Oculus Rift: 2015 Launch Unlikely, But Not Impossible 74
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this week during Facebook's 2015 Q1 earnings call, the company seemed to suggest that a 2015 Oculus Rift release date was unlikely. At least, that's what a report about the call from Gamasutra indicated, saying, "It doesn't sound like Oculus will ship the consumer version of its Oculus Rift VR headset this year, or at least not in very large quantities." However, an equity analyst has chimed in to say that the language used during the call shouldn't be interpreted colloquially, concluding that "...there is no information here that rules out Oculus shipping in 2015."
Okay (Score:4, Interesting)
Okay, why does my "bullshit detector" go off. Not on the article, but I thought I'd pop onto Wikipedia and find out when Oculus Rift was first started as a project.
There's no mention. They mention the huge buyout in 2014, but no mention of the start of it, even under the "History" section.
And only one of the citations is from before that - an article in 2012. Now, it's not a deep secret, I can google and find stuff from that kind of era discussing it, but why OMIT this information in the History section of your own product's page?
Maybe it's because, 3 years on from the kickstarter, and millions and millions of dollars later, there's still no commercial product?
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Wikipedia, got it.
Well, it's not 'their' page. Doesn't wikipedia even discourage companies from editing pages about themselves or their products?
Which brings us to...
That aside - yeah, by now there's quite a few competing pro
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Probably the same reason most of us don't bother, because some yahoo has the article set to page them the second that someone edits it. They then jump up and down and revert it while throwing a hissy fit in the talk section.
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I've always thought that was a rather simple cop-out.
1. Use wikipedia as a source for information.
2. Find it lacking.
3. Refuse to address that because reasons.
4. Go to 1.
That doesn't make sense, does it?
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Let me fix that for you:
1. Use wikipedia as a source for information.
2. Find it lacking.
3. Fix and source information with verifiable information from more than one party.
4. Watch revert happen in under 1 hour.
5. Watch talk page explode when hissy fit is thrown
6. Refute revert with more facts
7. Get temp banned by editors for 'reasons'
8. Give up.
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Let me fix that for you by adding:
9. Don't go to 1 again. Ever.
Alternatively:
4-8. Don't happen, you just contributed, and anybody who went with step 1 in the first place is thankful for it.
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4-8 happen quite a bit. Especially on articles relating to non-scientific subjects.
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I'm not disputing that - I haven't had it happen, but I've read the stories.
I just feel that it's strange for some people to say they won't contribute to wikipedia - because they fear somebody else with an agenda will just revert their edits.. on any subject.. all the time.. with nobody backing them up despite facts - and at the same time complain about lack of certain information on wikipedia. At the point where they won't contribute, themselves, they should have written off wikipedia as a source of infor
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Having watched the edit wars, editor sanctions, and all the rest over the last year on a variety of subjects. I can say that there are cliques of editors that have an agenda. They don't care about a NPOV, they want their POV. Even when ABCOM steps in and kicks them out, they'll come back either as someone else or a new account and continue to do what they were before.
You want a good example from the last year? Take a look at the gamergate article. Not only did ABCOM step in, it banned 5 editors, two of
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I think we're getting way out of context here. OP's issue was indeed just a 2 minute thing, and any potential power-mad editor reverting entirely hypothetical. Even if the OP feels that hypothesis to be sound, then OP shouldn't refer to wikipedia in the first place - or at least not complain about not finding certain information there.
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The biggest edits I ever did on Wikipedia, many years ago now, were to the articles about ZX Spectrum games.
I spent hours loading up games in emulators, capturing screenshots, writing out information, etc. Most of the articles for those games existed already, I just did things like link the developers, publishers, etc. categorised them, added screenshots where they were missing.
By a year later, every screenshot I'd done had been removed. Not because of copyright - but because when I'd first done them, I'd
Re: Okay (Score:2)
They have the rightman to implement it. Carmack is known for delivering quality technologies and taking the time to release them when they are finished.
