I was so optimistic about VR technology when the oculus cv1 (edit: dev kit actually, cv1 was already fb as pointed out below) came out. Now that facebook owns it, I can't find that same optimism.
This looks like a sweet piece of tech, but it feels like these big tech companies have too many priorities that come before the end user: investors, the companies own ambitions, governments/politics. If the product decisions they make happen to benefit us, it's only because those other considerations were met first.
I think the best thing to happen would be for FB to solve all the really hard and expensive tech problems, and then go tits up. Then a smaller company that can actually put the user first can step in and reproduce the tech for cheap.
Just FYI, that's a misremembering that accidentally looks like a bad faith argument. The Oculus CV1 was released two years after the acquisition.
The price point and subsequent price drops were only made possible by Facebook making some important hires for the production engineering and being able to scale the processes to lower component and manufacturing costs.
For better and worse, the CV1 on day one had a meaningful amount of Facebook software and hardware engineering in it.
Good point, I did remember that wrong. I should have said the dev kit. I remember now that I begrudgingly bought cv1 from facebook because I wanted the tech badly enough to hold my nose.
I don't mean to disparage any of the folks at fb that contributed or their work. I just don't think that companies like fb are capable of putting the user's needs first, as much as many individuals inside the company probably would like to.
This looks like a sweet piece of tech, but it feels like these big tech companies have too many priorities that come before the end user: investors, the companies own ambitions, governments/politics. If the product decisions they make happen to benefit us, it's only because those other considerations were met first.
I think the best thing to happen would be for FB to solve all the really hard and expensive tech problems, and then go tits up. Then a smaller company that can actually put the user first can step in and reproduce the tech for cheap.