It’s amazing. You strap on some gear, and then you’re inside whatever world you want. It showed up in books, it showed up in movies, and everyone dreamed about it. Problem was, it kinda sucked. I tried Dactyl Nightmare at an amusement park, and it kinda sucked. Huge wires, unconvincing tracking, horrible visual fidelity. VR kept sucking for a long time, and people kinda gave up on it. 
 
 But then something happened. Or, well, it had already happened, but nobody realized. The technology was finally here to do proper virtual reality. The team behind Oculus Rift realized this, and built the first prototype of VR that was finally just good enough to be usable, and it was only going to get better and better. They set up a kickstarter to fund their enthusiasm, and a lot of people got excited. They made about ten times the money they asked for, and I was one of the top-level backers. 
 
 I got my oculus rift dev kit, and played around with it. It was convincing. It presented a lot of design problems. It made me nauseous. It was signed by the entire Oculus Rift team. I got super excited and worked on a couple of prototypes before moving on to other things. Perhaps I would pick it up again closer to the consumer version release. 
 
 A couple of weeks ago, they reminded me that I still hadn’t visited their office, one of the rewards from the kickstarter. John Carmack would be there. The combined opportunity of seeing their latest tech and getting to talk about vr (and doom) with John was overwhelming, so I took the 12+ hour flight there. What I saw was every bit as impressive as you could imagine. They had fixed all the major issues, and all that remained was huge design and software implementation challenges. 
 
 As someone who always felt like they were born five or ten years too late, I felt like we were on the cusp of a new paradigm that I might be able to play around with. I could be part of the early efforts to work out best practices, and while I have no doubt that in ten years we’ll look back at the problems with early VR applications in the same we look back at GUI problems with early PC games, it still felt exciting to me. My head started spinning with potential applications and how to deal with all the issues (how do you do gui? how do you deal with locomotion? what input do you use? what happens if the player leans far enough forward to clip into a wall? how do you prevent vr induced existential crisis?) 
 
 Of course, they wanted Minecraft. I said that it doesn’t really fit the platform, since it’s very motion based, runs on java (that has a hard time delivering rock solid 90 fps, especially since the players build their own potentially hugely complex levels), and relies a lot on GUI. But perhaps it would be cool to do a slimmed down version of Minecraft for the Oculus. Something free, similar to the Minecraft PI Edition, perhaps? So I suggested that, and our people started talking to their people to see if something could be done. 
 
 And then, not two weeks later, Facebook buys them. 
 
 Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build. 
 
 Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social. In fact, I think social could become one of the biggest applications of VR. Being able to sit in a virtual living room and see your friend’s avatar? Business meetings? Virtual cinemas where you feel like you’re actually watching the movie with your friend who is seven time zones away? 
 
 But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games. 
 
 Fortunately, the rise of Oculus coincided with competitors emerging. None of them are perfect, but competition is a very good thing. If this means there will be more competition, and VR keeps getting better, I am going to be a very happy boy. I definitely want to be a part of VR, but I will not work with Facebook. Their motives are too unclear and shifting, and they haven’t historically been a stable platform. There’s nothing about their history that makes me trust them, and that makes them seem creepy to me. 
 
 And I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition. 
 
 I have the greatest respect for the talented engineers and developers at Oculus. It’s been a long time since I met a more dedicated and talented group of people. I understand this is purely a business deal, and I’d like to congratulate both Facebook and the Oculus owners. But this is where we part ways. 
 
 If you want to experience Minecraft in VR, there’s an excellent mod that does this. It’s called Minecrift, and you can find it here. ||||| By now, we know that the reaction to a major Facebook acquisition among the chattering technorati follows a pretty simple script. It happened with Instagram in 2012, it happened again last month with WhatsApp, and it happened yet again Tuesday with the $2 billion deal for the virtual reality gurus at Oculus VR. 
 
 First comes the stage where we all have a good laugh. Facebook bought what now? For how much? No. Seriously? What are they smoking in Menlo Park? The memes and jokes fly thick and fast. We comb our cultural history for anything that matches the pattern of an accurate prediction. The Oatmeal called it. The Simpsons called it. 
 
 Then Zuckerberg will get on the phone with analysts and journalists, and explain very matter-of-factly why the purchase is worth whatever he paid for it — not now, but many years in Facebook's future. He makes an awful lot of sense: yes, virtual reality probably is the next big platform after mobile. There are murmurs of unease. Crap, Zuck was right about Instagram, he's probable right about this. 
 
