Fool me, this is real good shit ! [the VR thread]

[merman]

It's obvious - 3D adverts constantly in your face. Ad agencies creaming their panties at the thought of a "captive" market with the ease of harvesting souls/data that Facebook brings.

[Dio]

That's an extraordinarily myopic view.

You can't build a market via an unpleasant experience. You have to give people what they want.

The worst Facebook could impose in the short to medium term (without it being counterproductive and killing the device and the investment dead) is to require Facebook integration as part of the SDK - but the official pronouncements say that won't happen, and you will know whether or not it's required before you buy. Even that would be a risk, because it would push a few people away, and when you're trying to go critical you need every neutron you have to hand.

[snaff]

At least it wasn't Microsoft.

[Baggypants]

That's an extraordinarily myopic view.

You can't build a market via an unpleasant experience. You have to give people what they want.

Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, Ryanair, and the Britannia Hotels chain would seem to disagree. It would appear all people want is for free or cheap things and you can make it unpleasant as you like.

[Dio]

You might, but I doubt most people who use Facebook or Youtube regularly would regard it as an unpleasant experience.

I'll give you Ryanair, but they're not trying to draw people in for the sake of being there, the point is to offer a service people already want more cheaply. Nobody flies Ryanair because they like flying Ryanair. Nobody takes a quick lap around Ireland and then lands back at Dublin. They fly it because they want to go somewhere and they'll tolerate a couple of hours of mild discomfort to get there.

[pogo]

That's an extraordinarily myopic view.

You can't build a market via an unpleasant experience. You have to give people what they want.

The worst Facebook could impose in the short to medium term (without it being counterproductive and killing the device and the investment dead) is to require Facebook integration as part of the SDK - but the official pronouncements say that won't happen,

They've said they have 'no plans'. But plans change all the time. I don't know what the long term future of it is but I'm sure it's not just a straight technology investment as that makes no sense.

Something I read recently suggested that FB thinks VR is the next big platform. And having tried and failed to introduce their own phone platform they don't want that to happen again: they don't want to be 'just another app' so other companies get to run the ID services, social services, payment services, advertising services as happens on phones. Their share price and his valuation is based on them being much more than just another chat/blog app.

I think Youtube's a good example. Everyone thought it was going fine, and Google was getting a lot out of it: advertising, leveraging their servers and bandwidth, a technology showcase for HTML5, VP8, Chrome. Then without warning you need a G+ account to use it. Google have been doing a lot of this, turning Youtube users, Gmail account holders and others into G+ members without their asking, sometimes without their knowledge.

So it could go the same way. Invest in the technology for a few years then as soon as it takes off bolt on an unnecessary Facebook requirement. Or requirements as you can require users to use FB to login; require game makers to manage games through FB; provide a launcher/OS which is also a launcher for FB services and conduit for FB adverts; do all billing through Facebook with a new version of Facebook Credits.

It only makes sense if there are synergies between Facebook's core business and this. If they're totally separate and stay separate Facebook would not have spent money on them, especially not so much money.

[gravy]

Facebook's core business can and will pivot as the world changes. Or they'll die.

See also Google.

[Cloudane]

"Stay the same, stay how you are, we'll just give you $2bn because we're nice like that"
Yep. Lovely people, Facebook.

You can't build a market via an unpleasant experience. You have to give people what they want.

Facebook is (as well as Google) very good at giving people what they want and getting what they want (big data) as subtly as possible. Look at something like Farmville - it's shiny, it presses all the right buttons to make people feel good and addicted, it makes people get all warm fuzzy social collaborative feelings with their friends... while the real farming goes on underneath.

[Jimaroid]

Getting Facebook to where it is today has seen some of the biggest and most impressive software engineering tasks in history, tasks which they've managed to execute really well at a humanly incomprehensible scale and speed. They've now put some of that experience, capability and capital behind one of the world's best programmers in the name of technology advancement.

So what's the problem with that? Good things are going to happen.

This is exactly what Rift needed to take it from nerdy niche product to something potentially revolutionary and mass market. And this sort of investment buyout has always been their aim irrespective of what people think they were doing.

People have been talking about the latest "next-gen" of consoles being the last of their ilk and I think Facebook has just set their marker down for the the real next generation. This is their "going to the moon in this decade" moment and we might all get to be there with them thanks to some fancy goggles.

Cool shit.

[gumboot]

See also Google.

Google is _still_ a search engine company and not much else. If search dried up or became easy they'd be in a lot of trouble.

[gumboot]

I'm not at all certain it will work well for that sort of thing though. Stereo 360 degrees is all very well but what about translational movement?

Those aren't different. When you turn your head your eyeballs move. You can't even do stereo 360 if you can't handle translation.

It'll be interesting to see what technology comes out of trying to fix that. Approximation fails hopelessly all too often, and stereo isn't actually all that relevant for most things; but because of the nature of marketing people are going to be stuck trying to solve an [almost] irrelevant problem for artificial cases which exist only to demonstrate that the technology is present.

trying to drink beer without being able to see either their glass or their hand or what their mates are doing.

There's question answered. Does OR have a camera? Evidently not.


Anyway.... why's nobody pushing the theory that they bought the technology for their developers to replace the massive monitors and headphones that they use in their open-plan acoustically-un-damped office?

[Jimaroid]

Google is _still_ a search engine company and not much else. If search dried up or became easy they'd be in a lot of trouble.

Google are an advertising company. One of their many advertising channels just happens to be a search engine.

And I have no way of backing up this speculation but I wouldn't be surprised if youtube was now a bigger channel than search is.

[pogo]

Google's an advertising company now: that's where their value is, that's where they make their money. Everything else (search, phones, GMail, maps, Glass) is a platform for those adverts and a way of getting more information out of users (from their search history, physical location, video watching habits, e-mail contacts and contents) for targeting adverts.

Facebook's Is trying to do something similar. Their problem is they only really have one platform, Facebook itself. Depending on your view they're either at the limit of how much advertising FB will bear or well past that limit, while they can't keep growing users indefinitely. But their stock valuation (P/E ratio of 100!) only make sense if they can keep growing revenue rapidly.

Which is why another platform they can control is so valuable. They tried it with phones but failed pretty miserably, and there aren't any other new platforms they can invest in. It's still unclear how big or popular VR will be but if it takes off FB want to dominate it.

[Dio]

There's question answered. Does OR have a camera? Evidently not.

I've been thinking for ages this would be a really good thing, although on reflection since you can't put them at the same place the users' eyes are I'm not sure if the image would actually be usable for much.

That said, even not usable for e.g. looking at your hands a 'glance into the real world' button seems a reasonable thing.

[Dio]

Google's an advertising company now: that's where their value is, that's where they make their money. Everything else (search, phones, GMail, maps, Glass) is a platform for those adverts and a way of getting more information out of users (from their search history, physical location, video watching habits, e-mail contacts and contents) for targeting adverts.

That's not so much the case for Google Play, at least, which is actually selling things to people. But it's a pretty small part of Google.