w00t zum Sonntag: 30. März 2014

Oculus Primed: Meet the Geniuses Who Finally Mastered Virtual Reality1396080698

In May 2012, a programmer named John Carmack—who, as a cofounder of id Software and the man behind games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, is widely seen as the father of 3D gaming—tweeted a picture of what looked like steampunk bifocals made out of a black shoebox.

Eyeing the virtual frontier: the Oculus Rift games that reinvent play1396080690

We said last week that virtual reality’s future is bigger than videogames; Mark Zuckerberg clearly agrees.

Facebook, Oculus, and Trust1396080664

When $17 million in venture capital funding was raised in June 2013, that was a red flag. When $75 million in venture capital funding was raised in December 2013, that was a huge, enormous, really big red flag. The news from yesterday was not shocking. The buyer, of course, was a little surprising.

Virtual Reality is going to change the world1396080655

It’s amazing. You strap on some gear, and then you’re inside whatever world you want. It showed up in books, it showed up in movies, and everyone dreamed about it. Problem was, it kinda sucked. I tried Dactyl Nightmare at an amusement park, and it kinda sucked.

Dear Kickstarters: Stop complaining about Oculus deal1396080660

Kickstarter backers are restless over Oculus selling out to Facebook. But if they want to blame someone, look to Washington, D.C. FORTUNE – The backlash to Facebook's planned $2 billion acquisition of reality headset maker Oculus VR has been swift and vehement.

Greetings from Planet Facebook1396080649

You blink and open your eyes to a fantastic new sun above your head. You're lying in a field of tall grass, but in the distance you hear sounds of machinery. The city.

Facebook Could Give You the Oculus Rift You Always Wanted1396080644

The news today that Facebook will buy Oculus—the makers of the best virtual reality experience in existence—caused paroxysms of upsetment and surprise. That's fair! But once the smoke clears, this could turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to the most promising technology we have.

Facebook's Oculus sale proves that videogames now write the first draft of history1396080638

Facebook bought Oculus Rift for $2 billion yesterday. But I digress. Last year, at our first-ever videogame arts and culture conference Twofivesix, we had the pleasure of having Palmer on-stage to talk about Oculus.

Introducing Michael Abrash, Oculus Chief Scientist1396080617

I'm tremendously excited to join Oculus, and when I think back, it's astonishing how unlikely the path to this moment is. I've told most of the parts of this story before, but never all together, and the narrative, now spanning twenty years, just keeps getting more remarkable.

Oculus Primed: Meet the Geniuses Who Finally Mastered Virtual Reality

In May 2012, a programmer named John Carmack—who, as a cofounder of id Software and the man behind games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, is widely seen as the father of 3D gaming—tweeted a picture of what looked like steampunk bifocals made out of a black shoebox. “This is a lot cooler than it looks,” read the caption.

He was right.

Since then, that awkward contraption—now more streamlined, and known as the Oculus Rift—has become the most anticipated new product in gaming since the Nintendo Wii got people off the couch. It’s a head-mounted display that promises to be a gigantic step toward what many had dismissed as an unrealizable dream: virtual reality.

The Rift is the brainchild of a 19-year-old tinkerer and VR enthusiast named Palmer Luckey. A collector of old VR headsets, Luckey was all too familiar with the shortcomings every system had faced—small fields of vision, unwieldy form factors, horrific resolution. He was also uniquely suited to do something about it: Years of modding videogame consoles and refurbishing iPhones for fun and profit had given him enough fine-soldering skills to start Frankensteining pieces from his existing headset collection. Eventually, chronicling his efforts on a message board devoted to 3D gaming, he figured out a way to cobble together a headset with a field of vision that dwarfed anything else on the market and allowed people to become completely immersed in a 360-degree playspace.

Luckey originally envisioned his creation as a DIY kit for hobbyists; after joining up with two partners and officially incorporating, though, they realized they could have a game-changing consumer peripheral on their hands. They began pre-selling $300 prototype headsets to software developers on Kickstarter in August 2012, just weeks after Carmack had taken his early version (on loan from Luckey) to the E3 gaming trade show. They pulled in nearly $2.5 million—and in spring of 2013, when those units began shipping to developers, virtual reality started to seem a lot less virtual.

Since then, the hype has only gotten louder. Oculus brought an improved version of the Rift to E3 in June and showed off its 1080p resolution as well as demos that placed wearers inside a virtual movie theater watching a trailer for Man of Steel. For the first time, applications beyond gaming began to suggest themselves. People, to use the clinical term, freaked out. Hell, I freaked out. Media coverage was rapturous; devoted Oculus forums and subreddits proliferated. Oculus launched a project depository for game demos, and developers responded, creating completely new experiences for a completely new medium.

Now they just need to build a consumer version that can pay off the promise of Luckey’s early experiments. And now that the company has received $75 million in Series B funding from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz—which sources say value the company at more than $250 million—the stakes are even higher. Before the official consumer version of the Rift (known internally as V1) becomes available in 2014, they’ll have to iron out seemingly innumerable kinks, from finalizing the display tech to deciding exactly what features will be included. But first and foremost, they’ll have to solve a problem that has plagued VR since the days of Tron: how not to make people sick.

There are a number of hurdles to creating a seamless virtual experience. Tracking, resolution, motion blur; sometimes it seems like the list never ends. But underneath them all is the most visceral obstacle of all. It’s the one that makes people feel dizzy, or hot, or nauseated. It’s latency.

Latency is lag. It’s the delay between inputting a command and seeing the effects of that command. You see it today in online gaming when your broadband connection gets unreliable: suddenly, you’re a half-step behind the action. Your button pushes and thumbstick moves don’t kick in immediately, and by the time you’ve seen another player he’s already killed you. In that kind of situation, the only price of latency is frustration. Wearing a VR headset, though, the price is something akin to motion sickness. Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe calls it “the Uncomfortable Valley”—that queasy feeling players get when they move their head and experience a barely perceptible delay while the world catches up. People are willing to put up with many things in the name of novelty, but nausea isn’t one of them.

Of course, you can’t fully remove latency—there always will be some delay. The question is how low latency needs to be. As processor power has progressed, various head-mounted displays and VR sets have claimed to have solved the latency problem at various thresholds: 100 milliseconds! 40 milliseconds! Those thresholds might do away with the most frustrating delays, but they can’t guarantee comfort. “It’s easier to get sick from latency than it is to perceive it,” Luckey says. “People in the VR industry have been disagreeing on what humans can perceive—and that number always seems to match up to what their system is just barely able to do.”

For Oculus, that magic number is somewhere under 20 milliseconds. “When you cross that, you get to something magical. It really enhances the sense of presence,” says Nate Mitchell, the company’s vice president of product. “I’m very confident we’ll be sub-15.” That’s about half the latency than the devkit version can attain, and it will require a bunch of innovations—some that cut the actual latency, and some that just convince you that they have.

Motion to Photons

“Motion-to-photons latency,” as the Oculus team calls it, is the aggregate latency that arises from the instant a player moves his or her head to when the player sees a new image on the screen. That pipeline consists of six stages:

1. User input
2. A USB cable delivering that command from the Rift to a computer
3. The game engine translating that command for the graphics processor (GPU)
4. The processor issuing a “write” command for a new image
5. The Rift’s display switching pixels to display the new image
6. The new image appearing in full

Oculus’ task is shaving as many milliseconds of latency from as many of these stages as possible.

The first step is minimizing input latency—speeding the process of translating action into digital commands. That’s a matter of hardware. While Luckey’s original prototypes used an off-the-shelf sensor, current Rift headsets utilize a proprietary inertial measurement unit (IMU) tracker that uses a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer and then fuses those readings to evaluate head motion in real time. That “sensor fusion,” as Oculus calls it, drops latency for this first stage—which was often around 15 milliseconds for the original tracker—to below a millisecond. Getting that input command from the Rift to the computer—where all the actual processing takes place—adds another 1-2 milliseconds, a number that can’t be reduced without reinventing the USB cable entirely.

At that point, the burden of latency shifts from the Rift itself to the game developer—in particular, how high a frame rate the game is able to deliver. Most modern-day games play at 60 frames per second; at that speed, a single game image takes 16.67 milliseconds to render and get pushed to the computer’s graphics processor. If a developer is able to double that speed, of course, they can halve the latency introduced by that render time (i.e., a game that plays at 120fps takes 8 milliseconds to render a single image). That’s not unheard of for PC games, but for now Oculus has to assume the lowest common denominator of 16.67 milliseconds.