 See also: Mark Zuckerberg Casually Conquers the World 
 
 A few hours later later, after the value of the technology or app in question has had time to sink in, comes the full-blown freakout. Zuckerberg is no longer a dolt; Zuckerberg must be stopped. Facebook is going to turn us into drooling zombies. You're going to be full-time immersed into a Matrix-style virtual-reality "Planet Facebook" filled with manipulative corporate sponsors while keeping your body alive by sucking on a "QuenchTube" through a "small nipple in your mouth," suggested Verge editor Josh Topolsky. 
 
 Hey, I'm as much of a sucker for a good sci-fi scenario as the next futurist, but let's get real about this one. That's just not how the future happens. If you want to talk about technologies that were supposed to turn us into drooling idiots, try television. Try games consoles. If you look at them objectively, as numerous studies have done, it turns out those technologies are actually pretty good at informing us and improving our reactions. (See: Everything Bad is Good For You.) 
 
 Yeah, but Facebook's going to ruin Oculus Rift, right? They're going to plaster it with ads and make it focus on gaudy, commercial apps that help its bottom line? Well, no. Facebook has a history of funding its big purchases well and letting them run themselves independently, like the world's luckiest startups. Look at Instagram: Kevin Systrom is firmly in charge, user numbers are skyrocketing, and the service has barely begun to introduce sponsored photos, which it may well have had to do by now anyway. (See: every app that wanted to make money ever.) 
 
 Look at WhatsApp: founder Jan Koum staked his word on the fact that Facebook will not touch WhatsApp user data, ever. You know why that's guaranteed? Because if it doesn't happen, Zuckerberg won't be able to convince the next hot startup that he wants to buy that he isn't just blowing smoke when he says they'll be independent. 
 
 Zuck is playing a wider game here, and the stakes are high. If Facebook ever got a reputation among the Silicon Valley community for being a rapacious corporate monster that goes back on its word and forces you to do so as well — well, there would be a few more giant companies around here that they'd much rather sell to. 
 
 Okay, you say, but surely there's some pressure that will be applied, pressure to put friend requests here, or targeted ads there — subtle backroom pressure that Oculus VR's leadership won't be able to withstand. To which I say: have you met John Carmack, Oculus' CTO? I interviewed Carmack half a dozen times over the last decade and a half, back to when he was the mastermind behind Quake and Doom. The two words I invariably used to describe him are "evil" and "genius." 
 
 Carmack never does anything by half-measures. He built his own space startup, for crying out loud. He's in the Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos realm of influence. If it ever came down to corporate politics, he'd give that young whippersnapper Zuck a run for his money. Come to think of it, I'd even put a small wager on Carmack taking over Facebook from within. 
 
 Facebook could buy an awful lot of goodwill for the cost of 3 engineers by refunding the 9500 Oculus Kickstarter backers their $2.5 million. — Anil Dash (@anildash) March 26, 2014 
 
 I do agree with entrepreneur and blogger Anil Dash, above, that Facebook would do well to address the fact that Oculus VR began as a Kickstarter company. The payout would be an elegant solution, so long as it isn't seen as a crass bribe, and who knows — it may convince the creator of Minecraft to stop freaking out about Facebook. 
 
 It would also encourage more Kickstarter campaigns, annointing the crowdfunding service as a legitimate form of venture capital, which would be a rising tide that lifts all Silicon Valleys boats (except for its established VCs, who may freak out themselves). 
 
 But it's not something Facebook needs to do, legally or even ethically. Oculus fulfilled its obligations to its backers long ago. If its backers thought it would never do any of the things a for-profit company does, perhaps they missed the part where it became a for-profit company. Perhaps they missed the hiring, last year, of the evil genius. Besides, again, they're missing the point. 
 
 Weep not, for the Oculus you know is not dead. Dry your eyes, because you ain't seen nothing yet through them. The number one reason why Oculus "sold out" to Facebook: because this way, it can remain independent and improve exponentially — first and foremost, in bringing down the cost and the size of those clunky headsets, and encouraging way more developers to join the platform. 
 
 I've tried Oculus a number of times, and really like the demo app where you zoom around the solar system. But even that felt a bit too low-res; all I could think was it'll be nice when it's finished. But Oculus was stuck paying way too much money for way too little gadgetry; now it has purchasing power, and how. What happened Tuesday was one giant leap into Oculus' future. 
 
