Oculus rift is dead
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Join Date: 2002-12-20 Member: 11220Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2002-12-20 Member: 11220Members, Reinforced - Shadow
in Off-Topic
http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/oculus-joins-facebook/
Yupp. So ... that happened.
The business model of a social media company is divided into two phases. Phase 1: the honey moon phase, earn trust and acquire users. Phase 2: Betray that trust and monetize as much information as you can before your users flee`.
What are the chances they will not soil the Oculus by bundling it with invasive scumware/DRM (e.g. some kind of facebook app)? Facefart is in stage 2, what happens to the Oculus when they are the new myspace?
Yupp. So ... that happened.
The business model of a social media company is divided into two phases. Phase 1: the honey moon phase, earn trust and acquire users. Phase 2: Betray that trust and monetize as much information as you can before your users flee`.
What are the chances they will not soil the Oculus by bundling it with invasive scumware/DRM (e.g. some kind of facebook app)? Facefart is in stage 2, what happens to the Oculus when they are the new myspace?
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Also I am legit happy for the Oculus founders, 2 Bil is a serious payday considering they probably made nowhere near that before. I don't blame them for a second for taking that money.
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Also Notch proves to be an idiot baby, again, by canceling oculus minecraft. Oh yeah, this thing you were working on just got serious publicity and backing? Better not capitalize on it because you have pre-conceived notions about a company you've never met.
Their reason for existing is literally to vacuum up every scrap of information they can about you, including everything you post, location data from your phone, including meta data of files to figure out where and when photos are taken, what links you click etc. so they can better target advertising from third parties and get a better price from unspecified third parties when they sell your information. It's the NSAs (et al) wet dream, total surveillance, far more sophisticated than anything which existed in the Soviet union.
People get upset about NSA spying, but this level of spying, in an unaccountable private tyranny, which is what a corporation is, would in a sane world be punishable by federal ****-you-in-the-ass prison, life without posibility of parole.
What are the odds, regardless of the lame protestations from Palmer, that this won't entail some kind of invasive scumware or DRM attached to the Rift software?
What are the odds Oculus rift will be a going concern after Facebook crashes properly?
Facebook has already stated they let Oculus run as an independent company, they need games to get the ball rolling and these thing popular. funny thing now is John Carmack is now employed by FB.
On the other hand, Google will develop their own product, so we got two evil great companies with VR now.
I seriously hope that in 20 years I will still be able to a life the same quality as everyone else's (i.e. with AR glasses) without relying on some shady megacorporation...
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists
Predicting the future is hard, and I don't necessarily blame them as much for this as I blame them for their failure to make predictions about the past. Population has grown less than linearly for half a century, still they talk of exponential growth. The problem with oil, gas and coal supplies has consistently been that we have too damned much of them and it's too damned easy to access more with minor technology improvements, still they argue that peak oil and world wide rolling black-outs are just years away, every year, for the last 30 years.
All the elements and minerals that are supposed to reach a production peak in just a decade or a few never do, because we just climb down the resource pyramid a little bit and find vastly larger quanitites at slightly lower concentrations.
All the supposedly vital elements keep turning out not to be so vital. With quantum dots being able to replace most of the applications for rare earths. With various allotropes of carbon in particular being vastly superior to just about anything in strength, strength to weight ratio, heat conductivity, electrical conductivity and so on.
Food production per capita just keeps going up faster than populations, with no end in sight. Precision farming. Perennial grains. And so on.
Amidst all the whinging about deforestation and desertification, there has been an explosion in forest and foliage cover over the last couple of decades, mostly due to increasing CO2 levels, which allows plants to take up carbon from the atmosphere (nutoriously inefficient) without losing as much water. This benefits weeds more than food crops (many of which are grasses, an adaption to the very low CO2 levels in the last few tens of millions of years), but we'll manage.
to counter the dumb bandwagon posts that are inevitably going to be posted (if they haven't been already, didn't bother to read the thread), the oculus is essentially a monitor with fancy software. even if Zuckerberg changed the scope of the project to not be gaming, it wouldn't change a thing. It wouldn't stop game developers from rendering their game twice (once per eye) and feeding that into the VR headset.
edit:
From the founder of Oculus, Palmer Luckey http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/21cy9n/the_future_of_vr/cgby5hj
For me, the main point is that they are now controlled by facebook.
Call me a hater, but in my opinion we should restrict facebook wherever possible.
And they will do some sh*t about customary facebook software on the OR (think google on android). Hell, I would do it if I where them.
"Oculus is going forward in a big way, but a way that still lets me focus on the community first, and not sell out to a large company.” - Palmer
Palmer's word is worth nothing.
He's been flailing about making lame excuses. 'it's an acquisition, but it's really more like a partnership' type nonsense. 'Facebook is proponent of open software and hardware' type nonsense. Much of what he has said has been contradicted by Zuckerberg, his boss. Facebook is all about collecting your info, they're not about entertainment. To the extent that they allow OR to be used for gaming without burdening it with facebook integration and data collection, it is a scam to sucker more people in before they implement it.
a friend of mine wants me to post for him because he can't be bothered to make an account. i agree with him so here we go, buckle your seat belts.
Uhm, no. Wait a second, right there. How do you know that?
We are all obviously guessing here, but facebook is a company that primarily makes money by acquiring and selling data. Currently, they do that by tracking as much as possible of their user's data. Why would they suddenly stop here?
Please do. I want to know.
...
(this is mine) Because they have always stopped there? According to google (I could be wrong or have outdated info, I don't use the apps myself), neither Instagram or WhatsApp require a facebook to login or use, both of which were bought by facebook for even greater amounts than the Oculus. Seeing as how there isn't precedent for it on a software level, do you honestly believe they will enforce facebook registration for hardware?
