Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

A very brief history of Facebook's involvement with Oculus and how this has shaped up, just from quickly searching HN previous posts:

- (2014) Facebook acquires Oculus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469115, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469237

- (2016) Oculus's privacy policy sparks concern: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410809

Oculus responds to privacy concerns about user tracking (https://uploadvr.com/facebook-oculus-privacy/) saying

> Facebook owns Oculus and helps run some Oculus services, such as elements of our infrastructure, but we’re not sharing information with Facebook at this time. We don’t have advertising yet and Facebook is not using Oculus data for advertising – though these are things we may consider in the future.

- (2019) If logged into Facebook, Oculus data may be used for ads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21770752

From their official statement:

> If you choose not to log into Facebook on Oculus, we won’t share data with Facebook to allow third parties to target advertisements to you based on your use of the Oculus Platform.

- (2020): Facebook accounts are now required.

None of this is particularly surprising, lots of people (even in the press) were calling out how this was going to evolve. But it's still interesting to look back 6 years and see what the initial reactions were and what people were most concerned about.

The takeaways:

- data silos are always temporary

- companies think on a larger timeline than just 2 years in advance

- this kind of thing nearly always gets executed as a slow boil. Facebook didn't buy Oculus and immediately require an account and start advertising to users. But I don't believe for one second that Mark wasn't thinking it at the time.

But did Facebook add any value (i.e. engineering money/hours) to improve the device? What you've listed are all negatives, but there have to be at least a few positives to come out of it.

there have to be at least a few positives to come out of it.

Why does this have to be true at all? Let bad things be bad, and deal with them. Don't try to rationalize away problems.

I suppose.

But at the same time, for any new users who value their own privacy the device is now pretty useless, and for any existing users who value their privacy but also want to be up-to-date and get new features, they're also probably going to be locked out in future updates.

So you kind of have to excuse them for focusing on the negatives, because they don't get to enjoy the positives. It's kind of a moot point for them what Facebook brought to the table.

This is always the concern with these kinds of purchases, and I think this was a big part of the concern back in 2014. I was never worried that Facebook wouldn't invest in Oculus, as a consumer I was worried that it would ruin the Oculus ecosystem and shove dystopian adware onto the devices.

The vast majority of those users likely also have a Facebook, Instagram, and/or Whatsapp account.

Without Facebook's funding, none of the recent advancements are likely to exist in the first place. Valve hasn't done it, HTC hasn't done it, Sony hasn't done it. Because it is hard, expensive, and a money losing endeavor (for the forseeable future).

To be clear, I am strongly against the requirement, but am glad the product exists.

I'm not saying there aren't positives, I'm saying that it's understandable why users who now need to choose between a peripheral and their privacy are having a hard time focusing on those positives.

I'm also not too cynical about the market, because thankfully there are multiple companies in this space who are making progress. So Facebook will trash Oculus and things will stink for a while.

Eventually somebody else will come along and offer the same functionality without feeling the need to create a user-hostile platform out of a peripheral. Eventually the Linux support will improve. Eventually some community group will take over WebVR and we'll get a general platform instead of a bunch of separate stores designed to increase user lock-in. Eventually the games will be disassociated from the peripherals. Eventually, we'll get what we want and the space will improve. And Facebook's early efforts to improve the raw tech will be a part of that story.

But in the meantime, for the people who were predicting what Facebook was going to do from the moment Oculus was acquired -- I think it's reasonable to step back and let them say, "we told you so."

Sure there are, for Facebook shareholders.

> But did Facebook add any value (i.e. engineering money/hours) to improve the device? What you've listed are all negatives, but there have to be at least a few positives to come out of it.

Can't help but think of this comic: https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

I think it's closer to 'What did the Romans do for us? Besides the roads, clean water, ...'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xad5Rl0N2E

Without Facebook's capital and Zuckerberg's commitment to VR, I doubt the Quest would exist. That project was announced in 2016 and was likely in development for a couple of years before that. Still it took until mid-2019 to be released to the public. IIRC, Carmack said that development on the Go was started after the Quest, yet the Go went to market a year sooner. I can only imagine what kind of hell it was to get a 2016 phone SoC to do VR with 6DOF inside-out tracking.