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Except that you still have a fucking PC strapped to your face!
aka "A stock pumper" (Score:3)
Whenever some "analyst" says something like a release "isn't impossible", the only reason I can think of for saying such a think is a "pump and dump" stock scheme. :(
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Oh, I know Facebook bought them out. Which leaves me wondering *why* someone would try to "pump" the stock.
I mean, seriously, what's the point of crying out "it could still happen!" when everyone is saying it's unlikely at best?
*shrug* Maybe the analyst is a hard-core gamer with a bad case of wishful thinking.
Kind of like the "Duke Nuke'em Forever" fans were. :P
watch your six (Score:2)
The phrase in TFS was "there is no information here that rules out ...", which is functionally pretty much the same as "not impossible". See the double negatives?
I guess there's nothing there that rules out being buggered by a unicorn either.
Weasel words and bet hedging.
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An analyst is generally not a person eating his own dog food, it's a person trying to sell his insight of the market to third parties as investment advice. What it means in practice is that you're trying to make a lot of statements that make you seem smart in hindsight but don't compromise your credibility when they don't pan out. Like in this case, if the Oculus Rift doesn't launch in 2015 this won't even be a footnote. If it does launch, he can point to this statement and say "Look, I wasn't sure but I ha
Vapourware (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure you can buy an expensive dev version but the consumer version is approaching Duke Nukem Forever territory.
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$350 for a working dev kit is expensive? You and I must live in vastly different worlds.
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Not true, bought one in Europe!
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It will always look artificial until they move to a true variable-focus retinal display. Note that there are other companies (e.g. Magic Leap) that are working on retinal displays.
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And the question is - is it too late? I mean, we've been hearing about OR for years now, and all the wonderful things it can do. Consumers are ripe for *ANYTHING* to come onto the market.
An enterprising Chinese manufacturer can release POS versions o
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at less than 1/100 the cost of previous VR versions I wouldn't really call it expensive.
Meh... (Score:2)
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Not really, they've had 3 releases so far and another next month. DK1, DK2, GearVR and the new S6 GearVR coming soon. For a company that hasn't had a release they sure seem to be releasing a lot of stuff.
The DK2 is as good of a product as any early adopter type thing. If you are even mildly interested in VR it is worth it. I picked mine up a couple months ago and have used it every day since. sometimes for 6+ hours at a time.
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I was watching an old computer chronicles from 1994 CES special where they featured a vr helmet (smaller than the rift too) and mentioned 2 others, so you see how far VR has come, its gotten larger, more expensive, and still hasn't left CES in 21 years in any meaningful way
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As someone who had the chance to try VR in the 90s, and who has used Oculus's DK2, I can say that the difference is staggering.
Most of the VR headsets that I remember from the 90s where significantly bigger than anything Oculus has put out, however I don't doubt that with a quick search one could find examples of smaller headsets from the 90s. But what all this glosses over is the difference in what the user experiences when wearing the headset. Part of this is simply due to improved rendering capabilities
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well no duh its gotten better, everything has gotten better and as far as size
http://img.gawkerassets.com/im... [gawkerassets.com] 1994
http://img.gawkerassets.com/im... [gawkerassets.com] 1995 *personally owned these
http://img.gawkerassets.com/im... [gawkerassets.com] 1996
seems smaller than
http://blogs-images.forbes.com... [forbes.com] 2015
VR Engineer (Score:1, Funny)
Facebook built quite well with just human labor rather than using domestic animals. As for ruby - where do you think corn comes from, just for starters? And Mark Zuckerberg? There were a number of other crop plants in the Americas that weren't available in the "old world" - including ruby on rails, that was nearly made extinct by code.org (in their reaction to a rather bloody ritual that was associated with its cultivation).
Despite the convenient old world conceit that they "civilized" the new world (rather
FB hasn't figured out how to bork it (Score:2)
FB is a software company. Actually, that's being generous. They're a post-dot-com dot-com company.
The technology needs 1-2 more generations... (Score:2)
Seriously.
Gen1 and Gen2 Rifts are nice rich-boy gadgets. But of EXTREMELY limited utility, as the side-effects of working with them are still as bad as they are.
so no star citizen this year (Score:1)
so no star citizen this year
poor chris roberts