how I think this could go:

A, FB has minimal involvement, and OVR continues as before;

B, FB gets involved, maybe makes some actually sensible changes/additions:

* "hey guys, why not add a camera and ability to see passthrough and do AR stuff?..."

C, FB gets involved, totally screws it up:

* makes HW non-trivial to access from 3rd party software

* breaks or takes away LibOVR

* ...

D, FB buys it and squanders or buries it.

so, yeah, it depends...

but, granted, I had tried developing some for the DK1, but personally wasn't really able to get over its tendency to rapidly cause motion sickness.

also, an inability to see anything external without having to take it off quickly got rather annoying. was left wishing there was some sort of convenient "pass-through" button, and better still if it were wireless, ...

but, yeah, can still be cool, if the overall experience can be made better.

admittedly, I have actually had better results here with just using 3D anaglyph.

yes, anaglyph sucks and screws up colors and makes eyes uncomfortable and causes lingering aftereffects, ... but, at least it doesn't really cause any more motion sickness than normal, or some of the other drawbacks of an HMD.

granted, polarized light glasses better (no weird color effects), but requires an expensive monitor and more expensive glasses, ...

so, yeah, could be good, if it all becomes less expensive.

though, apparently, the experience can be better with more expensive anaglyph glasses (which use secondary color filters to help neutralize the colors from the primary filters, ...). but, alas, not as good for cheaper/generic glasses.

it also has an advantage working with normal monitors.

though there is a drawback in that (of the rare few games that support anaglyph) few support either customizable color filters or multiple types of glasses (they will hard-code red/blue or red/cyan and call it done, which isn't so good if one only has, say, green/magenta glasses).

it is almost a mystery if this could be combined with IR head-tracking to good effect (such that the monitor could be seen as a movable window into the scene, with the location and angle of the head being used to calculate the view through this window).

not sure the cheapest technology for this. likely possibilities are either using acoustic processing, or using IR LEDs and photoresistors (or photodiodes), probably with one part on the users' head (or glasses) and the other part stuck onto the monitor (such as via some sort of adhesive or double-sided tape), potentially connected up to the computer via something akin to a USB GPIO board.

though, for glasses-mounted LEDs, they would probably be connected to AA or AAA batteries or similar (then it could be wireless).

or such...

Good lord we're all doomed !

I hope that Oculus VR will stay an "independant" company even if FB owns it but it seems to be compromised...

If the facebook squander this opportunity in a bid to tie it to their platform, someone else (Valve?) might step into this area and get it done. The guy who owns Oculus seems very enthusiastic about bringing VR to the masses, hopefully he retains enough autonomy to prevent this being locked down.

To be honest this was probably Oculus VRs long term buisness goal. They wanted people to pay them so they could develop cool tech Kickstarter, then the Dev Kits but, once everybody has a Dev Kit who are they going to sell a retail version to?

Inspite of Sonys recent VR announcement I really don't think the mass market consumer is ready for 3D VR goggles yet. Sure I've got a DevKit and its fun to play around with but the Tech just is not there yet. Its too bulky. Its too claustrophobic and above all else you look like a complete tool when using it. It's probably at least another 10 years before this stuff is really ready for the mainstream.

after my initial "OMGWTF! also does that mean Carmack works for Facebook now?" reaction. I had a think about it and read Palmer's recent Reddit AMA... and I think this is actually a good thing.

If you've been following Oculus from the beginning you'll know Palmer has been saying again and again that they really need a specific type of screen, but they they're not big enough to get a manufacturer to listen to them, so they just have to settle for mobile phone left overs.

Well now they are a big player.. they have near limitless resources to get exactly the hardware they need at pressumably much lower prices than they'd have had to pay before.

This makes me imagine the Rift will come out sooner and cheaper than before.

Palmer has also said that Facebook intends to be very hands off and let them continue with their vision... but also the possibilities the Oculus guys had put off as impossible dreams, now become feasible.

They've also said you wont need to log into facebook to use it, or have any ads appearing (other than if developers put them in their games)... further they now have the resources to put a heavy investment into rift developers.

So I think this could actually be the best thing to happen to VR in a long time.

I'm lucky I had the chance to play with DK1. It was amazing experience, a breakthrough technology that worth a lot more than 2B in the long run.

IMHO oculus rift is doomed from now. Even if a scenario where Oculus remain a completely independent entity (i.e. FB sees nothing from this investment), Oculus already lost a lot of its community, especially those who dont like facebook (http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/25/notch-minecraft-on-oculus-canceled-facebook-creeps-me-out)

but, granted, I had tried developing some for the DK1, but personally wasn't really able to get over its tendency to rapidly cause motion sickness.

also, an inability to see anything external without having to take it off quickly got rather annoying. was left wishing there was some sort of convenient "pass-through" button, and better still if it were wireless, ...

What of the PrioVR. I don't know much about oculus and don't like the look of giant head case stuff but i like what i saw in PrioVR and it got more than what it needed on kickstarter in a day.
*The oculus rift will be compatible with PrioVR.

Quote from a polygon article:

As Iribe describes it, this is the pitch that Zuckerberg made to Oculus. "We don’t have to make a big margin on the hardware, and you guys do right now… we’re a software platform company," Zuckerberg said, as quoted by Iribe. "If we do this together, we can ship this thing at cost and buy in bigger scale and we can support you on relationships with custom components that you couldn’t get otherwise."

How is that not fantastic news for consumers?

I was already a little peeved they didn't give any sort of bonus to the original kickstarter backers. I went in for 300 bucks on day 2 and for DK2 they didn't give us a discount (understandable pre-acquisition) but they could have given us priority ordering or some sort of other low cost bonus for being an early supporter. I felt a little underappreciated. Now I feel a lot underappreciated. I didn't want my contribution to go to facebook. A company who focuses on monetization and microtransactions as a fundamental part of games. I wanted VR to be about the experience and not about squeezing the last dime out people by manipulating them.

It seems like Palmer's incentive to sell is so they can use the money to manufacture custom parts. I can't see Facebook not wanting some sort of required integration. Perhaps some sort of required Facebook Credit interaction. Some sort of facebook login. They hinted at a "VR Launcher" but I can't see myself wanting that either. I liked the simplicity of the dev kit. You didn't need special software running in the background or some strange interface that felt like that bloat-ware you get with printers. It was just a simple library you could integrate into your game and you got this great experience.

It's not that Facebook doesn't give any "pros" to Oculus but the potential "cons" are entirely too scary for me.

I was already a little peeved they didn't give any sort of bonus to the original kickstarter backers. I went in for 300 bucks on day 2 and for DK2 they didn't give us a discount (understandable pre-acquisition) but they could have given us priority ordering or some sort of other low cost bonus for being an early supporter. I felt a little underappreciated.

Wait, did you donate $300, or did you get something for it? Cause $300 was the price of the DK1... if you got one of those then that sounds like your transaction was complete and you got what you paid for. I don't expect nVidia to give me a discount every time they release a new graphics card.