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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

  Very peculiar seeing this news after Notch was so 
  critical of the OculusVR sale to Facebook.

Well, a lot of the criticism of the Oculus sale was because the product seemed so at odds with Facebook's main products and lines of revenue.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has the xbox and has been publishing games since at least the 1990s, maybe the 1980s?

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Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.00 is from 1982. It's the oldest I know about.

Even QBasic Gorillas is from 1991, and published by IBM. Not Microsoft.

Well, then these people are very nearsighted. Virtual Reality could very well become the next big thing. And not just in gaming. Apart from gaming there is simulation training and yes, communication for example. This could lead to some incarnation of a Holodeck if you will. Virtual meetings where you actually can see the other person and not just some avartar but the actual HD picture somehow modeled onto a virtual model in a way that makes it indistinguishable from real life. That may be decades down the road but it could happen.

And facebook, being in the communication business is now trying to push this forward by backing Oculus. Trying to make VR be just about gaming is sort of like trying to make the TV be all about displaying your xbox picture. When in fact the TV can be used as a medium for much more.

Actually, just found out about another one. Olympic Decathlon, released by MS for the TRS-80 in 1980.

PS: Separate comment as the anti-procrastination filter kicked in. ;)

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