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A review by mkesten
The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blak J. Harris
2.0
“The History of the Future” is either the worst name for this book, or perhaps a tongue-in-cheek reference to one character’s reference to the impact virtual reality is expected to have on the gaming industry over the next few decades.
This book is not a history of the future.
For a few bright, shining years a very young man, Palmer Lucky, headed his own tech start-up in the promising field of virtual reality gaming. Virtual reality is really a synthetic, immersive gaming environment in 3D. Lucky and his colleagues sold the company, Oculus, for billions to facebook.
On the advice trusted venture capitalists, Mark Zuckerberg made one of his big bets in buying Oculus believing that it was the best of several attempts to bring virtual reality mainstream.
Given Zuckerberg’s resources, it was not a bad bet in my estimation.
Virtual reality has phenomenal upside, even for non-gamers like me. Humans use unconscionable amounts of resources to motor themselves around the planet to do things that could fairly be done in a virtual environment. Go to and from work. Visit the doctor. Go to school. Visit aged relatives. Attend a business meeting. Attend a concert. And the list goes on.
On one hand, this book is a story of a start-up. It is also the story of the rise and fall of a naïf and a sidebar to the story of Donald Trump...I kid you not! Lucky made the mistake of contributing to a non-profit supporting the election of Donald Trump that was labelled racist, white supremacist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic. When news of his involvement leaked, his future with the company and facebook was doomed.
More interesting to me, however, were the arguments Mark Zuckerberg made to Oculus. The biggest, of course, was the price Zuck was willing to pay. But Zuck also wooed them with the exclusivity of building the only interface with a facebook “experience,” and thus an attraction to developers and an automatic lock on potentially one billion users.
Zuckerberg seemed to be pitching some kind of a VR facebook experience, but the developers at Oculus were thinking of hitting a home run with a gamer experience. It seems that that buyer and seller were in different ball parks.
And this in a multi-billion dollar deal.
At face value it looks like the sellers really didn’t look closely enough at their suitor because immediately after the acquisition the principals were scratching their heads over attempts by facebook to integrate them physically in their workspace and culture.
For example, everybody at facebook used Apple computers, whereas the hardcore Oculus gamers were mostly PC users.
Also, the Oculus guys saw the advantages of leaving their games open to be used on other platforms. Zuck nixed that.
Oculus’ early fans were horrified that the platform was being developed by the evil facebook. The culture of facebook was and is so foreign to gamers. And we’re not just talking semantics.
Gamers really are different. And the games market is so huge that it’s really difficult to reorient them from the consoles and open source culture they come from. As big as facebook is, Zuck really bumped up into an immovable force.
In the couple of years since the facebook acquisition, Oculus devices have sold moderately well behind market leader SONY, and ahead of HTC. They are selling in the millions, good but not the killer app they expected.
This story is far from over.
This book is not a history of the future.
For a few bright, shining years a very young man, Palmer Lucky, headed his own tech start-up in the promising field of virtual reality gaming. Virtual reality is really a synthetic, immersive gaming environment in 3D. Lucky and his colleagues sold the company, Oculus, for billions to facebook.
On the advice trusted venture capitalists, Mark Zuckerberg made one of his big bets in buying Oculus believing that it was the best of several attempts to bring virtual reality mainstream.
Given Zuckerberg’s resources, it was not a bad bet in my estimation.
Virtual reality has phenomenal upside, even for non-gamers like me. Humans use unconscionable amounts of resources to motor themselves around the planet to do things that could fairly be done in a virtual environment. Go to and from work. Visit the doctor. Go to school. Visit aged relatives. Attend a business meeting. Attend a concert. And the list goes on.
On one hand, this book is a story of a start-up. It is also the story of the rise and fall of a naïf and a sidebar to the story of Donald Trump...I kid you not! Lucky made the mistake of contributing to a non-profit supporting the election of Donald Trump that was labelled racist, white supremacist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic. When news of his involvement leaked, his future with the company and facebook was doomed.
More interesting to me, however, were the arguments Mark Zuckerberg made to Oculus. The biggest, of course, was the price Zuck was willing to pay. But Zuck also wooed them with the exclusivity of building the only interface with a facebook “experience,” and thus an attraction to developers and an automatic lock on potentially one billion users.
Zuckerberg seemed to be pitching some kind of a VR facebook experience, but the developers at Oculus were thinking of hitting a home run with a gamer experience. It seems that that buyer and seller were in different ball parks.
And this in a multi-billion dollar deal.
At face value it looks like the sellers really didn’t look closely enough at their suitor because immediately after the acquisition the principals were scratching their heads over attempts by facebook to integrate them physically in their workspace and culture.
For example, everybody at facebook used Apple computers, whereas the hardcore Oculus gamers were mostly PC users.
Also, the Oculus guys saw the advantages of leaving their games open to be used on other platforms. Zuck nixed that.
Oculus’ early fans were horrified that the platform was being developed by the evil facebook. The culture of facebook was and is so foreign to gamers. And we’re not just talking semantics.
Gamers really are different. And the games market is so huge that it’s really difficult to reorient them from the consoles and open source culture they come from. As big as facebook is, Zuck really bumped up into an immovable force.
In the couple of years since the facebook acquisition, Oculus devices have sold moderately well behind market leader SONY, and ahead of HTC. They are selling in the millions, good but not the killer app they expected.
This story is far from over.