If you’re keeping track, we’re already close to 20 milliseconds of latency—and the image in your headset still hasn’t changed. For that to happen, the computer’s GPU needs to send a command back up the USB cable to each pixel in the Rift’s display. Some pixel switches happen very quickly—a black pixel can turn white in less than 10 milliseconds—but for one gray pixel to become slightly grayer can take close to 30 milliseconds. To save time, each individual pixel starts switching as soon as it receives its “write” command from the GPU; the Rift writes from bottom to top, so by the time the GPU is sending a command to the top lines of the display, the bottom lines have already switched.

All told, that process “smears out,” in Mitchell’s words, to between 20 and 30 milliseconds overall; since the processing and writing happen somewhat concurrently, that adds up to a total lag of up to 40 milliseconds for a 60fps game. (For reference, Luckey’s original duct-tape prototype was in the 50s—and Sony’s $1000 HMZ T3W has 52 milliseconds of latency in the device itself, not counting the latency introduced by a game.) That’s still too much.

Fortunately, Oculus has a few tricks left to employ.

Nips and Tucks

So that time-consuming pixel-switching process that hogs so much of the latency pipeline? Turns out it’s only time-consuming on LCD screens. OLED technology, such as what’s found on a Samsung Galaxy phone, can switch pixels in a matter of microseconds. So will the consumer version of the Rift utilize OLED panels? “We haven’t decided anything, but it would make a lot of sense to consider,” says Mitchell (with a smile, it should be noted). “The real trick to OLED is that there’s only one manufacturer in the world making OLED technology in the form factor we want.” That would be Samsung—and they’ve never sold their tech to any third party.

That doesn’t mean Oculus isn’t considering other display technologies that outperform LCD—and it doesn’t mean they’re not tinkering. As part of their ongoing collaborative work with Valve Software, the two companies worked up a prototype that, along with a number of other improvements that WIRED saw but can’t discuss, utilized an OLED panel. That was the prototype that got them below 20 milliseconds for the first time. It was also the first time that Iribe was able to use the Rift without feeling sick. “I’m one of the most sensitive in the office,” Iribe says. “People always joke that ‘it’s not ready to show Brendan.’ And for the first time, I felt incredibly good.” So where did the OLED panel come from? “We gutted a phone,” says Luckey. They won’t say what phone they gutted, but it’s clear that it’s a Galaxy S4.

By all accounts, that was a turning point. Andreessen Horowitz founder Marc Andreessen had been asking how long it would take for Oculus to conquer the Uncomfortable Valley. “We’ve had to be honest and say it’s soon, but not yet,” Iribe says. After he saw the prototype, though, Iribe emailed Andreessen: “I said, ‘Okay, we’re ready—you need to come down here on the next flight.’”

Chris Dixon was among four people from Andreessen Horowitz who saw the newest prototype. “I’d tried the devkit and thought it was really impressive, but the latency wasn’t quite there in my opinion,” Dixon says. “Going and seeing the new prototype gave me confidence that they were going to solve all of those problems. I think I’ve seen five or six computer demos in my life that made me think the world was about to change: Apple II, Netscape, Google, iPhone…then Oculus. It was that kind of amazing.” (The prototype and functionality that Andreessen Horowitz saw will not be shown at CES, as has been speculated elsewhere.)

It’s not all thanks to the OLED display, though. The Rift’s three-sensor head-tracking unit also samples motion data at 1000 times a second—four times faster than the original tracker from Luckey’s prototype. That high-speed data collection has not just allowed them to shave even more latency, but to actually predict where a player will move his head before he moves it. “There’s research that says you can’t predict where the head’s going well enough to render ahead of it, but nobody’s ever had a thousand samples a second to be able to try,” says Luckey.

He goes on: “If a head’s moving very quickly, you know it cannot instantly stop, and you know that it can only start slowing down at a certain speed, so you can say ‘well, if they’re turning their head, I know that they can’t slow down their head beyond a certain amount, so I’m going to render a little bit ahead of where it’s reporting they are.’ Then, as your head starts to slow, it lowers the prediction back down to zero, and during a very high-speed turn it can ramp it back up, which is when you need it as well.” This doesn’t change the latency of processing in any real way, but it allows the user to see the new image faster, and thus change the perceived latency—nearly 10 milliseconds less.

And then there’s Carmack, the graphics wizard who officially joined Oculus in August as CTO. Before he joined the team, Carmack wrote on his own blog about mitigating latency by changing the way the GPU writes displays. (If you’re not a programmer, don’t even bother trying to parse it: just know that it mentions things like “late frame scheduling” and “asynchronous time warp,” and be thankful there’s not a quiz.) Since then, Oculus has met with GPU manufacturers NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and AMD in an effort to ensure off-the-shelf PCs (and next-generation Android phones) will be able to pump the proper experience to the headset. “Making people buy a particular graphics card just to use Rift is totally off the table,” Mitchell says.

There’s still one more piece of the puzzle: ensuring the games and applications people are developing for the Rift are as streamlined as possible. In October, Oculus began shipping the Latency Tester, a tiny tool that allows developers to measure latency of their own motion-to-photons pipeline. By placing it in one of the headset’s two eyecups and pressing the test button, developers send a test signal that tells their game engine to draw a colored square on the screen; the tester reports how many milliseconds it takes for the square to appear.

Granted, it’s all still a work in progress, but after attacking it from so many angles, Oculus doesn’t consider latency the bugaboo it once was. “We’ve crossed the Uncomfortable Valley,” Iribe concludes. So it’s on to other things. Mitchell points out that the Oculus team still needs to make significant progress on a number of challenges—tracking precision, image quality, resolution—before the consumer unit finally ships. But with an extra $75 million, and the guidance from one of the most hands-on VC firms around, they’re confident that they’ll get there.

In the meantime, there are always more milliseconds to lose. “We’re shooting for zero,” Mitchell says. “We’re super-close.”

For more great coverage of science, technology, culture, business, and design, visit WIRED.com. 

Eyeing the virtual frontier: the Oculus Rift games that reinvent play

We said last week that virtual reality’s future is bigger than videogames; Mark Zuckerberg clearly agrees. Facebook’s $2 billion acquisition of Oculus has taken everyone by surprise, and it follows on from a GDC at which news of Sony’s Project Morpheus, on top of Oculus’ own Crystal Cove tech, has made virtual reality the most tantalising new frontier in videogames. In this feature written and published in print before news of the Facebook acquisition, we speak to the pioneers in virtual reality game development on Oculus Rift.

New devices have ever looked as likely to bring about radical change in the videogame industry as the virtual reality headset. Oculus Rift – and surely a raft of imitators to follow – places you at the centre of an immersive stereoscopic world. In doing so, it overturns many of the fundamental assumptions about how games are produced, controlled and experienced. Oculus’s own guidelines detail hundreds of ways VR games need to work differently to conventional ones to avoid confusing the human mind. That’s because VR isn’t just a new way of seeing a game, but a new frontier in game design, which makes it hard to predict what the future of videogames will look like.

But by speaking to those development studios brave enough to chart the new frontier, we can get at least some idea. And for an analogue of the kind of change now happening, you could do worse than consider CD-ROMs. Their popularisation in the early ’90s provided games with a storage medium hundreds of times the capacity of standard floppy disks, and the industry lurched to make use of all the extra space, producing re-releases of older games (now with spoken dialogue), terrible games with full-motion video starring real actors, umpteen adventure games with higher-res textures than previously possible, and Myst.

Oculus Rift has already inspired a raft of frighteningly similar projects, with developers simply attaching a VR camera viewpoint to traditional games, but these are just the start. In time, massmarket virtual reality headsets might be responsible for a larger and far more exciting adventure game renaissance than Kickstarter ever was.

“The most interesting thing in the Rift is the spatial perception – the fact that you are in [a] space where there is depth,” Untold Games’ Flavio Parenti says. “So you can actually locate the objects around you and know how far they are from you.”

Parenti is an Italian actor and writer working with Untold on Loading Human, a VR adventure game that blends Rift for the eyes with motion controls for your in-game actions. Untold thinks being able to place players at the very centre of its world marks a tremendous opportunity for storytelling.