Did they really need Facebook's capital? The market was absolutely flooded with VC money, Magic Leap raised almost $3B since then.

and did nothing, Oculus didn't just need money, but a competent team behind it.

This isn't correct. There were/are a lot of inside out VR headsets. Oculus just happens to have a brand, a solid marketing presence, a solid product, the appearance of longevity etc.

Facebook might have helped but from a purely technical perspective, Facebook wasn't the only path.

What standalone 6DOF headset with 6DOF controllers existed in the market in 2019 besides the Quest? Or now? I certainly can’t think of one?

How about Pico’s line of devices?

https://www.pico-interactive.com/us/neo2.html

“ Neo 2/Neo 2 Eye is available for businesses only. Please fill out this form if you are interested in ordering the Neo 2/Neo 2 Eye and we will get back to you once stock is available.”

Ah, didn’t see that bit, but at least we know the tech exists beyond Oculus’ labs.

The Lenovo Mirage Solo had 6DOF tracking with the Daydream controller. It had an experimental 6DOF controller add on but Google killed Daydream before that shipped. Inside out PC headsets exist with the camera setup for 6DOF inside out.

Currently the Quest is the only Android based (and thus fully stand alone) headset that's wasn't Daydream branded and wasn't killed when Google mothballed their VR support. There's less now then there were, or would have been if Google stuck with it.

sorry but no, what Oculus has is a team of strong engineers

Lenovo did it before the Go released (or about the same). It was kind of gimped because they went with the Daydream controller instead of full controllers but the headset itself was roomscale VR. It was also bigger and not as comfortable but worked on a previous gen SOC to the Quest. Check out the Lenovo Mirage Solo.

Since it only had two front-facing cameras, the Mirage Solo would have required extra hardware to track any controllers. Also I don't think there was ever an app for it that let you walk two steps away from the origin. The only truly room scale thing I saw was a demo written by some developers. They had to put the headset in dev mode and disable a bunch of safety mechanisms. I wonder if this limitation was imposed to minimize drift.

I developed on it and the limitation was mostly self imposed for safety/perf reasons. Its much easier to draw a consistent roomscale boundary on the Quest with the 6DOF controller. Without that its a real UX problem. Even the Quest is constantly asking to redraw the boundary. It was one of two SOC generations (as well as VR SDK gens) earlier and it was quite hard to build out a full room without a lot of perspective tricks.

There was an experimental add on for 6DOF controllers https://developers.google.com/vr/experimental/6dof-controlle...

It really wasn't a fundamental technical leap to go from the Mirage to a Quest. The Quest feels like a (well thought out) iteration instead of a revolution compared to the Mirage Solo.

Tracking controllers in 6DOF from headset cameras is the hardest part. Nobody has yet replicated this for a stand-alone headset.

Why do you say its the hardest part? Hand gesture tracking is quite hard, but tracking IR LEDs on a controller is much easier than tracking head motion as long as you have the camera setup to keep them in view.

Actually, not really. Inside out tracking runs on one core of my ancient AMD FX 6350 well enough. It was very doable.

Your ancient desktop CPU is powerful compared to Snapdragon 835 on Oculus Quest.

My ancient CPU is actually slower corewise than a Snapdragon 835. It's embarrassingly slow, about as fast as the first i5, if that. The snapdragon 835 is almost twice as fast as it corewise, actually.

Still outperforming on most of benchmarks. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/2817815 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/3344943

Of course you first need to fatten an animal before you slaughter it.

Those positives turn to negatives if you care about privacy - they help Oculus muscle privacy-respecting alternatives out of the market.

I think Facebook worked as a king maker, giving Oculus enough financial backing to be a trusted (ironic) platform. Were they the only option? No idea.