You're arguing just to argue, it sounds like.
No, I'm arguing because I'm a facebook hater :P (simply put)
edit: Alright, that does sound like I'm trolling. I'm not. But I will always be against facebook's policies and/or actions; because of the more than dubious background of fb. (Same goes for Google, Apple, Microsoft (to a lesser extent)...)
The Facebook money has started to flow.
Those are not "doomers" (yes, labels are so comfortable to use), those are actual scientists using scientific methods to analyze and extrapolate hard data. I know, it's hard to keep up to date, there are countries that still have hard time figuring out the evolution theory and heliocentrism, but hopefully, we are getting there. Nobody informed in the energy industry today can write something like, quote, "...it's too damned easy to access more with minor technology improvements".
The consistent track record of failure says otherwise.
You have to be completely ignorant of energy history to say otherwise. We've had these panics about running out of oil, gas and coal every few decades since well into the 19th century. The disaster has always turned out to be that it's too damned easy to get more cheap, dirty energy. Oil reserves (in terms of recoverable oil, not original oil in place) are the highest they have ever been.
The worst case scenario for oil production, basically assuming we keep sucking light sweet crude through vertical straws and stop rapidly expanding production of heavy sour crudes, oil sands, deep oil etc. is that oil production halves in 30 years. That's a nice comfortable decline and would be a good thing (tm) because the health consequences of burning oil are more than the cost of the damned stuff, and such a decline likely would case no major harm (more than half is pissed away on personal transport, and most of road freight can and should be replaced with rail and electricified rail). But it is not what we will do.
Coal we have enough to raise CO2 in the atmosphere back to what it was during the time of the dinosaurs. Easily > 1000 ppm. Coal mining equipment keeps making huge strides (e.g. see the German bagger for surface mining), and we keep wandering down the resource pyramid from anthracite to black coal, to brown coal and smoothing things over with slightly improved pollution controls. Dozens of countries are working on UGC. And the hydrogen economy, which is just another name for coal powered cars, is a real threatening possibility.
Fracking keeps making huge strides. With locating and drilling long boreholes horisontally in thin shale layers being surprisingly recent.
The 50's and 60's vision of cheap and abundant nuclear energy unfortunately got side-tracked by dirty, cheap fossil fuels (not counting externalities) and light water reactors, which are a terrible design for power production (yet still competitive with fossil fuels). There's a coal Chernobyl every month or so in Germany (assuming LNT hypothesis is true, less than a day if it isn't). Nobody is evacuated, nothing is shut down, nobody cares. We're now moving forward with molten salt reactors and pebble bed reactors, particularly in China, were reactors keep comming in on time and under budget, competitive with all but the dirtiest coal (we're still talking LWRs here, a crummy design for U-boats).
Facebook is a company whose executives deserve lifelong imprisonment in federal ****-you-in-the-ass prison without possibility of parole. That alone means that I cannot justify to myself buying an oculus rift despite wanting good affordable VR for 20+ years. It sucks, but I can wait a few years more if that's what it takes. If they'll work with the NSA, they'll bend over and work with the modern equivalent of the KGB, the Gestapo and the stasi in any country they may occur; say Turkey, Ukraine or Syria to name a few recent examples where this kind of betrayal could do enormous harm.
Appart from that little detail. The founder of the company did exactly what he said he wouldn't do, and people are right not to trust him. Zuckerberg owns Oculus Rift. It is not a partnership. any time-limited deal for Oculus to remain indepent or similar is not public information. All we have is the founders word that the acquisition is really more like a partnership.
I have never heard of whatsapp. Instagram was a disgusting, ought to be illegal, data mining operation, similar to facebook to begin with, and now it harvests user data for facebook instead; so I guess there's no huge change there. If you aren't buying the product, you ARE the product.
Without head tracking, the oculus is just a sea-sickness simulator. Of course they will build in data mining into the drivers. They're a scummy company with a long history of talking out of both sides of their mouth, particularly on privacy; whose main product is user data. That's a forgone conclusion.
Requiring logging in to Facebook or similar also isn't unlikely; I would not rule out an Apple style "walled garden" VR app store, forcing you to login by arguing that they can better serve their customers need and provide them with quality controlled games and apps etc that way. It is immaterial whether you log in directly to facebook or with a separate login to their "Oculus VR app store" since they have access to both data sets and in any case can tie it down to a physical person with credit card info if you are not a member of facebook.
There might be a FB-backed app store kind of thing, but they aren't going to be able to prevent people implementing stereoscopic barrel rendering in any game and, without any kind of low-level device locking, playing that game with a rift.
Take off your fedora emblazoned with "I
--Scythe--
Also 2 billion dollars would give a huge boost to oculus development.
That's not gonna happen. Roman empire fell due to corruption (believe it or not, much more than today) and because they turned against each other. Also, only half of roman empire fell, the other half is now Turkey. East roman -> Byzantine -> Ottoman -> Turkey. In fact, the only one that failed is the ottomans and that was due to world war 1.
Explain.
The devkit which is sitting on my desk has no cameras. It has no microphone or GPS. The only thing Oculus has gotten from me was money (with the credit card number masked by Amazon.com), my name and my address. How is that invasive?
I don't like it because it's like strapping a c4 on your head.
Well done Occulus, you have taken technology from 30 years ago, and sold it to the masses, as if it was something new.
Occulus is no more advanced than the military goggles they wore for parachute training etc in the 90's. None of the problems with VR have been fixed in the last 30 years, although Occulus claim they will be able to solve them by next year. HAHA is all I can say.
3D has actually been around since the 50s, I think. It has been pretty popular lately, thanks to new developments...
On the other hand, the longevity of the 3D hype is questionable and you probably can't compare it to VR... why am I even posting this?