Saturday 4 January 2020

Facebook Closing Half of Its Oculus Rift Demo Stations

Oculus Rift Demo Stations
Looks like the largest or ‘one of the largest’ social media platform, Facebook is not having a good time. The social media platform that is not only known to have given a free platform for people around the world to stay connected, it has also given huge updates and features to the website for businesses and small-scale enterprises to boost their business virtually and get real life benefits from it. Facebook was recently sued for using intellectual property and had to pay $500 million although it was proved to be not-guilty. But the rough start of the year goes on and the bad time for one of the biggest social media platform does not seem to be over. Recently it was revealed that Facebook is closing down not few but half of its Oculus Rift Demo Stations, that is because of low interest from customers.

Earlier in the day, Facebook was ordered by a jury in Dallas, Texas to pay ZeniMax a game maker $500 million because Facebook was using a technology due to the fact that the founder of Oculus violated a policy or a non-disclosure agreement. Soon enough the jury also turned down the claims of ZeniMax declaring that Oculus did not misappropriate its intellectual property. If we look at it the other way, it did not matter much to the giant social media platform Facebook who has $29 billion on their balance sheet. Not only that the award did not damage anything at Facebook, it raised their shares by 2%. About Oculus Rift Demo stations, well no matter how much Oculus denies it, all the signs are saying that Oculus pop-up shops in Best Buy stores have been taken away because there were days without demos as reported by their sales people and Best Buy representatives.

Facebook may have been a little too quick about everything and the devices they were selling over at their popup shops were one not being sold and the staff was there to promote demos just to get people talking about it and two people were not really interested because the set costs around $800 ($600 for the headset and $200 for the controller) and everyone who is interested in VR today has a much cheaper option that is PlayStation VR. Mark Zuckerberg plans on investing billions more on the VR in this decade and he says that VR may not be very profitable for a while. Now another question rises, which is that if people really do need VR or not? And if they do, do they have better and cheaper options which of course they do.

VR came out a bit too soon, there could have been a few things fixed here and there and then it would have launched but now, the devices are out there and they are common and inexpensive so maybe Oculus being so expensive isn’t working out well for Facebook for now. But then this is Facebook we are talking about, nothing Facebook has ever done has been not profitable and since the future is about VR and virtual reality will be more common than it is right now. About the popup shops at Best Buy, there were 500 Oculus Rift popup shops that Facebook signed up for and 200 out of the 500 have been shut down due to no interest from the customers and many idle days between demos of the VR.

Oculus however denies the report completely saying that the Oculus pop up shops from Best Buy are still there and the 200 that have been shut down are closed temporarily and need some technical improvement and work. Facebook will now be demonstrating the gear at events and it will be displaying the gadget at community gatherings where people will get to try them and use them. Rumors are also there that Facebook will be opening its independent Oculus Rift Demo Stations and stores and will be selling their gears directly from there but nothing is certain about this news, not only that this will take a lot of time, we are not even sure if that is happening and how authentic is this news so nothing can be said for sure at the moment about this news. No wonder the future is about Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality and we will be seeing robots and common use of virtual reality and augmented reality.

Mark Zuckerberg also tried on a new tech a while back and it has something to do with a new glove like gadget that lets you type in the air. Few days also we saw a similar video on Facebook shared by some website that showed us how that glove will make your life easy and you will be easily trained to use the glove effectively. With such things in pipeline and Facebook looking into investing billions more in Virtual Reality, we can’t say for sure if the pop up shops closing down was something for Facebook to worry about or not but what we know for sure is that this is Facebook we are talking about and a website that hasn’t been down even in its earliest days it will be there to beat the crap out of VR and will turn everything in its favor.

And the whole ‘Oculus copying its code’ thing does not seem to have anything to do with what Facebook is dealing with in the current scenario with Best Buy Oculus Popup stations. The Oculus Rift pop up shops are still giving demos in targeted Best Buy stores where they are more demanded and the stores where we don’t find any Oculus rift popup stations are the ones that are undergoing some seasonal changes according to oculus authorities. They say that you can still request demos at major Best Buy stores for the Oculus Rift gear and buy them right away. It is only about time Facebook understand that maybe the prices of the gears maybe need to go down a little?

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