FB's hardware strategy is confusing.<p>Oculus was their first, real consumer hardware release and effort.<p>The rollout was amateur hour between delays, customer service, etc, but that's forgivable and understandable at some level for a first major release.<p>But then Vive showed up to the party, shipped nearly on the same time frame, and delivered a product that's in striking distance of headset quality and WINS in interactivity.<p>This underscores how commoditized hardware is and will continue to be.<p>But then FB doubles down on protecting their "hardware play" and fucks everybody over with their bizarre Oculus "store" experience which launched with a ridiculous walled garden approach and an experience that's far secondary to Steam.<p>Meanwhile FB and Zuck keep making noises about wanting to support VR in general to bring about critical mass on VR as a platform so they can take the obvious step and execute THE killer-app for VR, - a truly connected social metaverse.<p>I get that having a hardware lab provides an incentive to new VR devs to come on board, and lets them press the medium forward.<p>But if owning that "metaverse" is the end game why bother dickering around with consumer hardware and pissing off / breaking trust with devs & consumers?
Well they definitely have the resources to create something amazing, but only time will tell if those resources actually mean anything. From the basis of what they are currently building, the lab is overkill. They must have something secret/bigger hardware projects going on.
Zuck have recently said that their 1 billion VR users are going to come from mobile phone and not PC so the real reason behind this hardware lab could be that fb is going to develop a real phone (sw + hw) and not like earlier.
Techcrunch has some photos of the lab.<p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/gallery/facebook-hardware-lab/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/gallery/facebook-hardware-lab/</a>
They are nowhere near even being close to Google in terms of revenue, technology, innovation, invention etc. After all, they started off just copying myspace and calling their users dumb f*cks. Facebook is the next AOL.