Oculus VR Now is Facebook's Baby

On Tuesday this week, Facebook announced that it acquired Oculus VR, the company behind the Oculus Rift gaming handset in a cash and stock deal. The deal was valued $2 billion.

The terms of deal include $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares of Facebook common stock.

"Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.

Facebook says that Oculus will remain headquartered in Irvine and it will also continue with the development of the Oculus Rift platform. The Oculus team was never really committed to bring out a consumer version of the VR headset to the market. However, more than 75,000 developers had already ordered developer kits for the technology.

Oculus is the social media giant’s second major acquisition in less than two months’ time. Last month, Facebook acquired Whatsapp for a whopping sum.

In a conference, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook said that it was a move taken keeping into mind the future, Buying Oculus is a long term bet on the future of computing for Facebook.

The idea that Oculus represents the future of computing isn't relegated to just investors. Shane Hudson, a London-based web developer, says he thinks that Oculus has the ability to offer up a “fully immersed experience." Hudson thinks that experience could extend from tasks such as "playing a game, watching a film, reading a book or even chatting your friends 'face-to-face' despite being on the other side of the world."

Hudson works with data visualizations and he sees the Oculus Rift as giving an entire new way of working with that kind of data. "It's a very interesting technology that could go in any number of directions, much as the web did," Hudson says.

That's what Zuckerberg thinks too. He sees Oculus's current focus around games and entertainment as just the beginning. 

"Oculus has the potential to be the most social platform ever,"

"Oculus has the potential to be the most social platform ever," he said. "Imagine not just sharing moments with your friends online but entire experiences."

Zuckerberg also said that buying Oculus was a way of investing in the best and brightest players in computing. He said Oculus is "years ahead in terms of technology" but that "all the best and brightest in the space already work there."

Over the last two years, the Oculus team has amassed tons of talent, including many of the best minds in virtual reality and in gaming. John Carmack, the co-founder of id Software — and the lead programmer of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom andQuake, joined Oculus in Aug. 2012 as its CTO.

Facebook has faced backlash before. After Facebook announced it was going to purchase Instagram, users threatened to leave the service en masse. However, the users did not leave and Instagram has been on the rise ever since!  

Zuckerberg is clearly hoping the same situation will take place with Oculus VR. He would definitely not mind a bit of a backlash for a better future!