Jury hands victory to Facebook and Oculus VR founder in Rift ownership trial
lawstreetmedia.com
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I hadn't even heard about the TFT chapter but the more broadly reported one was the saga with Carmack / Palmer / Zenimax eg ->
- Zenimax bought ID software for >$100m(1) on June 24, 2009.
- Carmack signed up with Zenimax for an earn-out / golden-handcuffs agreement that ended in June of 2013.
- Carmack was enthralled with VR.
- Carmack found Palmer via an internet forum, reached out to get a rift to try.
- Carmack tinkered with the Rift, adding sensors, building calibration, etc. while on the clock / using hardware from zenimax.
- Carmack brought a prototype of the Rift working on Doom 3 to E3 with him providing Oculus with their early press.
- Zenimax realized the extent to which Carmack was enabling Oculus and worked to negotiate equity with Brendan Iribe.
- Oculus sent Zenimax a proposal to discuss a partnership Sept 21, 2012 but never followed up / followed through.
- Carmack quit Zenimax the day his contract was up in June 2013, joined Oculus as CTO a few months later and took his 5 best guys with him.
- FB bought Oculus March 2014, Zenmix got pissed and sued.
From my memory of the early rift I am positive that outside of Palmer it was Carmack's genius that made this viable and Carmack's video lent credibility to the campaign.
No major comment here just a wild history, not unusual for breakthrough & derivative technology!
(1) https://www.scribd.com/document/274211118/Judge-denies-Faceb...
(2) http://www.gamespot.com/articles/zenimax-raised-105-million-...
My opinion on this, completely irrespective of the actual terms and laws:
Zenimax doesn't deserve anything.
But anyone who funded the original Kickstarter does (I was not one of those people). Anyone who put $200+ into that Kickstarter deserved some sort of payout. I feel like, at the very least, they should get free Oculus headsets for life.
It's hard to put a number on the total value created by that initial Kickstarter funding if it had been treated as an actual investment, but I'd be willing to bet that it's already in the billions, and will only grow.
Is there something different about this kickstarter than most others? Did they offer ownership? Because it sounds like you think you bought something they don't think they sold.
Just because you compliment my son on his lemonade stand and tell him you believe in him and buy a lemonade doesn't entitle you to a share of his eventual billion dollar lemonade empire.
In all seriousness, it doesn't sound all that more far fetched than someone deciding they want to bring VR to the masses, starting a kickstarter, and then fast forward a few years and it's a large division of Facebook.
We got the headset that we paid for, and we also got the next dev headset after that for free. I definitely feel like I got my money's worth from it.
I then switched for a Vive for my first retail headset, but I've since switched to Quest 2. Even though it shouldn't be better, the wireless functionality and ability to play games without a computer make it better than the original Vive. I'll likely be upgrading to whatever is next in the Oculus lineup.
I backed VR because I've always loved the idea of VR and AR, and desperately wanted it to take off. Palmer and Carmack did a great job of making that happen, and even though I don't like Palmer's politics, I'm very thankful that he got this ball rolling. If I had only gotten that first headset, I'd still feel like I totally got my money's worth. But the continued and increased presence of VR is the real payout for me.
My wife also has a Quest 2 now and we often play multiplayer games together, like Walkabout Minigolf. It's just amazing.
I agree but you'll have to blame the SEC for that. I'm sure Oculus and Kickstarter would have loved to sell equity to the public, and if they did then every backer would have made thousands of dollars on the deal. But the SEC's rules didn't allow equity crowdfunding at the time and they still impose limits that make it basically infeasible.
The 2000 dual-CPU Power Mac G4 would be worth a million now.
I would find it hard to believe that Zenimax was unaware of what was going on.
Also, you are not always in control of who your corporate overlords will be. They can be decent, then sell, then new owners are not cool. Happens all the time.
I think it’s fair to call John Carmack a visionary who has moved his industry forward multiple times. I think while some investors and business owners did not benefit (as much as they could have) from his work, the rest of the gaming world absolutely did.
Life hasn't turned out too bad for Carmack.
Maybe he sees those meetings, depositions, and what not as part of the price of that success.
He is one of the very few people in the industry (not just gaming, but technology in general) who manages to move the entire industries forward not once, but many times, and consistently so. All while remaining true to himself, caring about what he thinks matters the most, and not jumping head deep into corporate games just for the sake of it.