 Not convinced? Read the Reddit threads where Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is taking on all-comers. "I am not going to close off, I am 100% certain that most people will see why this is good in the long term," he writes. "Any change at Oculus will be for the better." He lists three short-term reasons why, in as much detail as he can: 
 
 1) We can make custom hardware, not rely on the scraps of the mobile phone industry. That is insanely expensive, think hundreds of millions of dollars. More news soon. 
 
 2) We can afford to hire everyone we need, the best people that fit into our culture of excellence in all aspects. 
 
 3) We can make huge investments in content. More news soon. 
 
 Where will this end? Not in Topolsky's dystopian vision, but where all technology ends up — in the casual mundanity of everyday life as you pretty much know it, just one step removed. It ends with "honey, have you seen my Oculus glasses?" 
 
 It ends with you using them the same way you'd use Skype — zipping in and out of the virtual world for meetings, making it much easier to work from home or catch up with far-flung family. 
 
 It ends with you donning your Oculus glasses about as frequently as you'd use your Xbox or PlayStation. Games nerds will be addicted; the rest of us will use it every now and then, for fun. 
 
 That's not a very sexy story to tell, granted; fearful future freakouts are so much wilder. If you simply don't trust Facebook because it's had a hard time communicating its privacy settings, if you don't trust Oculus to stand firm in the unlikely scenario that they're strong-armed, if you think the combination of the two is the beginnings of The Matrix, then knock yourself out. 
 
 Just be aware that the sci-fi reality you're spinning with that story is as unreal and unlikely as anything you'd see in VR. ||||| William Wei, Business Insider Facebook is buying Oculus VR, a startup that makes virtual reality headsets, in a $2 billion deal. 
 
 Oculus doesn't make a consumer product yet, but its headset called the Oculus Rift for video game developers has completely changed the way many feel about video games. 
 
 The device is nearly impossible to describe. It makes you feel like you're truly immersed in a virtual environment. It's one of those things you have to try to fully understand. And we guarantee it'll blow your mind. 
 
 Console gaming companies have sensed the threat of Oculus, which is why Sony announced a similar headset for its new PlayStation 4 gaming console. However, it's unclear when Sony's headset will launch. 
 
 The question now is: why would Facebook buy a video game hardware company? 
 
 According to a statement from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company plans to expand Oculus beyond gaming: 
 
 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. 
 
 Zuckerberg expanded on that in a conference call following the announcement, saying he believes virtual reality will be the next big computing platform after mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. 
 
 "History suggests that there will be more platforms to come," Zuckerberg said on the conference call, adding that the person who controls that major computing platform will be able to shape the entire tech industry. 
 
 "Today's acquisition is a long-term bet on the future of computing," Zuckerberg said. 
 
 Oculus got its start on crowdfunding site Kickstarter, where it raised $2.4 million in 2012. Since then, other VCs have invested in the company. Most recently, Oculus raised $75 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a Facebook board member, tweeted today that he recused himself from acquisition talks between Facebook and Oculus VR. 
 
 Last summer, Business Insider spoke with Oculus VR's 21-year-old founder Palmer Luckey about how he came up with the device. He got started at a young age, tinkering with all kinds of computerized headsets. You can read the full interview here. 
 
 By the way, this isn't Facebook's only recent major acquisition. Just a few weeks ago, Facebook bought WhatsApp in a $19 billion deal. 
 
 Here's Zuckerberg's full statement on the deal: 
 
 I'm excited to announce that we've agreed to acquire Oculus VR, the leader in virtual reality technology. 
 
 Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. For the past few years, this has mostly meant building mobile apps that help you share with the people you care about. We have a lot more to do on mobile, but at this point we feel we're in a position where we can start focusing on what platforms will come next to enable even more useful, entertaining and personal experiences. 
 
 This is where Oculus comes in. They build virtual reality technology, like the Oculus Rift headset. When you put it on, you enter a completely immersive computer-generated environment, like a game or a movie scene or a place far away. The incredible thing about the technology is that you feel like you're actually present in another place with other people. People who try it say it's different from anything they've ever experienced in their lives. 
 
 Oculus's mission is to enable you to experience the impossible. Their technology opens up the possibility of completely new kinds of experiences. 
 
