Support NeoGAF

[Brakke]

Yes, the hardware is just a useless piece of shit /s

Not my point; it's certainly not $2bn good.

I thought the product was what excited people, not the name.

I'm sure their product is a good thing, but there's no reason to believe someone else couldn't enter the market... maybe someone named Sony? There isn't even a market yet! The Rift is cool because it's the "best in class", but there isn't even a class yet.

It's exciting because they moved first on this new wave VR, but they haven't released a product so they've barely "moved" at all. Oculus hasn't invented some wild new technology, they're putting software on top of commodity display hardware. The VR problem certain isn't trivial, but it's not unassailably hard.

The only thing Oculus in particular has going for it is a bit of a head start on hardware, and a ton of a head start on brand. People call the Morpheus a Rift competitor but that's not accurate at all: they don't compete because neither exists yet. However, Oculus owns that mind-space because they've been making noise about it.

 

[RMI]

people really believed that?

What was the last thing fb bought that they rebranded?

NYT ran an article where an anonymous insider said they would re-brand it, and then that got picked up by other outlets. Personally I think it's a load of BS.

 

[Durante]

Oculus hasn't invented some wild new technology, they're putting software on top of commodity display hardware.

Oculus, or rather Palmer Luckey and John Carmack, did invent a way to build a high quality VR device for cheap right now, by using a single relatively large display, cheap and light optics, and correcting for distortion in software.

That's really the innovation fueling the massive rise in immediate consumer VR interest.

 

[KoopaTheCasual]

A policy that was quickly reversed be instagram as soon as people kicked up a stink. Facebook didn't force them to do anything.

Yes, it's great that we still control that much power, but it doesn't change the fact that Facebook likes their own business model (and why wouldn't they?), and wanted Instagram to facilitate their own model, with much more ease. That's just how business works.

I mean, on one hand, it's somewhat disheartening...

But on the other hand - what's the reality today?

Programs are frequently ported across platforms. There are some exclusives dependent on the platform...

But you know; while we're still operating society under a corporatocracy paradigm, it's probably better for there to be competing platforms rather than a single unified platform.

The difficulty of the metaverse is that significantly more coding and maintenance of servers is required to set the substrate for other creative works to go on top - then simply specifying standards similar to HTML - so an open source version of the metaverse was never going to be a real thing - the best open source would've managed would've been to specify a set of standards and hope developers adopt them regularly across platforms.

Things that should be really basic and consistent - like how you dress and show your avatar - in first person and third person view, how you access inventory, how you navigate menus - stands a much better chance of consistency if there's a program large enough (like an OS) to accommodate for those factors rather than leave it up in the air and hope smaller devs will apply all those functions consistently across board, even though doing so will strain the resources of smaller devs significantly.

You make a lot of good points, especially the bolded part. I guess it was a fools errand to possibly hope VR could maintain a massive Internet-like network without a massive group effort from every party involved for the "greater good", which had no chance of happening. Either way, I wonder how the landscape of VR will look in say 10 years. Will it mirror any existing market (TV, internet, gaming) or will it be so nuanced that it resembles none of them. Exciting stuff lies ahead, just in terms of history.

 

[Brakke]

Oculus, or rather Palmer Luckey and John Carmack, did invent a way to build a high quality VR device for cheap right now, by using a single relatively large display, cheap and light optics, and correcting for distortion in software.

That's really the innovation fueling the massive rise in immediate consumer VR interest.

Well the rub here is "invent", right? Optics are pretty damn well-understood by now. Does/could Oculus own entry-blocking patents here? Feels to me like anybody else should be able to start with the similar form-factor and solve the problems in a parallel way. Might be wrong, but Sony's thing tends to indicate that no, Oculus can't monopolize the market here.

Once Oculus showed people that it could be done, doing it stopped being the tricky part, shipping it and selling out that first shipment became the tricky part. That's where Oculus is valuable as a brand.

 

[icy_eagle]

Not my point; it's certainly not $2bn good.

but the brand is???

 

[Durante]

Well the rub here is "invent", right? Optics are pretty damn well-understood by now. Does/could Oculus own entry-blocking patents here? Feels to me like anybody else should be able to start with the similar form-factor and solve the problems in a parallel way. Might be wrong, but Sony's thing tends to indicate that no, Oculus can't monopolize the market here.

Once Oculus showed people that it could be done, doing it stopped being the tricky part, shipping it and selling out that first shipment became the tricky part. That's where Oculus is valuable as a brand.

I completely agree. There don't seem to be any fundamental patents about any of this. Which is a good thing for competition in the VR market.

That doesn't change the fact that Luckey and Carmack invented this particular way of building a consumer HMD for VR. Which does seem to be the best way right now, and the reason why it's viable in the first place.

 

[Coconut]

I was just talking about how this won't be rebranded it already has market recognition.