> I don't know why Facebook simply doesn't ante up and steal some of the talent away

To what end though? Say they could spend $10 million and quadruple the resolution, halve the price, and reduce the barf factor of a Rift v2 in a year. What then?

They would probably be better off funding a bunch of people to try to find something compelling to do with the current generation of hardware. It's cool for some types of games, but a market that's a subset of a subset isn't going to set the world on fire. It's easy to come up with a cool demo and hard to come up with a good application.