 Immersive gaming will be the first, and Oculus already has big plans here that won't be changing and we hope to accelerate. The Rift is highly anticipated by the gaming community, and there's a lot of interest from developers in building for this platform. We're going to focus on helping Oculus build out their product and develop partnerships to support more games. Oculus will continue operating independently within Facebook to achieve this. 
 
 But this is just the start. After games, we're going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a courtside 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. 
 
 Virtual reality was once the dream of science fiction. But the internet was also once a dream, and so were computers and smartphones. The future is coming and we have a chance to build it together. I can't wait to start working with the whole team at Oculus to bring this future to the world, and to unlock new worlds for all of us. 
 
 Here's the press release from Facebook: 
 
 Facebook today announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Oculus VR, Inc., the leader in immersive virtual reality technology, for a total of approximately $2 billion. This includes$400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares of Facebook common stock (valued at $1.6 billion based on the average closing price of the 20 trading days preceding March 21, 2014 of $69.35 per share). The agreement also provides for an additional$300 million earn-out in cash and stock based on the achievement of certain milestones. 
 
 Oculus is the leader in immersive virtual reality technology and has already built strong interest among developers, having received more than 75,000 orders for development kits for the company's virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift. While the applications for virtual reality technology beyond gaming are in their nascent stages, several industries are already experimenting with the technology, and Facebook plans to extend Oculus' existing advantage in gaming to new verticals, including communications, media and entertainment, education and other areas. Given these broad potential applications, virtual reality technology is a strong candidate to emerge as the next social and communications platform. 
 
 "Mobile is the platform of today, and now we're also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow," said Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. "Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate." 
 
 "We are excited to work with Mark and the Facebook team to deliver the very best virtual reality platform in the world," said Brendan Iribe, co-founder and CEO of Oculus VR. "We believe virtual reality will be heavily defined by social experiences that connect people in magical, new ways. It is a transformative and disruptive technology, that enables the world to experience the impossible, and it's only just the beginning." 
 
 Oculus will maintain its headquarters in Irvine, CA, and will continue development of the Oculus Rift, its ground-breaking virtual reality platform. 
 
 The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2014. 
 
 Want more? Here's what it's like using the Oculus Rift: 
 
 // OO.ready(function() { OO.Player.create('ooyalaplayer', 'NxMTJ4YzrICuo8bz1aYmFMSju3AzkYwN'); }); // <div>Please enable Javascript to watch this video</div> ||||| Minecraft creator Markus Persson said he’s canceling plans to create a version of the popular block-building video game for Oculus V.R.’s virtual reality headset after hearing the news the company is being acquired by Facebook. 
 
 Persson took to Twitter Tuesday to voice his displeasure with the deal: 
 
 We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out. - Notch (@notch) March 25, 2014 
 
 Persson elaborated in a blog post : 
 
 Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform… Persson left to door open to continuing the effort to create a virtual reality Minecraft edition with one of Oculus V.R.’s competitors. I have the greatest respect for the talented engineers and developers at Oculus…but this is where we part ways. 
 
 Facebook announced the $2 billion deal earlier Tuesday. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts during a call that the virtual reality technology "has the potential to be the most social platform ever." 
 
 About 35 million copies of Minecraft have been sold worldwide for PCs, Apple iOS devices and other gaming platforms. 
 
 Perrson is not alone in his criticism of the Facebook deal. Virtual reality enthusiasts were quick to blast the planned acquisition on Twitter after it was announced, Adweek points out.
– Facebook has bought pioneering virtual-reality headset maker Oculus for $2 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg is pretty excited about it. The startup's immersive headset for video game developers has been a big hit, but Facebook appears ready to take virtual reality beyond gaming, Business Insider finds. "After games, we're going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences," Zuckerberg writes in a Facebook post. "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. " The headset is "different from anything I've ever experienced in my life," Zuckerberg said during a conference call following the announcement. "Today's acquisition is a long-term bet on the future of computing." But while Facebook is enthusiastic about the buy, game makers are less than thrilled about the company's move into virtual reality, Time and AdWeek report. Soon after the announcement, Minecraft creator Markus Persson said he had canceled plans for an Oculus version of the game because Facebook "creeps him out." Facebook is "not a game tech company," he explained in a blog post. It cares "about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers." But over at Mashable, Chris Taylor urges everyone to put their freakout on hold: "Facebook has a history of funding its big purchases well and letting them run themselves independently." So any Matrix-esque scenario "is as unreal and unlikely as anything you'd see in VR."