This week, Will, Norm, and Jeremy discuss the continuing implications of the Oculus/Facebook purchase, Oculus hiring Michael Abrash, rearview cameras in cars, Roku’s HDMI stick, Gmail’s birthday, Liars day, and DIY traffic jams. We recorded before BUILD and the Amazon Fire TV announcement, so expect to see that next week.
One Day Builds
Adam embarks on one of his most ambitious builds yet: fulfil…
Show And Tell
Adam recently completed a build of the royal St. Edwards cro…
Making
Viewers often ask to see Adam working in real-time, so this …
One Day Builds
Adam and Norm assemble a beautifully machined replica prop k…
One Day Builds
One of the ways Adam has been getting through lockdown has b…
Making
Adam unboxes and performs a quick test of this novel new hel…
Making
When Adam visited Weta Workshop early last year, he stopped …
One Day Builds
Adam tackles a shop shelf build that he's been putting off f…
Show And Tell
Time for a model kit build! This steampunk-inspired mechanic…
One Day Builds
Adam reveals his surprise Christmas present for his wife--a …
Jeremy!!!!
I had the Darth Vader carrying case, but I still had no clue that guy’s name was Lobot until today.
“…it was the phone that got me off” – Norm 20:26
I would buy an 2015 Audi A3 over a competing Mercedes Benz CLA any day..
The M-B looks like it was designed by a team of bean-counting, penny-pinchers, while the similarly priced Audi looks luxurious inside and out..
The CIA bit Norm touched on, was a interesting story.
A guy putting up listings on Google Maps for the FBI with his phone number. When people phoned he routed the call to the real FBI, but was able to listen in on the conversation. Nice man in the middle attack.
I love that first video _SO HARD_. Reminds me of the 20th Century Fox theme done on a recorder
That Pink Panther rendition was good!
Google Drive is the most useful thing out there for high school students. Freshman year, the English teacher had us create accounts with Google so we could use Google Drive to work on projects together. Formatting is a little iffy on Google Drive, so someone in the group always has to throw it in a Word doc and print it. However, it’s super useful for collaboration. Lab reports, research projects, papers, and a plethora of other stupid stuff all gets done on Google Drive. Even though it was a passing comment in the podcast, I wanted to mention that Google Drive has quite useful applications. People use that which comes first and works the best for their case – which is a bit of a axiomatic statement- but! Still. Thought I would mention it.
Oh the irony! My Twitter account actually got hacked today as well. Twitter stomped it out pretty quick though.
That Jurassic Park video manages to make me laugh every damned time. And Will is thinking of a concertina…..
Jeremy laughing during the outro made me happy (being that it was my outro.) It’s often hard to tell what the hosts think of them.
I’d also love to know what he thought of the Tim Tam Slam.
For home made Pizza, I use the the Pizza maker:
http://www.amazon.com/Sur-La-Table-Pizzeria-LD-902SLT/dp/B00FPWAPA8/ref=pd_sim_sbs_k_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1DYM7HKEHBZ6SCC5ZV7C
It only takes a few minutes to warm up, and has a ceramic base to give that stone base cooked taste.. and a pizza only takes 3 minutes to cook once the unit has reached temperture.
Great podcast dudes, glad to see Jeremy back!
Here’s a recommended Star Wars viewing order I like the sound of: 4, 5, 2, 3, 6 (then optionally 1).
Source:
http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2011/11/11/the-star-wars-saga-suggested-viewing-order/
The HBO kazoo intro I mentioned.
+1 for pocket casts
they also have the best patch notes of any app I’ve come across
You guys hated the iFixit April Fools prank? I thought it was the best this year!
Well executed but something so preposterous no-one would take seriously on the 1st of April.
You had to expect that Tim-Tam slam video would come back to haunt you with all those sound bytes! lol
I can’t believe Jeremy actually had the mindset that Facebook would require you to login to use Oculus Rift stuff, ugh.
I’m kinda perplexed as well.
Like was mentioned in the discussion, Facebook paid a billion for Instagram and you don’t need a Facebook account to use that.
As for the idea of a fb-branded virtual hub you walk around in to get to your desired content, I can’t even imagine what a clusterfuck it would be to introduce a 20-year out-of-date concept like that to the Oculus consumer experience. FB might be evil in a whole range of ways, but they aren’t stupid. They don’t care about people, but they do care about “users” and user experience..
