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

[Jonne Nauha]

We have intergrated oculus support for DK1 in our desktop native Meshmoon
Rocket client. The Oculus was a pleasure to code against, and worked
without major mods on both Windows and OSX. I think we were going to
preorder the Oculus DK2 model so we can get that working also ASAP, but I
think now we'll have to wait and see what this facebook stuff actually does
to the project. Hopefully they wont steer it too much away from the
original goals of being a hackable device for the PC platform. I guess the
horror case (that people seem to be assuming) would be that you need to
login via facebook as a user to see anything, or popup ads or stuff like
that :) Also Facebook has a history with user privacy violations etc.

Ofc this will increase their budget and get a ton of devs working on it if
they wish. And potentially they might make browsers work somehow nicer and
maybe make the browser detect and interact with the Oculus device, as thats
Facebooks main platform. Or they could do a native app for nicer
experience, we'll have to wait and see.

Best regards,
Jonne Nauha
Meshmoon developer at Adminotech Ltd.
www.meshmoon.com


On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 6:17 AM, Philipp Slusallek <
Philipp.Slusallek at dfki.de> wrote:

> 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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>
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