“I think that in a game like this, you are able to give the player access to much more detail than you would with another game,” Untold developer Elisa Di Lorenzo says. “Adventure games have always been slow paced. You’re going to stay in an environment and you’re going to explore it, because it’s a new environment and you can check everything.”

Developers have found that viewing a gameworld with the sensation of having a physical presence within it encourages players to reach out and tinker more with its details. In Loading Human, you can interact with everything you can see. You can pick up vinyl records, place them on a gramophone and they’ll play. You can pore through your character’s bookshelves or play a game of draughts. You need only let your gaze linger on an object to hear your character’s thoughts about that item. “With the immersion of the Oculus [Rift], it becomes so natural that you don’t even feel like you just did something with a button,” Parenti says. “It’s much more organic.”

Meeting expectations, however, becomes all-important. If you make players feel like they’re a person inhabiting a real space, then they’ll expect things to perform as they would in the real world, and they become much less forgiving when a gameworld doesn’t work as reality does. “You need to try to do a one-to-one simulation, even with the dimension of the objects and the relationship between you and the objects,” Parenti says. “It’s so intense that if there’s something wrong, you feel it in a second.”

The naturally slower pace of an adventure game is handy too, given the challenges that arise from Rift’s current limitations. “Normally in games, I think the characters move at about 30–40mph,” points out Parenti. “It’s very fast paced. Of course, it’s a videogame, so you just watch it. But if you do that in virtual reality, you’re going to puke. You’re moving too fast as a human being.”

When the desire for realism and the need to not make your audience feel nauseous are coupled with technical demands, such as Rift games needing to be rendered at a much higher framerate, virtual reality starts to lend itself better to realistic or mundane settings than it does to the action-packed fantasy worlds we’re used to. Using Rift to play Quake would feel unnatural not only because it would be too far quick, but because we instinctively want our doorways to be sensible doorway sizes.

This is backed up by other indie development projects that have been released for Rift. As much as they mirror the focus on exploration and narrative of old point-and-click adventure games, they’re also fine examples of the way old definitions no longer fit in VR worlds. These games aren’t controlled via pointing and clicking, and are far more mundane than the videogame adventures we’re used to, but they point to an exciting new future for storytelling.

One example is Private Eye, made by Jake Slack for Oculus’s own VR Jam, a game that takes inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Although a full version is in the works, the jam build is playable now. In it, you take on the role of a wheelchair-bound detective gazing out of a window over an allotment surrounded by other apartment buildings. You look down at a notepad in your hand and spy through windows with your binoculars, hoping to find the clues you need to prevent an impending murder.

In Anamnesis, a class project by Alexa Kim and Scott Stephan at the University Of Southern California, Rift becomes a secondary display port rather than a head-mounted display. You walk around a realistic environment and lift the headset to your eyes in order to view the ‘psychic residue’ left behind by other people as you explore an apartment building.

Each of these games represents a clever way of exploiting Rift’s capabilities, but also of getting around its limitations. Anamnesis, for example, dodges the motion sickness inherent in the original Rift devkit by not requiring you to wear it at all times. Despite a few indicators of progress, however, there’s still a huge number of challenges for developers to overcome.

“No one has really found the best practices for how to make a game in VR,” Sigurður Gunnarsson says. As a senior programmer on EVE Valkyrie, he is well positioned to comment. The spaceship dogfighting game is one of the few VR games currently announced from a major developer, and its prototype has been wowing players at trade conferences such as E3 and CES for the past year. Valkyrie is, Rift creator Palmer Luckey says, the best demonstration of Rift’s capabilities yet.

Space games found new life with the advent of CD-ROMs, too – Wing Commander III was the first in the series to cast real actors, such as Mark Hamill, in its cutscenes. But CCP has thrown out a lot of old assumptions to avoid the trap of simply bolting a VR camera onto an existing genre. For example, since players wearing a virtual reality headset can no longer see their hands, the developer is taking great steps to simplify its control scheme, which means Valkyrie has no throttle. Instead its ships have permanent momentum, but a temporary boost and a brake button. But even boosting and braking introduce problems. “One thing [to avoid] is sudden changes to the velocity of the player, so no drastic acceleration or braking,” Gunnarsson says, “because when the brake hits, the giant change in velocity [means] the brain thinks it should feel the force of slowing down.”

It’s the same thing Parenti pointed out: ‘normal’ game speeds feel freakishly fast when you’re using Rift. Even in an action game like Valkyrie, which is built around five-minute dogfights, there’s an emphasis on toning motion down.

“From an aesthetic point of view, we don’t have to give the hard sell any more that 3D effects are happening,” says Andrew Robinson, a 3D artist on EVE Valkyrie. “It’s a much more tactile environment, so we really don’t have to push as much fakery around to make you feel as if things are going on.” In virtual reality, a little goes a long way, and a lot makes you throw up.

Even with the reduction of so-called ‘simulator sickness’ – the hardware-originated feeling of nausea – that the new Crystal Cove Rift prototype brings, experiences such as spinning around in a spaceship could make you as queasy in a VR game as they might in real life. But a few visual aids can help.

“Just having the cockpit constantly around you, it grounds you in the scene,” Gunnarsson says. “Even just being able to look down and see your avatar, that you’re in this body, also helps a lot.”

That particular limitation of the human brain bodes well for driving and flight games using Rift, where the fixed cockpit provides context and the natural sitting position of the player character isn’t at odds with your own posture. But the smallest disconnect between you and that avatar can cause problems. “One thing that we picked up from the early demos was that we used to have the hands [sitting] by your side,” Robinson says. “People were sitting playing Valkyrie with their hands obviously central, towards the Xbox controller. At some point, we moved the hands into the centre to [make you] feel like they were wrapped around the Xbox controller itself. It’s a tiny change, but it makes a world of difference.”

Even something as simple as the length of your neck, specifically the difference between it and the length of your avatar’s counterpart, can cause a disconnect between your brain’s perception of your body and what you’re seeing in the game. The future might see games in which you enter your height or dimensions during character creation to make the avatar match your build as closely as possible, and might consequently feature fewer burly space marines.

This need for an increased closeness between your real body and your body in virtual reality could also drive demand for new peripherals that work alongside a Rift headset. Untold, for instance, is making use of Razer’s Hydra, which offers advanced Move-style motion controllers that can track your hand movements in 3D space. “In virtual reality, the game is around you, so you have to use yourself,” Parenti says, speaking about Loading Human. “You need to get rid of the objects and use your hands. It’s the only way a virtual reality game can be enjoyed, from my point of view.”

CCP believes the same. Why position a model’s hands where the team thinks you’ll place them when it could just track your hands and mirror the movements in realtime? “People are also playing around with Kinect and recently the [updated Xbox One version], and that seems to be quite nicely used in VR to track the rest of your body,” Gunnarsson says.

Robinson wonders if people might go even further. “I had a great conversation one time with Palmer Luckey,” he says. “One of the first times he played EVE Valkyrie, he told me about how he’d quite like to build some of the cockpit panels in his house around his desk, so that when he put his hand out to touch things in the game, he would touch things in real life. I can see people wanting to put as many senses into the game as possible.”

When asked to pick which genre he thinks best suits virtual reality, though, Luckey himself is diplomatic. “I think it would be too premature to say what the best genres are going to be,” he explains, “because there are people that are making these new experiences. I don’t know if anyone knows what the best genre for VR will be.”

Gunnarsson is blunt, however: “The low-hanging fruit is obviously simulation games where you sit in a cockpit. That’s quite easy. You’re not walking around with a lot of the problems that can come with that.” Early indicators are he’s right, with a rash of driving games, such as Euro Truck Simulator 2, already retrofitting support for Rift’s development kit with good results.

Otherwise, the consensus is that Rift is the perfect partner for horror games. “I tried a few of the horror games, and they are very immersive. It’s just the depth of experience is so different,” Gunnarsson says. “If you meet an avatar, either another player or a monster, and it looks you in the eye, that’s such a strong connection. They’re also going to get people really, really, really scared.”

There are dozens already in development for the Rift devkit. Alone is a VR game in which you play a person playing a traditional horror game on a television that only exists in the virtual world, and in which elements of that game begin to bleed into your virtual reality. It plays on the paranoia players can feel about their surroundings when their senses are consumed by a Rift headset.

