are void. This even applies if the consumer is forced to click “I accept” during the installation because the software refuses to install otherwise.

Which makes a lot of sense - you don’t want to buy something and then have the product say its company now owns your house, eh?

So unless the EULA are accessible prior to the purchase, they’re void - no matter how much companies want them to be true. They might exclude you from their services - as is their right - but they cannot legally come after you. What they want you to click is, essentially, a void contract. It’s not a legally binding contract that would hold up in any court.

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The mouse tracking link you provided is done through SOFTWARE, and the Oculus doesn’t have any more access to whats on your screen then your monitor. If they’re looking for VR whether a social application or not it needs to be able to read fine movements which means a higher FPS and input speed would be necessary to mimic nuanced human movement.