Maybe I am fanboying a bit here, but after reading Masters of Doom (a biographical piece on the early life of both Johns [Carmack and Romero], how they started ID Software together, and how it all turned out; heavily recommended for everyone here), it feels like I am experiencing an even more exciting sequel to it happening in real life in front of my eyes.
See details in this comment here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28871907
Oculus is a company that started shady and just gets shadier. They have a cheap good product but I won't support them. That doesn't even get into purchasing third party exclusives during their launch to keep them away from the competition, something that wasn't really a thing on PC at that point.
They both have the exact same resolution OLED displays with a butterfly mechanism to adjust the IPD and fresnel lenses. They both use IMU’s as the primary tracking system with external components used for drift correction.
They both use optical tracking (except Vive is inside-out and Rift is outside-in.)
They both have incredibly similar software, with a very minor tweak needed to fully translate all the Rift calls to work completely on Vive.
The original Rift and Vive are very, very similar headsets. The most different thing about them is their controllers.
The question will be what changed from the CV1 to the Rift, but I don't think valve is going to sue oculus either way. This is just to expand the understanding of how slimy a company oculus was even before it was acquired by facebook.
I would say Alan Yates and Ben Krasnow are pretty credible.
What secret knowledge of the steam sight headset do you have?
Lighthouse is nearly identical to outside-in camera tracking, with the one wrinkle being that the photons flow in the opposite direction. Instead of a fixed, designed constellation of point-like emitters on the headset, you have a constellation of point-like detectors. Instead of a stationary grid detector, you have a stationary grid emitter. But otherwise, the data is practically the same, the math is all the same, the calibrations are all the same, and the whole system doesn't work without those stationary, external reference points.
Similarly, ray tracing doesn't simulate photons leaving light sources, bouncing off surfaces, and arriving at a camera sensor. The simulation is of anti-photons, leaving the camera, bouncing off surfaces, and seeing what lights they hit. It's like conventional current actually being the opposite direction of electron flow. The systems can run forwards or backwards and get the same answer.
Actually inside-out tracking does a completely different thing. The acronym "SLAM" stands for "simultaneous locating and mapping". It's building up a coherent, consistent model of the world around it. It adapts to new surroundings.
Bump a Lighthouse emitter or CV1 camera out of position and everything stops working because the data no longer makes sense. Designing a Lighthouse headset or controller requires given the tracking code a 3D model of the position of all the detectors.
But move the furniture around in a room and SLAM catches up in a few seconds. SLAM also doesn't care about the shape of thing you're tracking. Hell, it really doesn't care all that much about the quality of the camera feed, other than being relatively high framerate and not very noisy.
On the oculus system the sensors were the external cameras, and the beacons were the LEDs on the devices.
My experience with both was that the oculus system did really well in a seated system but for room scale games the lighthouse system does better, especially when the controllers go behind you like in the valve archery game.
I haven't bought an oculus system since the DK2 so not sure how sophisticated it is now.
You need it to be this way, because the IMUs can run at fairly high frequencies (200 - 1000Hz), which is (in part) keeps latency low. The data paths and processing needed for the reference frame corrections are so complex that they can't be run anywhere near as fast. It's why the hand tracking on the Quest is so high-latency: there's no IMU on your hand.
And it's not "algorithm magic". It's mostly just Kalman Filtering.
Windows MR (both VR headsets and the HoloLens), Magic Leap, Vive Focus, Pico Neo, and the upcoming Linx all use inside-out cameras, all with their own implementations. HTC Vive, Vive Pro, Vive Cosmos, Valve Index, Varjo XR-3 and VR-3, and PiMax headsets are the only ones using outside-in tracking anymore, and they're all using specifically Lighthouse.
First of all, you just don't really do that very often. People have rotator cuffs and elbows that make any action in those regions fairly uncomfortable.
Second, the all current VR systems primarily use inertial tracking. The visual tracking is only there to correct for drift out of the reference frame. Whether it's Lighthouse or Rift CV1 outside-in cameras or inside-out cameras on every other system, you can put your hands in the sensor blind spot for several seconds before it becomes a problem.
99% of the time, you're working with your hands in front of you. Lighthouse doesn't care about your hands in relation to your body. But it does care about your body in relation to the base stations. Lighthouse's blind spots are constantly changing over the course of your play session. Quest's are always in the same spot.
So many times I've found myself in a corner on the opposite axis of my base stations and my own body is blocking my controllers' view of the base stations. When that happens, you have to have enough awareness of what is going on to understand why your hands start slowly floating away while you are trying to work on something, having forgotten your orientation in the real world room. It's literally immersion breaking.
"Inside-out cameras can't track behind your head" is really not the problem that your random Valve fanboy on Reddit makes it out to be.
The vive was developed in a hurry once valve realized Oculus' betrayal and the very real chance that the VR renaissance would be primarily owned by facebook and oculus' closed garden.
It's an interesting idea at half its price, maybe.
Facebook gaining control of mass VR is basically why I feel pretty bearish about VR in general. If there's any company that can turn it into an anti consumer ad driven experience that experiments on you, its facebook.
Hopefully valve continues to put out competing hardware even if its niche for people willing to pay for a premium experience. The main issue right now is, as you say video card availability and prices.
Then there's a whole other tangled story involving Michael Abrash and his comitatus at Valve, Palmer and the original Oculus guys, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, other teams at Valve that also got excited about VR or AR at different stages, and Valve's office politics and internal decision-making.
EDIT: watered down some adverbs.
I'm positive of this. Palmer spotted an opportunity to use phone screens + MEMS sensors for cheap VR and garnered public support for his prototype by presenting it as an open source gadget.
Carmack thought it was cool, and brought his name, time, resources, business acumen and legendary development skills, got it running Doom 3. Next thing you know they have a million dollar Kickstarter and are pulling in massive rounds of funding.
Isn't that a fairly standard way that startups get started?
It's hard to feel bad for Zenimax here, they had opportunities and generational talents and wasted them.
The fact they sued once they found out FB was involved, just makes it seem like they suddenly realized what Carmack was working on and could've delivered for them, and now that big money was involved, they panicked and had to slow the company down somehow.
I'd love to know what the actual timeframe is from the time Carmack left to the time Zenimax sued. It just seems so suspect the timetable and reeks of desperation of a company who discovered too late what they had all along and let go for nothing.
According to Palmer Luckey there were tech reporters in the courtroom as the verdict was read, but they chose not to publish articles about it, presumably because something bad happening to Luckey/Oculus/Facebook would have been news, but something good doesn't fit the narrative. https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1452753156895506433
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/ex-facebook-vr-founder-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joeparlock/2020/06/16/lawsuit-a...
They literally have tech journalists in courtroom for the outcome. But if it's not anti-facebook no coverage.
It is a bit weird.
Forbes "sites" are just glorified blogs. They reflect Forbes to the same extent that some random Blogger blog reflects Google/Alphabet.
> They literally have tech journalists in courtroom for the outcome. But if it's not anti-facebook no coverage.
Facebook losing would be an interesting result that may carry repercussions. Facebook winning is.. business as usual.
> It is a bit weird.
Meh, personally this is the first time I've heard of this debacle at all, and neither of the sources you mentioned are particularly prominent either.
And even then, those articles were over a year ago. Priorities and interests change over time.
In my experience, at the conclusion of a story, people never link to their previous comments that turn out to be incorrect or off-base, offering a mea culpa.
I wonder if you’re seeing is that sites have audiences that aren’t split 50/50 on potentially controversial subjects?
Yeah, a nobody (in the public's mind) making false accusations is not a story worth telling.
Facebook stealing billions worth of IP is.
That's obvious so far, isn't it?
Though you are right with news reporting giving unproven accusations and in-process trials far too much weight. This is not just happening with 'hated' entities like Facebook, but also publicly unknown individuals. It clearly can convey a distorted picture of the facts.
It really seems like the folks who are upset at the lack of coverage are so emotionally invested in this trial for whatever reason that they can't see the truth that there's no reason to care about it outside of the personal feelings of the celebrities involved. At least with SCO v IBM, and Oracle v Google, the rulings could, and did, have significant impacts on how regular tech folks went about their careers.
But if you cover before trial, it's in public's best interest you cover the outcome.
An analogy is some news outlet covering a murder trial and presenting the suspect as a ruthless criminal. By your logic, news should not cover if the criminal case turns out baseless... does that sound good to you?
That's why
The reason that this gets covered before is that it sounds like juicy gossip. Turns out the gossip isn't "true" enough to get an interesting court result. So it's not really news. Those articles are just gossip.n the words of Dennis Nedry, nobody cares.
The intersection of people who think that FB is evil because of IP theft in the occulus thing but who don't also just come to this conclusion from all the other FB coverage of their non-action to stop genocides (random example), is the empty set.
Ridiculous.
"Someone makes intense claim regarding IP law theft": interesting! Maybe it's true? If it's true, that is interesting in itself! It's pure palace intrigue with basically no important consequences (even if Palmer Lucky were to lose all his money he would end up being fine in the way that everyone above a certain strata ends up only falling up).
"Turns out the claim is not accepted by the courts": given that this didn't really matter for anyone beyond the two people, not interesting!
The important aspect here being this is like a dispute around money with really no consequences. Of course doesn't help that the people involved are not exactly super friendly. Palace intrigue. Fun to read about and talk about! Not important
Their job is to report the news, not the olds.
There was coverage of the lawsuit filed against FB & Co. They got the bad press. Then once the lawsuit was ruled in their favor, there was no coverage. Whereas, if they lost, you bet there would be coverage.
"Pop culture figure accused of rape by fan!!" -> front page headlines.
"Pop culture figure acquitted" -> not news.
This I disagree with, almost every story I have had in-depth knowledge of has been very misleading. This is partially laziness, but mostly due to wanting to present a coherent and engaging narrative.
The media isn't choosing most things in the sense that online news media don't have a plotting war room where they decide what gets published and what doesn't, but rather they observe the news feeds of the agencies and their competitors and pick from this what gets printed in their own page.
Even if you are right that a news site leadership will equip different departments with staff and prescribe length etc, it is much less a guided process.
Not publishing on Oculus/Luckey/Zenimax isn't in any moral ballpark anyway.
What jumps out at me is how little is available via RECAP on this case. The amended complaints, for example, aren't available--and that's literally the most important of the lawsuit! In the more interesting cases, far more of the docket is available, and often even some of the uninteresting minutiae of the docket (e.g., applications for pro hac vice) are sometimes available, presumably because someone unfamiliar with how the courts work wonders why this isn't available, buys it themself only to discover that it actually was uninteresting.
See also how everyone believes crime is getting worse due to increasing news coverage, when the statistics say crime is decreasing.
IGN published one article when the lawsuit was first filed, and Destructoid published a copycat article. I'm not surprised the result was not interesting enough to write out, if they were even aware.
TechCrunch published an article when the case was dismissed in 2017 (before being resuscitated by the 9th Circuit), but nothing else before or after. Given that that was good news for Luckey, it shows an opposite 'bias' to the one being alleged.
Reuters did publish a number of articles about the case's progress and hasn't published anything about its ending, so I guess you can blame them?
But overall, this is just not a case that's gotten a lot of media attention.
It seems very difficult to find old news articles actually. Google News doesn't turn up most of the stuff I found, I had to explicitly search the individual sources. Who knows what else is missing.
Coverage in general has declined as the years have gone by, and this latest trial garnered little attention when it started. It wasn't as if there was minute-by-minute reporting that went dark as soon as the verdict came in. Yes, a loss for Oculus would have been an interesting story, and would have been reported on, but the reality is that Oculus and VR are simply not the zeigeisty topics they were in 2015, or even 2017, and so a "Goliath beats David after six year legal slog" story was never likely to be make headlines.
As someone who spent years fighting against a meritless suit, Luckey is entitled to feel aggrieved, and to wish that its end would be as big news as its beginning. But objectively its easy to see why it wasn't, without necessarily ascribing it to an industry-wide conspiracy of silence.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/10/oculus-catches-a-break-as-...
Luckey alleges that reporters were there and ready to cover it in case he lost. So there was still interest, just not interest in anything that was good for him.
> a "Goliath beats David after six year legal slog" story was never likely to be make headlines.
This is pretty much a statement of the problem right here. If your goal in reading the news is to be entertained, then it's not a problem. But if your goal is to become informed, then this bias against a certain kind of story is presenting a warped version of reality to you while pretending that it is the truth.
It's not a vast conspiracy. It's just incentives at work, but the outcome is lamentable.