Doorways, meanwhile, is more a more traditional horror adventure set in dark tombs, Don’t Let Go features a scene in which you must watch tarantulas crawl up your body, Dreadhalls is about exploring a roguelike dungeon, and CDF Ghostship introduces science-fiction elements to evoke the same kind of dread as the Alien films. Many of these games still rely on jump scares and horror clichés, but they’ve been refreshed by cleverly exploiting the personal closeness players feel when immersed in VR.

“[Rift]’s taken away some of those barriers where you’re sitting far away from [a game]. You’re living it. That’s why psychological horror games are moving into the area,” Robinson says. “I wouldn’t like to play Slender in VR. That game scared me so bad as it was.” Virtual reality support is, of course, already on its way for Slender: The Arrival.

While Rift is undoubtedly a powerful tool for scaring players, many of these games feel like the most obvious first steps into a new medium. In that sense, they may prove to be Rift’s equivalent of the ‘interactive movies’ of the past: for a brief moment interesting, but soon embarrassing in their simplicity. Ultimately, the perfect parallel between virtual reality development and early CD-ROM development might lie with a single person: John Carmack. CD-ROMs found their footing within the videogame industry when we found ways to make fun from the higher-definition worlds they enabled. Quake’s textured, polygonal environment and fast-paced FPS play were vital parts of that process, helping to define the next two decades of both engine programming and mainstream game design.

Carmack might help to do it again. The industry veteran has joined Oculus as its chief technology officer, and is working on game projects there. Luckey can’t yet discuss those with us, but he talks about the company’s efforts to make its hardware work as seamlessly as possible with various game engines. He also reveals that engine latency specifically “is one of the things Carmack is working on. He’s working on many other things, but it’s one of the key things that we need to do. We don’t want developers to worry about the technical details of how exactly to implement virtual reality. We want them to have the technical side taken care of as much as possible, so that they can worry about the creative and user experience side.”

Whether it’s Carmack developing tools and even possibly being the person to carry the FPS forward again, indie developers finding new ways to tell stories and breathe life into hoary horror clichés, or mainstream developers defining how virtual reality will be controlled for decades to come, it’s easy to see how game creators are already being inspired by the new technology. Yet it’s all the unknowns surrounding VR that remain the most exciting thing about it. The new console generation was revealed to a muted response because it was exactly what we thought it would be: more social, more connected, and packed with more particles and pixels than ever. With virtual reality almost ready to start leading the way, the future of videogames has become unpredictable for the first time in a little under a decade.

Facebook, Oculus, and Trust

When $17 million in venture capital funding was raised in June 2013, that was a red flag. When $75 million in venture capital funding was raised in December 2013, that was a huge, enormous, really big red flag. The news from yesterday was not shocking.

The buyer, of course, was a little surprising.

Yesterday, Facebook purchased Oculus, the company behind the beloved Oculus Rift virtual reality tech, for $2 billion. People are upset.

Let's unpack why this deal is causing such an emotional reaction. It's complicated, may have more to do with Facebook than Oculus, and underscores some other, unresolved trends coming to a head.

The Kickstarter proposal for the Oculus Rift launched in August 2012. The company was asking for $250,000 to build a developer kit for its pet technology project. People flipped for the idea, and it raised $2.44 million over the next month. The company has likely seen even more money from the many who decided to purchase development kits after the Kickstarter campaign concluded.

In the two years since, Oculus has carefully worked on the Oculus Rift, slowly making advances in its technology, as the hype slowly built through excited word-of-mouth. That hype seemed to reach a peak (if we're lucky, one of many) this month, as Sony revealed its Project Morpheus VR kit (spoiler: it's very similar to the Oculus Rift), and Facebook announced it would purchase Oculus for $2 billion in cash and stock options.

People have become emotionally invested in the idea of VR. Just watch the way Fez designer Phil Fish spoke about its potential (even in, say, our dystopian apocalypse) on our GDC live show last week. VR is Star Trek brought to life. VR is about better realizing the potential for virtual worlds that's been happening in our imaginations for years. I'm a convert, and been a believer in VR ever since strapping on the Oculus Rift for the first time. After that, I tracked down a development kit to play with. In short, I'm a fanboy. I'm not alone.

It's why there's a backlash. The term "emotional investment" is key, and it's why Kickstarter has been such an interesting business tool these past few years. It plays on emotion. On Kickstarter's "What Is Kickstarter?" page, the company outlines what it means to be part of Kickstarter, from the perspective of both a consumer (better known as a "backer") and a creator. There are a couple of sentences worth pulling out more closely:

"Backing a project is more than just giving someone money. It’s supporting their dream to create something that they want to see exist in the world."

When it comes to games, there are many that would not exist without Kickstarter. Broken Age, Shadowrun Returns, Wasteland 2, and others. Several of these games have shipped to players, and some of them turned out to be really good games. Crowdfunding allows us to help make dreams happen, and that's lovely. But emotional investment is not an actual investment--it does not give you control over the company. It does not provide equity, and you are not owed anything by the creators. The ROI (return on investment) is fulfilling hope.

Which leads us to this:

"Backers are supporting projects to help them come to life, not to profit financially. Instead, project creators offer rewards to thank backers for their support."

Backer. That's a problematic term. It sounds too much like investor. It implies more control than what Kickstarter actually offers. Kickstarter is, at its base level, little more than tossing dollars and cents into a tin can, and hoping the person goes and does something nice with it. When established people come to Kickstarter, we can be a little more confident something will happen, but that's not a guarantee. Every time you back a Kickstarter project, this should be how you feel: "that could be cool, I hope it works out." That's it.

Broken Age didn't have a totally smooth development. The second half isn't out. But the public learning about the bumpy road was important to our collective understanding of games.

I don't root for Kickstarter projects to fail, but it's healthy when some do. Lots of video games are cancelled every single day. Lots of video games with promising ideas turn out to be total crap. We just don't hear about those games. Those are tossed under the rug, and we focus on the success stories. But success only comes through failure, and failure is far more common than people understand. When Kickstarter projects fail, when people get angry over their investment, it gives them a better sense of how development actually works. These stories happen all the time.

What doesn't happen all the time, however, is the complete opposite, which is exactly what happened with Oculus. Oculus delivered what its Kickstarter project promised: a development kit. But people became emotionally invested in the prospect of a new, independent technology company coming out of nowhere and changing the world. The emotional investment fused with the ideals behind Oculus, a notion the company's founders stoked with press quotes that suggested Oculus had no interest in selling to the usual suspects.

Of course, it's easier to say that before a deal is in your face, and when you're being offered an opportunity to, if it works out, do everything you ever wanted and more.

At GDC last week, Facebook reportedly hashed out its deal with Oculus. Scattered chatter at GDC suggested that Facebook was not alone. I heard other companies were interested, but apparently Facebook was offering the best deal. I haven't done enough reporting to say much more than that. Perhaps the reveal of Sony's Project Morpheus forced Oculus to tip its hand, perhaps the initial investors wanted to cash out while the news was hot.

When the Facebook news was announced, Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson announced he was cancelling his deal with Oculus to officially bring virtual reality to Minecraft. Persson wrote a lengthy blog post outlining his decision, and included this line:

"And I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition."

Yes, you did. Everyone did. And Oculus probably won't be the last time backers struggle with this idea.

On some level, I get it. It doesn't feel fair. You were on the ground floor, and a bunch of other people get the big money. Polygon's Chris Plante put this best in a tweet earlier today:

But how else was this gonna end? John Carmack, Cliff Bleszinski, Michael Abrash, and Gabe Newell were part of the pitch video. From day one, this was shooting for the stars. If Oculus wanted to be a company producing electronics for the masses, that was not going to happen on its own. It would be like the Pebble SmartWatch: the fuel of a potential revolution without being at the center. Oculus owes you nothing. Oculus does not have to pay everyone's Kickstarter investment back because the company just made a load of cash.

Persson's original tweet on the subject, which has been retweeted more than 16,000 times now, struck a nerve. Persson represents our ideal vision of a rich person with money. He's a self-made altruistic gazillionaire that invests his money into things he loves, and wants to see them grow. But it's called idealistic for a reason: it's not reality. The response on Kickstarter proved there was interest in the Oculus Rift, and the venture capital funding was simply a way to let the company grow its ambitions and make a move like this. It's clear that Oculus wants to be the tip of the spear, and partnering with Facebook is one way to give it a real shot.