Seriously, I see no concievable reason beyond paranoia to assume such a thing. Walking through some 3d world and enter games as if they were Mario 64 levels would make for a terrible user experience that I cannot imagine any modern tech company would seriously consider implementing. Even the disk of demos I got with my first Win 95 computer, which had a virtual menu hub thing (it was a novel idea back then, it isn’t any more), allowed you to bypass that shit with the touch of a button and go to a conventional menu. I was 7 years old and even I couldn’t find any value to selecting my games by walking around looking for the door for three minutes as opposed to selecting them and spending that time playing.
Personally, I instantly assumed that FB wanted the hardware piece of VR due to the fact that hardware has a straight-line to making money, unlike advertising/data funded services. Because Facebook has shown time and time again that making money on social platforms isn’t easy.
On Facebook itself, they have resorted to extorting businesses with FB pages by having them pay for visibility on user feeds. and I’ve seen quite a few people simply shut their FB-page down in response.
And when Facebook began putting ads on Instagram people went batshit (that was like 6 months ago and I can remember seeing a total of two ads in my feed in that time, one was a couple of days after the announcement, the other was last tuesday).
It really wasnt very funny, the language used made it 100% clear to anyone that it was BS. They were trying to be funny and poke at Apple, but the attempt at satire was so poorly written and half-assed that it just made them look pathetic. They couldn’t be arsed to be clever, they phoned it in and still got scared and apologized.
And man, hearing that people got angry and they actually issued a “hey guys, we’re just kidding”-statement was honestly shocking. You have to be a special kind of moron to think that was real. April Fools that fool no one aren’t good, and one that *shouldn’t* have fooled anyone but still does, and then elicits an apology on the same damn day?! jeez.
Great job, Jeremy! You are absolutely correct and expressed my opinion and that of many others.
It might not have been that funny, but it was still the best april fools prank I saw this year IMO…but that says more about the general level of april fools pranks this year than anything else…
Time will tell, right? I’ll see you back here in this thread in 3-5 years. 🙂
Facebook said they have no plans to profit on hardware in their investor call, and Palmer was recently quoted saying they can afford to give the consumer rift away at cost because they don’t need to support the company on hardware sales anymore.
If Facebook doesn’t profit from hardware, and they don’t want to control the front end of your VR engagement, why do they need to own the hardware platform? They could have developed a VR space with a few dev kits.
I appreciate the insight, Jeremy, as well as your willingness to take the opposing view on the Podcast, good to have some dissent. Honestly, I haven’t been following the news of the buy closely, as even the first couple dozen comments here on Tested (which are usually fairly civilized) were the sort of knee-jerk anger I tend to avoid if possible.
First off all: I was also bummed to see Facebook buy Oculus. Facebook is a different kind of company to the other likely candidates for such an aquisition. If Google or Microsoft had bought them, we would probably have been able to guess how things would have played out. With Facebook, anything can happen. Facebook can do crazy shit without thinking, and that is certainly reason to be concerned.
But given the people working on this, I just can’t imagine they will knowingly create a user experience that is an active hindrance to a user’s enjoyment of the product and service itself… and having to spend time in some Facebook lobby to access content is just that. As much as I believe the people at Facebook can be reckless, I don’t think they are stupid. Their services have huge user bases and grow quickly for a reason.
Speaking of which, Facebook has owned Instagram for 24 months and haven’t really touched the service at all.
Yes, as you say, it is a safe bet that in terms of its technological impact Oculus is a bigger deal than a photo-sharing service, but Instagram currently has somewhere between 150-200 million users (50 million new users between February and September last year). Now, if Facebook had the intent of overtly pushing their branding or social service to the users of other services they own, such a number of people within their immediate reach would be a pretty convenient place to do so. But there has been no such interference.
The only time Facebook the service interjects anything into the Instagram experience is when they give you a notification that one of your Facebook friends have tied their IG account to their FB account, the same type of notification as any other event in your feed. And I assume you only get such alerts if you yourself have tied your accounts. They famously introduced ads, but as someone who uses the service a lot, I have only seen two ads since the announcement in October.
Now, I am sure there will be a Facebook social experience in VR and that you’ll be introduced to its existence as part of having an Oculus device, but I’d be very surprised if there was a gateway or a “facebook layer” on top of the Oculus experience itself, honestly I’d be surprised if there was much beyond having the option to tie an Oculus account to your FB account.
