Facebook Is Buying Oculus Virtual Reality for $2 Billion! What can happen next?
Oculus VR has been showing us some mind-blowing virtual reality gadgets lately, be it Oculus Rift or the new Crystal Cove prototype, now this news is going to blow your mind too! And what? Its from Facebook again, which recently acquired WhatsApp. Facebook has announced that it is buying Oculus — the future of virtual reality, for $2 billion. And this amount includes $400 million in cash with about $1.6 billion in stock. Ofcourse, this is not a small amount. But it is smaller when compared to the $16 billion sum paid for the messaging app!
What is Oculus VR?
Oculus VR, is a leader in virtual reality technology, where sony has just now emerged to show its Morpheus. When the company started a Kickstarter campaign for their first project, they successfully raised over $2.4 million in funding from project backers and supporters. Oculus basically makes 3D virtual reality headsets. And the firm has already shown us a variety of ways the headset can be amazing!
Here is what Mark Zuckerburg has to say about Oculus VR
Mark quotes on the acuistion on his Fb post, and here is a part of it.
Oculus’s mission is to enable you to experience the impossible. Their technology opens up the possibility of completely new kinds of experiences.
After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.
This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.
These are just some of the potential uses. By working with developers and partners across the industry, together we can build many more. One day, we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people.
How can Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus VR be positive?
Facebook with Oculus can really bring out an interesting and useful platform for us in the near feature. It was a time that people thought virtual reality could be only in gaming, but now things have changed and Facebook can actually bring out more features for chatting, sharing, learning and many more. By far, this is what we also expect of! And this can also be understood by Mark’s quote above. Also, with Facebook we could expect a commercial version of the Oculus headset sooner than announced.
How can it go worse?
So far, acquisition has been a term that expands as “buy and bury” and this suits majorly for Google, Yahoo and many more firms. But for Facebook be its Instagram acquisition or WhatsApp acquistion, both have actually helped in their growth although its very soon to talk about Whatsapp, Facebook has already announced that Whatsapp will operate separately under FB).
Even for Oculus Mark has said , “Oculus will continue operating independently within Facebook to achieve this”.
Lets wait to watch more!