[Fiware-miwi] Facebook buys Oculus for $2+ Billion

Philipp Slusallek Philipp.Slusallek at dfki.de
Wed Mar 26 05:17:36 CET 2014


Wow!

It seems that Facebook shares our vision that interactive 3D graphics 
and wants to drive VR/AR as a big factor for Future Internet communication:

"While the applications for virtual reality technology beyond gaming are 
in their nascent stages, several industries are already experimenting 
with the technology," Facebook said in a blog post. "Facebook plans to 
extend Oculus' existing advantage in gaming to new verticals, including 
communications, media and entertainment, education, and other areas,".

"The history of our industry is that every 10 or 15 years, there's a new 
major computing platform, whether it's the PC, the web, or now mobile," 
Zuckerberg continued on a conference call following the announcement. 
"History suggests that there will be more platforms to come, and that 
whoever builds and defines these will not only shape all of these 
experiences that our industry builds, but also benefit financially and 
strategically." He believe that "vision," in the form of virtual and 
augmented reality technologies, will form the basis of that next major 
platform.

See: 
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/03/facebook-purchases-vr-headset-maker-oculus-for-2-billion/

However, we also need to be careful as Facebook is obviously very 
controversial. For example, Minecraft immediately stopped working on an 
Oculus version of their game 
(https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/03/minecraft-dev-halts-talks-with-oculus-following-facebook-acquisition/).

Still, this acquisition will give the entire field a big boost anyway in 
particular with respect to non-gaming applications. And the animosity 
relating to Facebook probably creates many new opportunities elsewhere 
-- including us.

Just yesterday I had talked with Stefan Lemme and Torsten that we should 
organize a joint meeting discussing how to best drive our WP13 
technology for the next two years in FI-Core also taking into account 
FI-Content and other activities that we are all involved in. We planed 
to invite for such an event pretty soon and this only makes such 
discussions much more relevant.


Best,

	Philipp

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