I’m much more concerned about the openness of the ecosystem under Facebook than having the experience itself soiled. I’d say that is a much more serious problem, one that may make developers hesitant to pursue VR, and a real reason to be upset. That problem would also potentially have been much the same with any other owner with a vested interest in operating its own services on the platform, but given Facebook’s lack of a track record in both the software and hardware space, it makes everything harder to predict.
And I do apologize for the lengthy ramble, I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see how this pans out. Fingers crossed that the Oculus team is allowed to do their thing and that those developing content for VR aren’t deterred by the uncertainty related to how support, experience and ecosystem will be handled in the future.
What is the 3rd consumer electronic device that are going to “change the world” according to Norm at around 1.15? PM me if you know it and dont want to spoil it for everybody else. Thanks
At where I am in this podcast what I am learning is, is right!!! Don’t fight it because you are wrong. Sorry will but that argument sounded like two children fighting where the one who yelled loudest wins, no matter who is right, they loudest one wins.
So, Anyone wanna guess what the thing is Norm is referring to that’s going to change the world like the iphone and the oculus???
I take your point that Facebook has a track record of leaving their acquisitions alone, but surely there is a profit upside to all of them. We just may not see it yet, and they are right to be careful about changes that could cost them users. The Oculus acquisition is a bigger deal to me, personally, since it’s the only Facebook platform/product I have any vested interest in — and a massive interest at that.
With respect, I don’t believe you answered my question. If you’re right, why does Facebook need to own the hardware platform? Do they hope to make their virtual space the only one that is “first-party,” and perhaps best integrated with the hardware? $2B seems way overkill for that. Surely that money could have wooed the right developers to their offices to make that independently (keeping in mind their $2B buyout doesn’t cover future staff salaries, hardware R&D or Facebook VR infrastructure, and they would have needed to buy that anyway).
I do agree that they’ll be careful about user-experience, and I don’t necessarily think their VR front-end will be a 3D space. Another metaphor might be the Steam layer they apply to games written for Steamworks, where shift-tab brings up the social layer. My point is, I expect everything about VR to exist below a Facebook layer, whether you have to pass through it or not. Expect friend requests and messages to be seamlessly integrated (and mostly optional) absolutely everywhere, for instance.
With a nod to SteamOS, I wouldn’t be surprised if the long-term plan includes their own OS built for VR. And to be ABSOLUTELY clear, I reluctantly welcome our new Facebook overlords. They provide insurance that VR will happen on the scale that we all want, with a world-class team that can stay ahead of anyone else in the world. It just comes at the cost of a lot of unanswered — and so promising — “what if’s.” It’s kind of like when Pixar was sold to Disney. That was good for Pixar, but it was GREAT for Disney. This is good for Oculus, but it’s going to be GREAT for Facebook. I’m just a little less interested in the second half of that equation.
Thinking more about it, my guess would be they bought Oculus, hardware in tow, so that the platform and ecosystem is under their control. If Oculus ends up being the prime VR interface, I suspect there is a lot of money to be made from access to direct integration. And sadly it’ll probably mean a closed, anti-competitive platform.
Instagram currently lets you share posts directly to Twitter and I’m sure that wasn’t put in without compensation. Considering that Instagram pretty much killed the mainstream adoption of Twitter’s Vine by allowing video content within weeks of Twitter’s aquisition of the 6-second video service. The preview of Instagram photos on Twitter was also killed, so you have to click through to IG to view shared photos. You can set your Facebook page or profile to post to Twitter, but not the other way around. Essentially, I think it will be very hard to establish a direct competitor to a Facebook service on Oculus VR. Owning the platform, hardware and all, will make it easier for Facebook to keep a tight grip on that.
Like you, I also suspect there will be a layer of some sort throughout the experience but, while surely tightly integrated with existing social platforms and any Facebook social-VR services, ultimately not facebook branded… and in the form of a traditional UI.
The Pixar example is probably appropriate, as is the Marvel one. Good for Marvel, they suddenly became the biggest franchise in entertainment, but man has it been huge for Disney.
a little tip on getting the pizza of the peel, put some corn mean on the peel, slides right off and adds a little texture to the crust….
Unless Tested requires you to log in via Facebook. 😉