Facebook will be a 'powerful force' in driving virtual reality forward, Oculus CTO says

Facebook gets the 'big picture' of VR, John Carmack, the chief technology officer at Oculus, said this week. 

|
Reuters
In this Jan. 7, 2014 file photo, attendees at the CES expo play a video game wearing Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets.

Earlier this month, Facebook revealed it would acquire California company Oculus VR in a deal worth a reported $2 billion. Oculus VR, of course, makes the forthcoming Oculus Rift, an eagerly-awaited headset that once received an injection of $2.5 million in cash from an array of Kickstarter donors. And now a lot of those donors are feeling a little betrayed by the Oculus team. 

Writing on Twitter, John Melloy, CEO of StockTwits, joked that Oculus might start offering a new T-shirt, one emblazoned with the following tagline: "I Helped Oculus Get Sold for $2 Billion and All I Got was This Lousy T-Shirt." 

But this week, John Carmack, the chief technology officer at Oculus, took to the comments section of a blog run by a musician named Peter Berkman to defend the acquisition by Facebook.

Mr. Berkman had argued that under Facebook, Oculus's users would soon find themselves sliding "down one giant funnel of information." Mr. Carmack responded that "the fairly rapid involvement" of tech titans such as Facebook was "inevitable."

"[T]he real questions were how deeply to partner, and with who," he continues. "Honestly, I wasn't expecting Facebook (or this soon). I have zero personal background with them, and I could think of other companies that would have more obvious synergies. However, I do have reasons to believe that they get the Big Picture as I see it, and will be a powerful force towards making it happen." 

Carmack added that although he "spent an afternoon talking technology with Mark Zuckerberg," Facebook's CEO, he was not involved with any of the negotiations. 

His point – that the money from Facebook could help propel Oculus to a new technological level – was echoed last week in a post from the Oculus founders. 

The acquisition "gives [Oculus] the best shot at truly changing the world. It opens doors to new opportunities and partnerships, reduces risk on the manufacturing and work capital side, allows us to publish more made-for-VR content, and lets us focus on what we do best: solving hard engineering challenges and delivering the future of VR," they explain

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Facebook will be a 'powerful force' in driving virtual reality forward, Oculus CTO says
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2014/0331/Facebook-will-be-a-powerful-force-in-driving-virtual-reality-forward-Oculus-CTO-says
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe