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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

This is a god damned tragedy. (And the smartest move Zuck has ever made.)

VR was supposed to be a new frontier, I have been so excited to see finally the Next Thing was coming and it feels so much like the early days of the web and computing. But now it's owned by the worst company on the planet when it comes to choosing inspired thinking and pushing humanity forward instead of just trying to get inside of our lives (and now our heads.) I am frankly terrified.

Thank God for Valve, I hope they hit the gas and leapfrog these guys now on the tech and poach as many of them as they can. Thank goodness there is still plenty of work left to do and Facebook doesn't own all the VR patents. I am so fucking scared of a world where Facebook has a monopoly on VR. I really hope it doesn't happen.

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> VR was supposed to be a new frontier, I have been so excited to see finally the Next Thing was coming and it feels so much like the early days of the web and computing.

VR has been the Next Thing since before there was a World Wide Web, if not the internet itself. Maybe this time is different, maybe not.

this time is different

This time is even more different than the last time!

This time the technology is mature enough to support the vision, and isn't laughably poor and expensive.

Valve has stopped developing their own VR hardware and gave their prototype to Oculus a few months ago. If I remember correctly, their top VR guy also joined Oculus.

Sony is developing a competitor with project Morpheus, though.

Which is a proprietary addon for their playstation. Not interesting at all.

Occulus was going to be revolutionary because it was supposed to be an open platform. "Here is a headset, this is a starting point" every other company in the world could take it from there and see all the places it could go. How many improvements to the base model could be made. How many novel ways to utilize VR to advance common activities.

Instead, we now have Valve tossing away their project, Sony making its own proprietary toy dongle, and Facebook getting a live camera feed of your life while you use their video services on their proprietary platform with proprietary drivers and patents on everything including the paint job.

It is a pretty big travesty.

> Which is a proprietary addon for their playstation. Not interesting at all.

Yes, Sony products can never be rooted. Kinnect was a proprietary addon for XBox and look what happened there.

And look at the thriving ecosystem of 3rd party, unlicensed kinect apps

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