This loud, angered reaction is the feeling our toy, our collective dream, is being taken away from us. And that leads me to what's driving most of the vitriol: a distrust of Facebook.

Persson actually touched on this part in his original tweet.

We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.

— Markus Persson (@notch) March 25, 2014

"Facebook creeps me out."

He probably could have tweeted only that and received a similarly big response. If we conveniently ignore the disturbing hot-or-not reasons that drove the creation of Facebook in the first place, what Facebook once (and still sort of does) represented was connecting disconnected people. Friends, family, lovers, ex-lovers. Hell, the whole world. Someone took part of what the Internet provides and harnessed it in a way that could bring us all closer to one another. I love that, and still love that. I got over the fact that my mom uses Facebook a long time ago because it does a better job of informing her what's going in my life than my less-than-regular phone calls. (Sorry, mom!) It's hard to imagine she will ever sign up for another social network. Facebook is it.

But as Facebook has expanded and become a normalized social commodity, it's also had to make money. The whole reason Facebook was able to buy Oculus this week is because it went public, and has access to a pool of real money (the $400 million) and funny money (the $1.6 billion in Facebook stock options). In making that transition, it's started eroding its foundation: trust.

(If we want a recent reason to feel better, Instagram was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion and seemingly remains unscathed as part of the buyout process.)

When we engage with "free" software like Facebook or Twitter, we understand the "free" part comes at a cost. Scratch that. I don't think most of us think of it that way, even if that's reality. Nothing is free. But that "cost" is companies finding ways to make money on us via advertisements, and it's hard to blame Facebook for that. What we can blame them for, however, is often dragging us there without our knowledge. How many people have spent a significant amount of time tweaking your privacy settings? You probably did it once and then figured you were good, right? For a while, that's true, but Facebook has time and time again forced its users to share more and more and more and more and more and more, often without explicit consent.

(Side note: I also think people have distanced themselves from Facebook, intimidated by how many people they have friended on Facebook. Social norms make us feel weird about deleting them. I'll disclose my method of dealing with this, but don't tell anyone, okay? Every day, Facebook notifies whose birthday it is. If you can't muster the energy to write someone a virtual happy birthday note, what are you doing being friends with them on Facebook? I've been slowly deleting people from my feed for years this way. I'm a monster.)

Did you really think I wouldn't get this photo in here somehow?

This breach of trust is combined with a common buyout tactic in Silicon Valley: talent acquisitions. Companies are often bought to bring in the people who work there, not the product they're making. If you take Facebook at their word, that's not happening with Oculus, but it's not hard to imagine the Oculus folks won't be asked to work on whatever hardware projects Facebook's making. (Facebook seems a bit like Valve, constantly tinkering with internal ideas, even if very few of them see the light of day.)

Even if we look squarely at games, how many studios did the old EA ruin by purchasing? It's a graveyard.

All of this adds up. The emotional investment, the distrust of Facebook, the cynicism we have towards companies with billions of dollars. It doesn't feel like there is much pure in the world anymore. Oculus felt pure. It was a kick ass idea becoming reality. "We made this happen, you guys! And we were going to change the fucking world!" That was, sadly, naive, and helps explains the yelling and the screaming happening today.

I listened to the conference call with Facebook and Oculus. They were saying all of the right things. Oculus will keep doing what they're doing, and Facebook looks at Oculus as an investment that might pay off in five or 10 years. Facebook doesn't intend to make a profit on the hardware, which means Oculus should get to ship the device it wants. Kotaku noticed the company is also performing some damage control, and answering concerns on Reddit. You won't need a Facebook account to use the Oculus Rift, the money from Facebook will mean better hardware and investment in cool games, and a promise there won't be specific tie-ins to Facebook technology. Facebook has also told TechCrunch that it denies The New York Times report that the Oculus Rift would be re-branded and re-designed with Facebook look and interface.

Facebook's social ubiquity means it has time to take chances on long-term gambles, and Oculus seems like one of them. They might screw it up, but also might not matter.

Oculus did start a VR revolution, even if that revolution never takes off and flounders in the same way 3D did during the last five years. But without the Oculus Rift project on Kickstarter, none of this would be happening. It's easy to be upset that you're not walking home with tens of thousands in your pocket, but that was never going to happen. You were a part of something big, though. You contributed to a dream, and that dream is about to take off. Not all dreams succeed, but, hey, we can't control everything.

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Oculus Rift

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Virtual Reality is going to change the world

It’s amazing. You strap on some gear, and then you’re inside whatever world you want. It showed up in books, it showed up in movies, and everyone dreamed about it. Problem was, it kinda sucked. I tried Dactyl Nightmare at an amusement park, and it kinda sucked. Huge wires, unconvincing tracking, horrible visual fidelity. VR kept sucking for a long time, and people kinda gave up on it.

But then something happened. Or, well, it had already happened, but nobody realized. The technology was finally here to do proper virtual reality. The team behind Oculus Rift realized this, and built the first prototype of VR that was finally just good enough to be usable, and it was only going to get better and better. They set up a kickstarter to fund their enthusiasm, and a lot of people got excited. They made about ten times the money they asked for, and I was one of the top-level backers.

I got my oculus rift dev kit, and played around with it. It was convincing. It presented a lot of design problems. It made me nauseous. It was signed by the entire Oculus Rift team. I got super excited and worked on a couple of prototypes before moving on to other things. Perhaps I would pick it up again closer to the consumer version release.

A couple of weeks ago, they reminded me that I still hadn’t visited their office, one of the rewards from the kickstarter. John Carmack would be there. The combined opportunity of seeing their latest tech and getting to talk about vr (and doom) with John was overwhelming, so I took the 12+ hour flight there. What I saw was every bit as impressive as you could imagine. They had fixed all the major issues, and all that remained was huge design and software implementation challenges.

As someone who always felt like they were born five or ten years too late, I felt like we were on the cusp of a new paradigm that I might be able to play around with. I could be part of the early efforts to work out best practices, and while I have no doubt that in ten years we’ll look back at the problems with early VR applications in the same we look back at GUI problems with early PC games, it still felt exciting to me. My head started spinning with potential applications and how to deal with all the issues (how do you do gui? how do you deal with locomotion? what input do you use? what happens if the player leans far enough forward to clip into a wall? how do you prevent vr induced existential crisis?)

Of course, they wanted Minecraft. I said that it doesn’t really fit the platform, since it’s very motion based, runs on java (that has a hard time delivering rock solid 90 fps, especially since the players build their own potentially hugely complex levels), and relies a lot on GUI. But perhaps it would be cool to do a slimmed down version of Minecraft for the Oculus. Something free, similar to the Minecraft PI Edition, perhaps? So I suggested that, and our people started talking to their people to see if something could be done.

And then, not two weeks later, Facebook buys them.

Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build.

Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social. In fact, I think social could become one of the biggest applications of VR. Being able to sit in a virtual living room and see your friend’s avatar? Business meetings? Virtual cinemas where you feel like you’re actually watching the movie with your friend who is seven time zones away?

But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games.

Fortunately, the rise of Oculus coincided with competitors emerging. None of them are perfect, but competition is a very good thing. If this means there will be more competition, and VR keeps getting better, I am going to be a very happy boy. I definitely want to be a part of VR, but I will not work with Facebook. Their motives are too unclear and shifting, and they haven’t historically been a stable platform. There’s nothing about their history that makes me trust them, and that makes them seem creepy to me.

And I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition.

I have the greatest respect for the talented engineers and developers at Oculus. It’s been a long time since I met a more dedicated and talented group of people. I understand this is purely a business deal, and I’d like to congratulate both Facebook and the Oculus owners. But this is where we part ways.

If you want to experience Minecraft in VR, there’s an excellent mod that does this. It’s called Minecrift, and you can find it here.

Dear Kickstarters: Stop complaining about Oculus deal

Kickstarter backers are restless over Oculus selling out to Facebook. But if they want to blame someone, look to Washington, D.C.

FORTUNE – The backlash to Facebook's planned $2 billion acquisition of reality headset maker Oculus VR has been swift and vehement.

No surprise there – users frequently complain when a beloved service or app gets snapped up by a larger company. Users revolted when Facebook (FB) bought Instagram. They revolted when Yahoo bought Tumblr. They revolted when Facebook bought WhatsApp.

