<story><title>The Creator of &apos;Doom&apos; Is Now A Facebook Employee</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/25/the-creator-of-doom-is-now-a-facebook-employee/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>daviding</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s been a flurry of threads, and I&amp;#x27;ve not seen this discussed. As a huge fan of Carmack and a believer in VR, the acquisition is interesting, in that:&lt;p&gt;- John Carmack&amp;#x27;s OR work was not just on the mechanism of VR in terms of the screens, latency, but also on an embedded operating system to best drive the experience. The fact that Zuckerberg in the investment call mentioned this as a &amp;#x27;new device platform&amp;#x27; (not desktop, not mobile) could be taken somewhat literally. This could be an interesting way for FB to become part of a new embedded platform, written to drive these displays. This Facebook Display OS could be next years press froth that was the Facebook Phone OS. While AR &amp;#x2F; Glass is not much like OR, the platform might be Mark&amp;#x27;s play here, just as much as a &amp;#x27;seems like a good long bet&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;- John fairly recently discussed how Armadillo was really not something he could put much more money in. Fairly quickly he has got into a situation that (post golden handcuffs) he could seriously restart this. While it&amp;#x27;s funny to imagine Zuckerberg&amp;#x2F;Carmack in code review meetings :) the reality if the situation might be that this OR adventure is big-picture just John&amp;#x27;s way back home to Armadillo in a few years. Needs must and all that.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m still internalizing the news (as a dev&amp;#x2F;purchaser of both DK1 and preorder DK2) but some things do seem apparent today:&lt;p&gt;- This is probably a good time for one of the VR also-rans to do a &amp;#x27;Oculus Rift kickerstarter V2&amp;#x27; on this news. Rightly or wrongly there&amp;#x27;s now a huge need for a new white knight in VR that could be tapped.&lt;p&gt;- What JC does&amp;#x2F;says now is a barometer for a lot of people in the OR community.&lt;p&gt;- OR&amp;#x27;s biggest pitfall will now be loss of focus. There are now so many distractions, from metaverses to HR noise.&lt;p&gt;Personally I think FB will be hands-off, and this is not a disaster but then my main excitement is really just on getting to CV1 as soon as possible, regardless of who owns the most stock, and today&amp;#x27;s news helps that.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Creator of &apos;Doom&apos; Is Now A Facebook Employee</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/25/the-creator-of-doom-is-now-a-facebook-employee/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>downer76</author><text>If Carmack obtained any sort of options or shares in Oculus stock prior to this deal, this is likely to be quite a hefty payday for him, no?&lt;p&gt;Just goes to show that his business sense was dead on, and he aligned his position with an organization he instinctively perceived as valuable &lt;i&gt;before&lt;/i&gt; it&amp;#x27;s value exploded. It&amp;#x27;s probably safe to say, though, that his participation in the company also augmented the perception of its value, by his association acting as a defacto endorsement.</text></comment>