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Comment by dkarapetyan | Hacker News Reader

This is just nerd candy right? I mean facebook is in the same business as google when it comes to what the business model is based on. Get people to pull levers in a virtual casino and sell the resulting statistics to advertisers. The surprising thing is that I think it actually works. New graduates will be lining up to work on projects like this and then end up debugging shitty PHP.

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I work on similar projects at Google, so I can say with certainty that this is not just about candy. YouTube makes up a sizable portion of Google's business. Providing 360 capture devices like this (ours is called Jump) allows people to create new content for YouTube, which can then be monetized.

Building cool VR hardware and software is not as distant from Google's and Facebook's core businesses as you believe. Watching 360 videos with 3D audio isn't necessarily the height of human experience, but it's a far cry from "pulling levers in a virtual casino".

And how many people work on that project? 10? 100? 200 people?

Many, and many more on similarly interesting projects. All I can say is that ~nobody writes PHP :)

Lucky then.

If you get enough nerd candy you can evolve them.

> This is just nerd candy right?

I take it that you haven't seen stereoscopic VR video? Although VR is enthusiast-grade right now the excitement surrounding it is by no means exaggerated, whatsoever. I strongly recommend attending a VR roadshow.

Is it virtual casino in your mind first? My first thought is virtual porn.

I was thinking of rats in a maze, running around and pulling levers to get pellets. In the human case I guess the pellet is dopamine or some other neurotransmitter that makes you feel good and is potentially the root cause of compulsive behavior that facebook and google are able to capitalize on.

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