But this time, it's different. The sale of Oculus VR is the first major acquisition of a company that got its start through crowdfunding. Not only do certain users feel a special connection with Oculus, they have supported the company with actual dollars from their wallets. The company raised $2.4 million from 9,522 Oculus supporters through Kickstarter campaign in September 2012.

Since the deal's announcement last night, many of those backers have left bitter and disappointed comments on Oculus's Kickstarter page. Some have a general distaste for Facebook. Others feel betrayed that Oculus sold out before it even shipped a single consumer-facing product.

Some even are suggesting that they got ripped off by Oculus and Kickstarter. Business Insider bemoaned that Oculus's Kickstarter backers "got nothing" in the sale. Gawker editorial director Joel Johnson referred to the deal as "Oculus Grift." Markus Persson, creator of the popular game Minecraft, wrote, "I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition."

It's easy to feel that way when the big winners in this acquisition are the venture capital funds which invested in Oculus after its Kickstarter success. Spark Capital, Matrix Partners and Founders Fund invested $16 million at a $30 million pre-money valuation last summer. Then Andreessen Horowitz led a $75 million Series B round a few months later at a $200 million pre-money mark. Facebook's purchase earns those funds a big fat return in less than one year.

But this is where things break down. Much of the ire directed at Oculus and Kickstarter boils down to a misunderstanding how of crowdfunding works.

Backing a project on Kickstarter is not the same as buying equity. Supporting a project on Kickstarter is not the same as investing in a company. Pre-ordering an item on Kickstarter (which Kickstarter strongly discourages, by the way) is not the same as acquiring shares in that product's maker. Bottom line: Kickstarter is for donations, not investments.

Kickstarter makes this much clear in its guidelines:

Creators cannot offer equity or financial incentives (ownership, share of profits, repayment/loans, cash-value equivalents, etc).

Further, Kickstarter makes it clear that it takes no responsibility for creators fulfilling their promises to backers:

Kickstarter does not guarantee projects or investigate a creator's ability to complete their project. On Kickstarter, backers (you!) ultimately decide the validity and worthiness of a project by whether they decide to fund it.

In other words: Want to support a project? Great. Don't go crying to us if things don't work out the way you wanted them to. We're all adults here.

Blaming Oculus doesn't get you very far either. Here's what Oculus promised in its initial Kickstarter offer:

We're here raising money on Kickstarter to build development kits of the Rift, so we can get them into the hands of developers faster.

That's a very specific goal, which the company made good on when it shipped its first round of developer kits. In addition to the kits, the company offered backers things like T-shirts and posters. Three supporters pledged $5,000 or more, which earned them a paid-for trip to the Oculus office. The company even told non-developers not to pre-order the kits. "If you're not a developer or hardcore enthusiast, sit tight for now. We promise the consumer Rift will be worth the wait!"

Nowhere does the company promise it will never raise venture capital, nor that it won't sell out along the way. Disappointing as that outcome might be for early backers, Oculus does not owe them anything but a very gracious "thank you" for their donation.

Instead, this backlash would best be directed at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Why? Because maybe if equity crowdfunding were legal, they'd be getting a payday (albeit very, very tiny one) out of the Oculus deal.

A piece of legislation designed to legalize equity crowdfunding -- called The JOBS Act -- was signed into law two years ago next week. But the SEC neglected to write the necessary rules for 18 months, due largely to fear-mongering ("This will cause another Madoff scandal!"). It finally got around to issuing draft rules last October, but actual implementation remains in a state of limbo.

Oculus VR is a promising company with a long road of development ahead of it, fast-moving competition and no meaningful near-term revenue in sight. Kickstarter is a platform that has made its hands-off role in project crowdfunding very clear. The venture funds are trying to earn a return on behalf of their limited partners, which include pension funds, universities and family offices.

Until the SEC implements the crowdfunding part of the JOBS Act, only accredited investors like venture funds can buy equity in private companies. Any Oculus backer who wishes he or she'd been able to invest should call their Congressman, not complain on a comment board.

Greetings from Planet Facebook

You blink and open your eyes to a fantastic new sun above your head. You're lying in a field of tall grass, but in the distance you hear sounds of machinery. The city. As you lay there, a blimp begins to float into view, its bulbous shape painted in the striking cherry red and stark white ripple of the Coca-Cola logo. "Go Offworld with Coca-Cola today!" bellows a voice from a loudspeaker high above your head. "The adventure of a lifetime awaits... and all you have to do is say yes!" Offworld huh? You haven't been off of Planet Facebook yet — that could be fun. You raise your hand to the sky, pointing a clenched fist towards the blimp above. You extend your thumb upward, offering your endorsement of Coca-Cola. A simple thumbs-up. A like. Sound and light surges around you as your body is levitated, up, up, up into the sky, into space, across a light field of stars, planets, and massive ships. You speed towards a blue, mysterious planet full of secrets, adventure, the unknown. Adventure awaits... and my god you're beginning to feel thirsty. Coke is it.

In the meatspace, a QuenchTube pipes in fresh Coke through a small nipple in your mouth. Yeah, that's better.

0.0001714 in Bitcoin is subtracted from your account.

Welcome to the internet. Facebook's internet.

Everyone will be asking the same question today: why did Facebook buy Oculus VR, makers of a groundbreaking virtual reality headset called the Oculus Rift? The answer, however, is really quite simple. In fact, company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said clearly what this purchase means for Facebook. "We ... want to start focusing on building the next major computing platform that will come after mobile," he told listeners on a conference call. "History suggests that there will be more platforms to come and that whoever builds and defines these will not only shape all the experiences that our industry builds, but also benefit financially and strategically."

What he means is that right now, mobile is the internet, or the next internet at least. Maybe it's not all the way there, but your kids will never know the desktop and "web pages" the way you do now. They will only know how to interact and communicate through discrete applications in the palm of their hand. Snapchat, Instagram, Hangouts. They will only know social games played across oceans, like Words With Friends. And they will never, or rarely, go back to a "computer" or a "browser" to learn, work, or socialize. But Facebook hasn't been able to own that particular space — in fact, it's fighting for just a little corner of it right now. Fighting so hard that it's spinning up its own collection of tiny apps like Paper, Messenger, and Poke (okay, maybe not Poke). It had to buy Instagram and WhatsApp to stay relevant there. Facebook doesn't own mobile — it actually barely even exists in it.

But Facebook's ambition isn't to have a corner somewhere. Its ambition isn't to be an app in a grid on your home screen. For tens of millions of people, sharing photos, communicating with your friends and family, and learning about the world around you already happens through the portal of Facebook, but just a handful isn't enough. Facebook wants to be the internet — hell, in some ways Facebook needs to be the internet — and I don't believe it will settle for anything less.

Your All Stars touch down on the dark blue planet — an environment that appears to be teeming with life, both native and exotic. All around you, green and blue foliage sways in a strong breeze. The light of this planet's sun begins to dip behind the tree line, burning orange and purple on the horizon. A Taco Bell logo dots the yellow sphere, reminding you to try the new Doritos Locos Taco 6, with six times the sizzle. Somewhere nearby, you hear music. You like the beat —a strong four-four with an undulating series of power chords atop. It sounds like something your parents used to listen to, one of the classics like Katy Perry. A Spotify logo materializes in your HUD displaying the track name and artist. Good thing you connected your account. Suddenly your Facesuit vibrates across the shoulders — a message is incoming.

"Hey man, you're on the blue planet too!?" It's your cousin Charlie on a VidMessage. "Meet me at the club just a few clicks from your location — Places bro — and we'll go on some adventures." His head disappears and is replaced with an offer for directions to Gatecrasher Blue, which is in walking distance. You thumbs up the logo and head off in the direction of the sound, assisted by the turn-by-turn.

Your QuenchTube switches over to Ciroc vodka, and you start to feel a buzz. Here comes the night.

The purchase of Oculus may seem like a company hedging its bets, but Chris Dixon at Andreessen Horowitz (a major investor in the startup) explained it quite well. "The way to understand this purchase is to think of Google buying Android in 2005. That confused a lot of people at the time. Facebook believes that virtual reality will become the next major platform, the same way mobile computing did, and they want to make sure they have a big stake in that."

This wouldn't be the first time Facebook has made a play to become the internet — just think about its many privacy encroachments, search initiatives, and attacks on competing companies — but it is the first time that Facebook could legitimately own the window into the next phase of connectivity. And you can be sure that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want to own that window so you can look out onto other people's property — he wants you looking at his property.

