$2 billion worth of Oculus VR

[Core Tip] Facebook, with $400 million trillion in cash, plus about 2 billion of the 23.1 million shares of Facebook shares, uses the Facebook to buy Oculus VR. But Why does Facebook buy Oculus VR? and What is the reason for the Facebook takeover of Oculus VR?

August 1, 2012, only 19-year-old teenager Palmer Luckey put his own invention of the Oculus Rift put on the Kickstarter, when he began to raise the time, the use of propaganda is step into the Game, when young Palmer Luckey at that time probably didn't think too much, his intention is only in the garage to make a more interesting things, at that time he probably did not think that after two years, the acquisition of their incredibly will be social giant Facebook, now show in Oculus VR is not just a game, Facebook, the social internet giant, will lead Oculus VR to the life.

　　maybe The scene in the matrix is going to be staged in your life--take your Oculus Rift in the morning, then enter your Facebook account, through the voice will be able to direct your virtual characters to visit friends ' homes, if you are tired of walking on the roadside to open a portal, into a Facebook popular game World ...

What's Oculus Rift?

Oculus Rift is a head-and-wear virtual reality (VR) display that enables your vision to reach immersive virtual reality experiences as you enter the game.

The head-worn display is currently priced at 350 dollars. It has two eyepiece, each eyepiece resolution is 960x1080, relies on the binocular vision merging to have the 1920x1080 resolution, the frequency is high Hz. And it can connect a computer or a game machine via a dedicated cable. It also has gyro sensors, accelerometer control angle and geomagnetic sensor positioning, the second generation of infrared optical positioning tracking can accurately track the location of the user's head.

Thanks to the Oculus Rift's disruptive innovation to the gaming experience, game developers flocked to the current Rift development Kit, which offers unreal DK, Unreal Engine 4, and Unity 4 integrated suite engine. But the biggest problem with the developer version is that the resolution is too low and not comfortable to wear, and because the Rift optical lens has a spherical aberration, all the games that want to board the Rift need to be redesigned to show the normal picture.

There are currently two Oculus Rift rivals: Kopin Trimersion,kopin, the main supplier of the US military's head-worn display system, is much richer than Oculus, both in patent reserves and in industry resources; PS4 Project from Sony Morpheus, and the integration of the PlayStation move Body sense Controller and DUALSHOCK4 handle controller technology, and Sony in the gaming industry for many years to accumulate, presumably in the number of games is absolutely repressive.

The growth history of Oculus VR

Oculus Rift landed on August 1, 2012 KickStarter began public fund-raising, in one months to raise funds to nearly 2.5 million U.S. dollars, than the Oculus team initially planned to raise 250,000 dollars doubled 10 times times.

On June 17, 2013, Oculus VR announced the acquisition of a round of investment of $16 million from Spark Capital and Matrix.

In August, John Carmack, the father of the first person shooter, joined Oculus Rift as CTO.

At the end of 2013, Oculus VR's angel investor a16z the 75 million-dollar round of financing.

At the end of 2013, Oculus VR announced that it would launch a new virtual reality headset due to cash adequacy.

On March 26, 2014, Facebook bought Oculus VR for about 2 billion of $400 million in cash plus 23.1 million shares of Facebook shares, which, according to the two sides ' betting agreement, would pay an extra 300 million dollars for Oculus. Reward。

What did Facebook buy?

Interestingly, the game author and Mojang studio head, Markus Persson, said today that as Facebook acquired Oculus VR, the development plan for the launch of the VR version of Rift on Oculus Minecraft equipment had now been canceled- Because the little Mojang studio can't afford Facebook, just hide away.

Why is that? Facebook, which relies on user relationships and social networking, has been going on for years, and now young people are getting more and more uncomfortable with Facebook, and everyone feels that Facebook has little to do with it, and they're more likely to turn to Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp, which is why Facebook bought Instagram and WHATSAPP, the same social attributes but more private products helped Mark Zuckerberg's partial dislike of Facebook Young people remain, and for Facebook, the mobile platform has a little bit of security.

So why buy Oculus VR?

Not only do Oculus VR companies need more money to improve their hardware, but Facebook wants to make connections between people more tightly through virtual reality technology, and more importantly, Instagram and WhatsApp are not enough to attract young people. Cool ", and virtual reality technology lets Facebook, which no longer attracts young people, become" cool "again!

Facebook spent 2 billion of dollars buying a future where young people would feel "cool" and buying a chance to get young people back on the Facebook platform.