Just a month after the spectacular Whatsapp takeover, Facebook again goes on a shopping tour and announces the purchase of Oculus VR. The price is expected to be $ 2 billion, with $ 400 million being paid directly and $ 1.6 billion in the form of Facebook shares.
Mixed responses to Oculus deal
With the acquisition of Oculus VR, Facebook is buying a well-known hardware manufacturer for the first time. Oculus VR is well-known through its Virtual Reality Headset Oculus Rift, which is financed by the crowdfunding platform kickstarter. According to promising prototypes the gaming scene is waiting for the appearance of the first market-ready headsets.
Facebook on shopping tour: The most important transitions
On Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg announced to let Oculus VR operate as an independent company within Facebook. They will focus on helping Oculus develop their products and help find new game partners.
Oculus Rift - Overview
However, Zuckerberg's visions of the future for the virtual reality glasses go beyond pure gamer dreams: "After the games we will make Oculus a platform for many more experiences. Imagine you enjoy a seat right on the edge of a sports event Learn in a classroom with pupils and teachers from all over the world or you can get advice from your doctor vis-à-vis - only by using your glasses at home. " In the long term, Zuckerberg sees Oculus as a communications platform.
Picture gallery
For Oculus founder Palmer Luckey the takeover by Facebook is an opportunity to accelerate the development of the virtual reality market. In an opinion on the Oculus VR blog, he indicated that the bill deal not only gave more room for creative and risky ideas, but now one could also bring the VR glasses Oculus Rift better and faster on the market. In this context, he praised the open nature of Facebook and its urge to innovate.
As with the Whatsapp deal, the Oculus VR takeover by Facebook ensures mixed responses on the web. So, Palmer Lucky at Reddit is trying to calm troubled users and developers who are worried about possible privacy implications and other consequences of the deal. On Twitter, Minecraft inventor Markus Persson alias Notch announced the development of a Minecraft version for Oculus
Game designer legend John Carmack (formerly ID-Software), who has been working as CTO at Oculus VR since August, sees the takeover as a welcome move to the scaling problems
And Shuhei Yoshida, president of the Sony World Wide Studios, took a position on Twitter
This is to be seen against the background that Sony only last week at the GDC 2017 with Project Morpheus had presented its own VR glasses. Even if you want to make Facebook products more attractive, you do not have to do without the beautiful new (virtual) world.
We're talking about Minecraft to Oculus. I just canceled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.
For the record, I am coding right now, just like I was last week.I expect the embarrassing scaling crisis for VR.
Wow, I did not see this coming, congratulations! @oculus @brendaniribe @natemitchell
No comments:
Post a Comment