"Today's acquisition is a long-term bet on the future of computing. I believe Oculus can be one of the platforms of the future," Zuckerberg said. But Facebook is a business, and so Oculus must fit into its business plan. And of course it does. "We now have Oculus joining us, which long-term can be one of the next important computing platforms. And of course we will continue to focus on our extremely important work of building out our advertising platform as well, as part of this."

"Imagine enjoying a court-side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world, consulting a doctor face-to-face, or even shopping in a virtual store where you can explore the products you're interested in... just by putting on goggles in your own home."

Just like the future envisioned in some of our best science fiction, the things to come are fantastic and exciting, but often tinged with darkness. The most breathtaking vistas can hide something terrifying — something inhuman. The wedding of Oculus VR — a company with a literally boundless vision of things to come — to an entity like Facebook gives us a taste of both, perhaps in equal measure. It's true that no company other than Facebook could connect us together the way that we have been connected in the past decade, but it's also true that no company could taint that experience in quite the same way. As a service, Facebook is inspiring, as a platform, Facebook is scary.

That company now controls one of the most exciting technologies of the past 50 years. A truly revolutionary product that has reignited a dream many felt was all but dead and gone. What it will do with that technology is the only question that remains. I submit that history is an excellent teacher.

So learn your lessons well.

Exhausted and elated, you punch your Extractor switch and a Honda transport drone silently scoops you up for the journey back to Planet Facebook. As you see the blue planet shrink in the distance, you pull up your RealTime Player to revisit the night. You click play.

You blink and open your eyes to a fantastic new sun above your head. You're lying in a field of tall grass, but in the distance you hear sounds of machinery. The city. As you lay there, a blimp begins to float into view, its bulbous shape painted in the striking cherry red and stark white ripple of the Coca-Cola logo. "Go Offworld with Coca-Cola today!" bellows a voice from a loudspeaker high above your head. "The adventure of a lifetime awaits... and all you have to do is say yes!"

Lead image courtesy Condition One

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Interested in The Verge's science coverage? Check it out here.

Facebook Could Give You the Oculus Rift You Always Wanted

The news today that Facebook will buy Oculus—the makers of the best virtual reality experience in existence—caused paroxysms of upsetment and surprise. That's fair! But once the smoke clears, this could turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to the most promising technology we have.

If you've been tracking Oculus since its early days as a Kickstarter project, today's acquisition is frustrating. Facebook is your trying-too-hard uncle; Oculus is the homecoming queen. Of course seeing them together would give you the creeps.

It shouldn't. Oculus offered a beautiful dream, but you can only get so far on Kickstarter funds. Facebook offers the financial wherewithal to make the Oculus Rift a truly mass product, to realize its vision beyond just a gimmick-driven game engine. Even better, it looks like Mark Zuckerberg gets what makes Oculus so special.

Let It Rift

We've seen Oculus do lots of amazing things so far. It can take you up the Game of Thrones ice wall, or turn Unreal Engine 4 games into something that feels very, very real. Even the Navy leans on it for its next-generation war games.

Neat, right? Also limiting. Virtual reality has historically been applied to gaming, and that's how Oculus began as well. But VR's roots—especially the goofy headset version—are from an age that predates the bandwidth we have today, the drive towards connectivity, the densely layered social tissue that Facebook and Twitter and Skype and WhatsApp have spent the last decade cultivating. Despite lofty dreams of a VR internet, technical limitations have made VR games a closed circuit, a way for you and maybe one friend to pretend that you weren't in the room—or mall concourse—you were actually in. But it can be so much more. Facebook gets that.

In a call today to discuss the acquisition, Zuck said more than once that his company was preparing for "the platforms of tomorrow." And that's what Oculus provides: a platform. A place for games, sure, but also for chat, for education, for literally anything that involves human interaction. If it seems farfetched that a goofy headset could achieve that kind of ubiquity, remember that Android and iOS didn't exist 10 years ago; now they're all-encompassing.

That Facebook recognizes this not only speaks to its own ambitions—and its manic urge to hedge for the future—but also manages to broaden those of Oculus. Left to its own devices, the company could very well have turned Rift into the absolutely most immersive way to play Left for Dead. There's value in that! But by pushing past games and into hospitals, and classrooms, and kitchens, and battleships, Facebook will give Oculus every chance to realize its potential.

Think of it this way. Without Facebook, Oculus's best case scenario was to bootstrap its way to becoming a real product that gamers could embrace until Sony's Project Morpheus came along. Still great, but niche. With Facebook, Oculus will go on sale, soon. And when it does, it'll have ample resources focused on letting you do more than just mash buttons.

The Worst Case

Your worries aren't totally unfounded, of course. There are a whole lot of complications that come with Facebook owning Oculus. Starting with the biggest concern whenever a big company chews up a small one: Will it disappear and die?

It's a reasonable question. Google bought Sparrow, now Sparrow's dead. Yahoo! bought [LITERALLY ANYTHING YAHOO EVER BOUGHT], and now it's dead or dying. But Facebook, so far, seems to be doing right by its marquee acquisitions. Instagram's not just going strong, it's actually adding useful features. The Branch team is still working to make Facebook Conversations better, by all accounts. It's too early to say anything about WhatsApp, but Facebook has promised to let it act as an independent company as well.

Besides, it's not like Facebook can subsume a hardware company the way it did, say, FriendFeed. When it says Oculus will continue independently, and that its main goal is to allow it to succeed as a platform, there's every reason to believe that's true. Remember, Facebook is buying Instagram and WhatsApp and Oculus not because it wants all of those things to become Facebook. It's buying them on the off chance one of them becomes what replaces Facebook.

A more rational concern, though, is what the ultimate Oculus experience will be under Facebook. One prominent developer (!) has already jumped ship on the news, and more could follow:

We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.

— Markus Persson (@notch) March 25, 2014

That's probably a short-term concern; once developers realize that Oculus is the same old Oculus—assuming it is—it shouldn't have much difficulty attracting enough action to keep you entertained. Especially since it's currently, for all intents and purposes, the only game in town.

The bigger, longer-term issue might be how exactly Facebook plans to monetize Oculus. Zuck said earlier today that he's not interested in making a profit off of the hardware (which is good!) but that "there may be advertising" (which is bad!), not to mention various retail pushes. Why go to the mall when you can sift through the sales rack from the comfort of your Rift?

Which brings us to the last question about a Facebook-Rift pairing: What kind of future are we looking at? Virtual reality can bring us closer to people who are at a great distance, but it disconnects us from the world we're currently in. It's one thing when you're just playing a quick game; you've got the same blinders on whether it's a Xbox 360 or an Rift. But attending a lecture? A family reunion? Piloting a drone? It's miraculous that we'll be able to do those things from the comfort of our compugoggles. It's also a little bit terrifying.

But those are questions for society at large, not for Facebook and Oculus. Right now, today, the most amazing technology we've seen in years just found a champion that can make it a reality. That's something to applaud, not scowl at. That's how this is supposed to work.

Unless you ponied up for that Kickstarter. Sorry, guys, that sucks.

Facebook's Oculus sale proves that videogames now write the first draft of history

Facebook bought Oculus Rift for $2 billion yesterday. But I digress.

I want to tell you a story about Oculus' creator, Palmer Luckey.

Last year, at our first-ever videogame arts and culture conference Twofivesix, we had the pleasure of having Palmer on-stage to talk about Oculus. He shared the stage with Dance Central project director Matt Boch for 40 minutes and it was wonderful.

To many, Palmer is a stereotypical gamer. He forgot his wallet on the way to the airport. He wore sandals. He even did a barrel roll on-stage to demonstrate how new players confusingly navigated in Team Fortress 2.

But what struck me most was what drove him to explore VR. His voice bristled with emotion when explaining that the biggest reason he wanted to create the Oculus wasn't some grand future of human-computer interaction or virtual spaces or Gibson-esque cyberspace. He just wanted to play games.

In a past era, that "narrowness" would have been treated as a liability. That just is a potent one. For the past 30 years, the common wisdom has been that games are a land unto themselves. What happens there is only applicable to games, and nowhere else.

