Over the past few days, the Oculus Rift VR system has gone from savior to demon, and all it took was for Facebook to acquire it. Full disclosure here, I am not a fan of Facebook and I've never hidden that fact. This post will obviously reinforce my personal bias.
When I first heard about Oculus Rift I thought it was a great idea but destined to fail. I didn't see any point in helping fund the kickstarter, but I have kept an eye on the system's progress because it's something that truly interests me.
I grew up in the 80's and 90's and virtual reality was always the distant dream of the future. We had movies about it, and there were even arcades that hosted early vr systems. They were kinda fun, but clunky, and they didn't take off the way anyone expected. But the hope and dream of a viable, home vr system, never left the thoughts of anyone who played games and grew up in that time.
Oculus Rift brought that dream back to us, and offered it up as a reality. That's why this acquisition has caused such and uproar. The people freaking out, finally saw their childhood dreams starting to come true, and then that dream was sold for two billion dollars. Not only was is it sold, it was sold to Facebook.
Even though Facebook is massive and used by people everywhere, it's a hated company. And for good reason. They rarely show respect for their user base, and their privacy models are joke. Facebook has been around for far less time and has somehow managed to be as distrusted and hated as Microsoft.
The acquisition may have gone a bit smoother among the fans if it hadn't been sold to Facebook specifically. People simply do not trust them to take the system in the proper direction. The two billion will certainly help in the development but how the system will be used is now suspect. The possibilities for use in a social networking framework are endless and exciting, but not if it's tied to facebook.
As stated earlier, I didn't fund the kickstarter, but I've always had an eye on Oculus. If it lived up to my expectations, I was planning on buying it. I've pretty much abandoned console gaming, but this would have brought me back. That is no longer a possibility, and unfortunately for Oculus Rift, I'm not alone in this position. Someone else, somewhere, will take this technology in the right direction, and they'll get our money. It's going to happen, if nothing else Oculus Rift has proven that people still want this.
