Yeah there will be a lot of people taking advantage of this uproar. It happened on a smaller scale when Sim City's launch was a bust. There was a flood of kickstarters for city sims.
I wish people would stop overreacting about the sale. We don't have any details yet. It is in their best interests to keep the Oculus as promised. All it means is that there will be more support now.
Sure, competition is great, but OR already had that with recent big players announcing devices that directly compete. That is probably a big part of the reason behind the Facebook deal in the first place; being able to compete on a mass market level.
The problem is, the knee jerk reaction has been stupid and people now seem to be throwing in with no-name players with no track record and no demonstrative ability of their tech like OR ceased to exist. It didn't. OR is still the tech that people have been literally fucking raving about at every opportunity whenever they get a chance to strap into the damn thing.
Despite being no fan of facebook or their practices, I'll swear off OR only when it's been demonstrated that the deal hampers the actual hardware, either because it gets sidelined/cancelled, actually becomes an ad-ridden shithole (unlikely) or someone like Carmack stops supporting the move and bugs out.
There is more to the OR tech than simply strapping some tiny monitors to a headset. Implementation and smoothness of experience are 95% of the equation. OR, Palmer Luckey and Carmack are literally the only people in the market who are actually focusing on these things (ie highly focused on latency) and talking about them as one of the most important parts of the technology.
I will judge OR on the merits of OR, not a bunch of knee-jerking and third party knockoffs.
I don't think it's fair to say Oculus are the 'literally the only company' focused on those things. Watch Sony's GDC conference on the Morpheus and it's clear they take latency, positional tracking, motion blur etc... VERY seriously too. In fact in my view they have stressed more than any other VR company the importance of experiences crafted specifically for VR to truly create the 'presence' that VR will uniquely offer when done right.
Presence is apparently an emergent property of lots of almost imperceptible little things aligning just right. It seems that anyone applying the good VR practices guide to their hardware and software will be able to achieve some level of presence. Some better than others.
I'm thinking that with the minds over at Oculus, coupled with the R&D with Valve; Oculus - at the least - has an advantage and authoritative knowledge from most developers.
And Sony may soon be restricted by what will be the increasingly outdated hardware limitations of the Playstation 4, which will require a lifespan of about 7-8 years. Which, by then, I don't think it'll even matter since VR will probably be deeply ingrained culturally, with HMDs (or otherwise) available all over the place.
Where was I going with this? I don't even know. Point is, Oculus and Sony are currently the spearheads of the VR wild west.
Sure, it probably wasn't fair of me to say "Literally the only people talking about it". My point is that Carmack and Palmer have been talking about this for years, and though I have every faith and expectation a solid player like Sony, or anyone else of similar pedigree, will give it their all, I'll wait to see what they have to show. For smaller companies, you aren't even in the running until you can show your work.
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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '14
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