And in fact, the first reporting on the acquisition seems reflect this bias. In Slate, Lily Hay Newman casts a very small net:

It may seem like Oculus VR doesn't fit into any of Facebook's existing products, but if you look at Facebook in terms of gaming—virtual reality's biggest and most obvious strength right now—you can see where Facebook may be going with this.

Aside from the host of non-gaming uses that have already been documented since the dev kits of the Rift have been released (Jerry's Apartment!!!), Newman's statement shares a similar refrain that gamers have been told for decades.

"What you do doesn't really matter to the outside world," we're told. "It's just, games after all."

But there have been rumblings. First, there was the Wiimote, a clever device cobbled together with the same tech used to trigger airbags, that started finding non-conventional applications from DJing to robotics. Then there was the Kinect, which launched with the Xbox 360 and became the fastest-selling consumer electronics device ever. It soon began finding new life in the digital arts and hospitals. Later, it was the clumsy executions of "gamification," an attempt to turn game design into something everyday business can use. And now there's Oculus Rift, which caught the eye of one of the biggest platforms in the world.

The point is if you really watch games—I mean, really watch games—you'll see that future of consumer technology, and perhaps, the future of how we interact with machines and each other, begins with games. Oculus isn't the pinnacle of this convergence. It's the beginning.

And for the 1.2 billion daily active users of Facebook who may not have know anything about virtual reality until today, this is a cosigning of a big, big vision. Regardless of whatever trepidation you may have about what Facebook does with the product, there is no doubt that virtual reality has now become a mainstream concept. And it is unsurprising that Facebook, which aspires to be the absolute center of human communication, would turn to a piece of technology that utterly enraptures and envelops.

To what end, I don't deign to know and frankly, I don't care. This is a culture site, not a business one. Life for Oculus, post-acquisition, could be wonderful or it could be terrible. The original Kickstarter backers, like Minecraft creator Notch, could be jilted that their dollars ended up in Mark Zuckerberg's hands or elated that they were first on-board a grand journey. We could get great games or we could get terrible ones.

But if we take a step backwards—and remember that Maker Studios, one of the biggest distributors of gaming content on YouTube, was acquired by Disney this week as well—it becomes clear that the outside is beginning to wake to the idea that something is happening within games. They may not be able to identify it, but there's a palpable change in the air that lingers in fits and whispers.

Palmer, like many who grew up playing games and look to integrate them into their lives in new and exciting ways, understands something very deep and central to who we are. If it's got Facebook's attention, we'd do well to listen.

Header image via Serge Galyonkin

Introducing Michael Abrash, Oculus Chief Scientist

I'm tremendously excited to join Oculus, and when I think back, it's astonishing how unlikely the path to this moment is. I've told most of the parts of this story before, but never all together, and the narrative, now spanning twenty years, just keeps getting more remarkable.

Image credit Steve Grever, PC Perspective
Palmer, Michael, and John @ QuakeCon 2012

Sometime in 1993 or 1994, I read Snow Crash, and for the first time thought something like the Metaverse might be possible in my lifetime. Around the same time, I saw the first leaked alpha version of Doom. I knew John Carmack from exchanges on the M&T bulletin board a couple of years earlier, when both John and I were learning how to write 3D graphics code, so I sent him mail saying how blown away I was.

John replied that his mother lived in Seattle, and maybe we could get together next time he was in town. Eventually he came by to visit, and we had a good conversation, in the course of which he asked if I'd like to come work at Id; being in the middle of shipping the first couple of versions of Windows NT, I politely declined.

In late 1994 or early 1995, John let me know he was going to be back in town, and asked if I wanted to have dinner. We met at Thai Chef in Bellevue. I knew he was going to try to hire me, and I knew I was going to say no. But he didn't get around to doing that until after he had talked for a good two hours about how he was going to build cyberspace, and by that time it was hard for me to imagine doing anything else. John was as good as his word, and Quake was the start of a world of connected gaming that thrives to this day.

Quake was seminal and high-impact – it's amazing what a team of ten mostly untrained twenty-somethings in the Black Cube in Mesquite, Texas, managed to accomplish – but it wasn't the Metaverse. It was still, in the end, images on a screen, not Hiro Protagonist literally fencing for his life. And so John and I went our separate ways, John to continue to refine what he had created, and me to wander through a series of interesting projects that, in the end, always left me wishing for the pure focus, intensity, and impact of those two years working with John.

Fast-forward fourteen years. I'm at Valve – which started its existence by licensing the Quake source code – looking for the next big platform shift, and I conclude that it's augmented reality. Thanks to Valve's unique structure, I'm able to start working on that, along with several other interested people, including Atman Binstock, who I recruited over coffee at St. James Espresso in Kirkland; Atman is thinking about moving to Paris and writing a debugger, but finally decides to join up. John, meanwhile, is poking at virtual reality, seeing if it's finally feasible. He sends me mail on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of Quake's release, saying that he has a feeling that something really big is just around the corner, something bigger than anything that's happened so far. He's talking about VR.

Then two things happen at about the same time. On one path, Palmer develops his first VR prototype, John and Palmer Luckey connect, Oculus forms and its Kickstarter is wildly successful, DK1 ships, and John becomes Oculus CTO. Meanwhile, I read Ready Player One, strongly recommend it to several members of the AR group, and we come to the conclusion that VR is potentially more interesting than we thought, and far more tractable than AR. We switch over to working on VR just as Palmer's homebrew project is morphing into Oculus.

From that point, both VR paths have been pretty well documented, Oculus's in this blog, in the press, and all over the Internet, and Valve's in my blog and talks. The end result, a year and a half later, is a VR system that can create a sense of presence – the feeling, below the conscious level, that you really are someplace. This is an experience that no one except a few researchers using awkward, hugely expensive equipment had ever had, but within the next couple of years it should be available in a comfortable form factor at a consumer price. In the space of two years, a relative handful of people at two companies, none of them VR experts at the start, somehow managed to resurrect VR from the trash heap of technologies-that-never-were and make it the most exciting technology around.

What VR Could, Should, and Almost Certainly Will Be within Two Years, Steam Dev Days 2014

That wouldn't have happened if Palmer hadn't developed his prototype. If John hadn't been investigating VR at the right time. If they hadn't run into each other. If I hadn't been looking for a new platform. If Palmer hadn't met up with the right people to form Oculus and build DK1. If the community hadn't been so overwhelmingly supportive of VR and the Kickstarter. If Atman had decided to go do a debugger instead. If a team hadn't assembled at Valve, done a bunch of hard work to show that low persistence, excellent tracking, and a well-calibrated and well-tuned system enabled presence, and shared that knowledge with Oculus. If I hadn't come across Ready Player One at the right time. Heck, if I hadn't come across Snow Crash all those years ago, or the Doom alpha, or known John from the M&T bulletin board, or if I hadn't known Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington from my days at Microsoft, in which case I would have had no reason to help them license the Quake source code…

You get the idea. We're on the cusp of what I think is not The Next Big Platform, but rather simply The Final Platform – the platform to end all platforms – and the path here has been so improbable that I can only shake my head.

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place on Tuesday. A lot of what it will take to make VR great is well understood at this point, so it's engineering, not research; hard engineering, to be sure, but clearly within reach. For example, there are half a dozen things that could be done to display panels that would make them better for VR, none of them pie in the sky. However, it's expensive engineering. And, of course, there's also a huge amount of research to do once we reach the limits of current technology, and that's not only expensive, it also requires time and patience – fully tapping the potential of VR will take decades. That's why I've written before that VR wouldn't become truly great until some company stepped up and invested the considerable capital to build the right hardware – and that it wouldn't be clear that it made sense to spend that capital until VR was truly great. I was afraid that that Catch-22 would cause VR to fail to achieve liftoff.

That worry is now gone. Facebook's acquisition of Oculus means that VR is going to happen in all its glory. The resources and long-term commitment that Facebook brings gives Oculus the runway it needs to solve the hard problems of VR – and some of them are hard indeed. I now fully expect to spend the rest of my career pushing VR as far ahead as I can.

It's great to be working with John again after all these years, and with that comes a sense of deja vu. It feels like it did when I went to Id, but on steroids – this time we're working on technology that will change not just computer gaming, but potentially how all of us interact with computers, information, and each other every day. I think it's going to be the biggest game-changer I've ever seen – and I've seen quite a lot over the last 57 years.

I can't wait to see how far we can take it.

- Michael