I don't have the financials, but I expect that after spending $2 billion for the acquisition, they didn't live them alone.

One notable thing is that Oculus hired Michael Abrash just following the announcement of the acquisition. With John Carmack, who was already there, they are among the most (if not the most) prominent developers in the field. Even though Carmack stepped down as a CTO, both are still there. I have stopped following VR news but Oculus had pretty nice prototypes a few years ago which combined eye tracking, foveated rendering and varifocal lenses, all addressing fundamental problems with the current generation of headsets.

Also, even though I am not sure about Facebook involvement, they financed some of the best VR games at the time. Lone Echo is one of them. Ready At Dawn, the developer is now part of Oculus Studio, a branch of Oculus focused on making VR content. Note that having good VR content is extremely important, even more so than the devices themselves. I mean, you are not going to spend hundreds of dollars just to slash cubes, or maybe you do, can't blame you ;)

That's one side of the story, the Quest wouldn't exist without Facebook

Sure, it'd be called something different and would be made by someone else. It's not like FB started Oculus from scratch. Worst case it would've just taken a little longer while some other player with the capital got around to being interested.

The use case drove the tech, not the company, and so far the tech is being used for exactly what it was used for before FB bought it (just better as computers, motion sensors, and cameras got better). There was nothing transformative there.

I don't think FB deserves any credit other than being in the right place at the right time. Now they're in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Props for wireless 6DOF before anyone else, and I love my Quest, but now that the trail is blazed and they aren't being maintaining their (yes, their--Palmer worked for them too) promises to the community, they can sit down.

> The use case drove the tech

Eh. The money drove the tech - Facebook can afford to dump money into Oculus despite there being very little use cases or consumer appetite for it.

> Sure, it'd be called something different and would be made by someone else

interestingly you can say that about pretty much anything, but at some point someone need to work on it for "it" to happen.

Both can be true.

It can be true that Facebook heavily invested into the Quest and it can be true that their user-hostile moves over the past 6 years were all utterly predictable, even though company heads ran around telling their critics that they were being unreasonable and paranoid.

This is true for many tech products and industries.

Apple and Google have both invested huge amounts of money and resources into building voice assistants into general consumer services. They deserve credit for that. They also deserve criticism for stifling the markets around voice assistants, building walled gardens that hamper innovation in the space, and for general privacy violations along the way. And it is, once again, completely predictable what the end goals are for companies like Google in regards to voice assistants and augmented reality -- regardless of what their company spokespeople might be saying today.

It can be true that Chrome unambiguously moved the web forward as a platform, and that without Google's involvement the modern web would not have the potential that it has today. And it can simultaneously be true that Google's long-term corporate vision for the web is toxic, and that there are serious concerns to be had about Chrome continuing to maintain a dominant browser position.

The point is, I don't think acknowledging Facebook's investment in the Oculus means that it's good to ignore the obvious downsides of their involvement. I think it's good to look at what people were worried would happen, and to see that it did happen. That doesn't mean you need to disregard Facebook's investment, and it doesn't mean that Oculus shouldn't exist -- it's just giving you a broader perspective that sometimes these positive investments also come with serious tradeoffs that aren't always acknowledged up-front.

I don't understand what value FB gets from VR device data. I have never understood the acquisition, but that point in particular has never been clear.

Or is it just that the end goal is to advertise in VR, and the acquisition was a grasp at a dystopian daydream?

My guess is elevated application running on the PC. If they could push a desktop facebook client with admin permissions, they would in a heartbeat

VR has the potential to reveal more about you than normal browsing history. The device knows what you are looking at (sometimes including eye tracking) and for how long. This is extremely valuable.

Fuck. Forgot eye tracking. How long you look at an ad, Where you look on the ad.

Neuro-marketing that scales. Yummy.

Reminds me of Ready Player One, where the big bad gloated over the possibility of filling up to 70% of the visual field with ads, before the user collapses in epilepsy.

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