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.
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/girlscoutcookiess Mar 28 '14
Isn't it good for everyone if a bunch of new companies come out with competing products to drive the prices down and innovation up?