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Oculus Rift: What does Facebook's acquisition mean for virtual reality?

You may know that Facebook just acquired Oculus and its Rift headset for a sizable US$2 billion, which includes 23.1 million shares of Facebook stock and US$400 million in cash.

But do you know what Oculus is, and why the company was bought? What could the social network's big-money purchase mean for the future of virtual reality technology? Here's what we know so far:

Oculus Rift Crystal Cove Prototype

© Digital Spy

The Crystal Cove prototype of Oculus Rift

Who are Oculus, and what is Oculus Rift?

Oculus is the company behind Oculus Rift, a 3D virtual reality headset designed to make video games more immersive than ever. This is achieved by tracking your head movement, and relaying said movement within a game.

The idea behind the technology is that you could be looking around an environment as if you were there in real life. The system is meant to feel more natural than looking and moving around using a typical controller input method.

The Rift headset also opens up doors for improving the level of control you have in a game. For instance, you could be running forward towards an object while looking at your surroundings. In a racing game, you could glance down at the gear knob to see what gear you are in. During a virtual track and field race, you could take a quick glance and see how far behind your opponent is. Neat, huh?

How does it work?

Basically, Oculus Rift is a headset that contains a display. The right side of the display displays an image for the right eye, the left displays an image for the left eye. A lens is tasked with the job of adjusting the picture for each eye, creating glorious stereoscopic 3D.

An external and internal tracking device is used to monitor the position of your head (on six axes), and also tracks the movement of your eyeballs. Clever programming turns these real-life movements into in-game movement within 30 milliseconds.

The Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 - DK2 for short - is based on the 'Crystal Cove' Oculus Rift prototype revealed at CES 2014 (and tested there by Digital Spy). It has a 5-inch OLED display with a 100-degree view, and a resolution of 960 x 1080 pixels.

The older, inferior Oculus Rift had a 7-inch display and a 110-degree view with a resolution of 1,280 x 800 pixels. Expect an even better screen in the consumer version, whenever that comes to light.

So, Oculus is designed for gaming?

In its present form, yes. But the scope of virtual reality has fascinated humankind for years, which means the technology could be honed into something with greater mass-market appeal. We'll get to that in a minute.

Can I buy Oculus?

You can pre-order the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 from the Oculus VR website. It's priced at $350, and first deliveries are expected to arrive from July 2014. If demand increases, production will be ramped up.

What are the technological hurdles?

Virtual reality and 3D have a few issues, chief of which is nausea. The latest version of Oculus Rift uses a 'low persistence OLED display' to reduce the issue of motion blur and judder. You know on some TVs, fast movements are met with blurriness your eyes struggle to look at? It aims to reduce that.

Not everyone experiences nausea, but ultimately it would be better to reduce the strain on your eyesight over prolonged periods of time. Nobody likes leaving a cinema with a headache after watching a film in 3D. Our eyes would probably implode if we spent three hours playing a fast-paced game like Call of Duty in 3D.

In defense of Oculus Rift, you can tailor the settings to your eyesight, which isn't possible in a trade show setting where many journalists have tested it out. This would perhaps reduce or remove the issue entirely.

Oculus Rift Crystal Cove Prototype

© Digital Spy

Trying out Oculus Rift at CES 2014

The tracking of motion is another area that can and will only get better, but in its present state, there are limitations. Oculus hopes to add functionality like peeking around a corner, or looking at an object more closely. Improvements in tracking will make these functions possible.

There's also the issue of what is known as the "screen-door effect". Having a display so close to the eyes allows you to look between the pixels on display as if looking through a 'screen-door', limiting the effect of the illusion. A better display should help solve the problem.

What does the move mean for Facebook?

At present, not a lot. In the future, Oculus Rift opens a lot of doors, and not necessarily limited to gaming.

On the face of it, the combination of a virtual reality headset and social media might seem like more of a dead-end move than Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow's marriage. But from a legacy and empire perspective, Oculus could be a defining gadget that ushers in what the movies have always depicted.

Experiences so real you can go on holiday from the comfort of your living room, advanced teaching systems, a real-life RoboCop, sight for the blind - Mark Zuckerberg could shape the future once again.

"Mobile is the platform of today, and now we're also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow," Facebook CEO and founder Zuckerberg said of the firm's big-money purchase. "Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate."

Zuckerberg goes on to say that he sees Oculus as a "communication platform", which has us envisioning a super-advanced Skype call where it feels like you are actually with your family in the same room. He goes on to mention studying in a classroom with other "students and teachers all over the world" from the comfort of your living room.


© PA Images / Jeff Chiu/AP

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees Oculus Rift as one of "the platforms of tomorrow"

So, what does the move mean for Oculus?

Zuckerberg's statement mentions gaming first, which means that Oculus will stay on its current course for the time being. That means more investment than ever, and access to a pool of talent that would perhaps be unavailable to Oculus on its own.

There are downsides. Oculus was born out of Kickstarter and has been embraced by the indie development scene, which is the polar opposite of the multi-billion dollar behemoth that is Mark Zuckerberg's social networking empire.

To prove the point, Minecraft creator Markus 'Notch' Persson basically said he was out, to quote Dragon's Den, having invested $10,000 at the initial Kickstarter stage.

Other developers have also shunned the move. BAFTA-winning indie game developer Dan Marshall commented: "I just feel how I would if McDonald's acquired my favorite local restaurant."

Gaming platforms rely on games. If developers turn their backs on Oculus Rift, it could crash and burn. While Facebook's financial might will likely secure triple-A publishers, the smaller guys might feel they have sold their soul. A case of one door closes, another one opens, then.

Markus ' Notch ' Persson

Minecraft creator Markus Persson is unhappy about Facebook's big-money buyout of Oculus

In a sense the move is a kick in the nuts for indie guys, but with Facebook's vast resources, Oculus may become a better product than it would've ever done on its own, such is the need for hefty investment into new technologies.

You could argue, then that the acquisition has given virtual reality the biggest chance to succeed. The technology has, after all, failed before albeit in a less market-ready form. Remember Nintendo Virtual Boy? No, because it was a complete flop.

Oculus product vice president Nate Mitchell said as much on Twitter: "We had two roadmaps: plausible and impossible. [The Facebook] partnership means the impossible roadmap just became 'very likely'."

Can Oculus succeed?

There is a nagging feeling that virtual reality tech is a dead-end in all but specialist scenarios. A surgeon may benefit from learning a complex operation without actually operating on a real human, for instance, but is it practical wearing a headset when playing games with friends at home? Do we even want to further distance ourselves from the real world and the virtual ones we can buy?

Time has proven that consumers are inherently lazy, and unlikely to shell out on a new technology that's inconvenient. Can you imagine yourself wearing a headset while browsing pictures of food and no make-up selfies? Probably not. It's difficult to imagine such a device pushing people from their video chats and phone calls to looking utterly ridiculous.

Military and educational uses are the most likely outcomes of virtual reality, and in some ways we're already exploring that avenue. Google Glass and its 'augmented reality' technology is not so different to Oculus.

One of the more interesting ideas involves looking around in movies, further blurring the lines between films and video games. Your trip to the cinema would never be the same again.

Should we have seen this acquisition coming?

Strangely, there was a warning about a month ago, when a Reddit user claimed that a friend of his saw Mark Zuckerberg in a lift on his way down to where the Oculus magic happens. At the time, he was laughed at, but it turns out that threewolfmtn was onto something after all.

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