Facebook bought the Oculus Rift and its team for two billion dollars.

Did you guys hear about Facebook picking up the Oculus Rift virtual reality company? Paying two billion is a ridiculous amount, and I think it's way over priced. I like the idea of virtual reality on the PC and all, but the thing gives people who aren't near sighted mild headaches, and I can't see it being worth some two billion.

What do you guys think? http://powerleveled.com/facebook-spent-2000000000-on-a-virtual-reality-company-now-what/

Overall, I think there might be some potential in the PC space outside of games if Facebook invests money into going on adventures, so that we can take a trip to Mt. Everest without making the climb but it's not really reasonable for anything else right now.

 

was reading on this earlier, i forsee ad popups incoming all over that thing.

 

I'm actually disappointed to hear this, facebook is badly managed. Profit > end user in all cases.

 

wow does fb have to own everything? other then our lives 0.0

 

No, that's what googles for.

But honestly, where do they see $2,000,000,000 worth of work in this company?

 

They more than likely had to buy out the contracts / copyrights involved with the company.

They pretty much paid for a jump start in the tech and the idea.

 

So much for the kick starter, I feel a bit betrayed. I think they just got greedy, and took the money.

 

Facebook is just buying everything arent they lol

 

Tech companies are extremely highly valued for like no reason at the moment.

 

I never liked Oculus Rift anyway. 3D gaming sounds fun when you hear about it but when you watch a film in 3D or a game, I just get terrible headaces. Few years ago 3D TVs hit the UK and everyone was going crazy about them, now they're dead.

 

The thing about 3D as it was, without the Rift, you're messing with your depth perception. You're forcing perspective. Anyone who uses the Rift will be able to use it fine as long as they can see an object with good clarity at close range.

People who are far-sighted will not like the Rift, but most people will.

 

WA state? I'm from the Olympia area




Same as josh, I feel like I wasted that $20 I gave to kickstarter. It was a small amount, but it what I had at the time, and I donated it to see the pioneers succeed, not the product.

 

Seems like Facebook is trying to buy every up and coming company nowadays. I feel like that's somewhat excessive and kind of sucks. Oculus Rift is probably gonna suck now.

 

When you're Mr. Zuckerberg it's just another house on the monopoly board. If you have that money to throw around I'd rather he was buying business and providing jobs than it sitting in his bank acount. He's a good employer to work for so I've heard.

 

Yeah, Facebook is supposed to be a great place to work, but he really only buys businesses for the sake of eliminating competition before this point. Obviously that's a great idea, but I'm not sure how the Rift fits into his history of purchases.

 

I only skimmed the article, but it seems like Zuckerberg sees the possibility that 3D virtual reality is probably the next "big thing" for entertainment/internet/etc. If he does manage to succeed, the ROI is ridiculous.

Similar to how technology upgrades quickly, I'm assuming he sees huge potential in this virtual reality possibility. I guess he also has to buy out all copyrights/patents/whatever other intellectual property as well, in exchange for a huge lead in this not-yet-existent market.

Besides, he has the money to do so anyway. He'll probably recoup his investment quickly if he succeeds. Even if he doesn't, he eliminated future competition at the very least and essentially monopolized whatever virtual reality market exists already, seeing as there probably aren't many companies that have that much of a foot into this door to begin with.

Or I could be confusing Oculus Rift with a different company, I'm kind of just vaguely remembering this documentary I saw on this virtual reality Battlefield/Cod-type of game where they placed an actual military sergeant captain or whatever into the game. It got rated incredibly realistic and high quality by the guy, but I could be mixing up names here...

Edit:

Whoops, looks like this guy beat me to the explanation already

 

I'm interested to see where this goes. With the billions of dollars behind it, it could be quite something..