Despite being the company’s chief technology officer and devout programmer, John Carmack has quickly become the face of Oculus VR, the startup behind the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and new addition to the Facebook mothership. If you’ve been wondering what his perspective is on recent events, you only have to go as far as his Twitter timeline to find out.
Today, Carmack took the time to fire out a few short thoughts via Twitter now that “everyone has had some to digest the FB deal”. Essentially, he’s happy to read anything opponents of the acquisition have to say, as long as it’s “coherent”. He also believes the presence of Facebook will be “positive”:
(2/3) Much of the ranting has been emotional or tribal, but I am interested in reading coherent viewpoints about objective outcomes.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) March 28, 2014
(3/3) What are the hazards? What should be done to guard against them? What are the tests for failure? Blog and I’ll read.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) March 28, 2014
That said, he has no problem with the company getting involved if things start going awry:
I would expect Facebook to not exert any overt control over Oculus unless Oculus fumbles badly a few times, at which point they SHOULD.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) March 28, 2014
Carmack also mentions that Facebook will help Oculus — and VR technology in general — avoid “several embarrassing scaling crisis [sic]”.
Of course, you’d hardly expect Carmack to be crapping on the deal, but he’s a pretty forthright guy and I’m sure he only has the technology’s best interests at heart. Hopefully Facebook does too.
Image: Oculus VR
Comments
6 responses to “Oculus VR’s John Carmack Speaks On Facebook Deal… Via Twitter”
I’ll take this with a pinch of salt just like I did Cliff Bleszinski’s comments considering he’s a share holder in OR. These people are hardly going to say the deal’s bad for the company so until I hear what other people have to say then my judgement on the deal will remain on the skeptical side of things. What they should be concerned about is things like Minecraft being pulled from the platform. If developers are going to be put off by the presence of Facebook then OR will have no content and simply fail, and Cliff starting a schoolyard name-calling fight over it really isn’t going to help things.
As it is, Facebook shares dropped by 5% as a result of the deal, I don’t know about yesterday’s trading, but to me that spells that they have a lot of work to do to convince people about the Oculus Rift’s future and the direction it will take
On the other hand, companies with Oculus in their name experienced massive increases. Now granted these are from investors who don’t take the time to make sure they’re investing in the right company, but I think this shows the market thinks it’s a dubious move from facebook, but a great move for oculus.
Or you could believe that using the stock market to infer the wisdom of decisions is about as good as using a random number generator. That wouldn’t surprise me.
Eh, Bleszinski’s a whole different bag of fish kettles to Carmack, since he was pretty much purely an investor rather than someone actually working on it. And jumping ship from their old job to do so too.
well I can think of a whole heap of mental issues with delving into a virtua space and not exiting for weeks on end… wait… its just a monitor on your eyes 🙂
I’m a bit sick of the whole subject and especially the term “VR”. Just like it has for the past 30 years, it is being applied incorrectly. Oculus is an enhanced visual projector. Nothing more. Virtual Reality is putting me in a digital world where I can not just see by turning my head, but where I can move, interact and listen to the world like it was real. Without some ridiculous full body rig, the only way that will happen is when tech can tap into our brains and take over the input to trick us. Strapping on goggles are a very small first step.
Video games are already virtual reality. You can choose your own definition for VR but everyone else is happy with how it already is.