Facebook Buys Virtual Reality Oculus for $2 Bln

Facebook made its second huge acquisition this year on Tuesday, purchasing a company Oculus VR Inc for $2 billion in cash and stock.
According to reports, Facebook agreed to purchase Oculus for $400,000 in cash and the rest in stock.
Oculus VR Inc is a relatively new, 20-month old company that maker virtual reality goggles.
Just last month Facebook purchased a text-messaging service WhatsApp for $19 billion pursuing their idea to connect people all over the world via different means of communication. This deal also opens huge perspectives for companies with bright ideas even if they do not have much income yet.

Oculus Headset

The headset developed by Oculus, called Rift, is for now a device for playing video games. However, according to Mark Zuckerberg, they now have much bigger plans for it.

"We're going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences," Mr. Zuckerberg said.

"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," he adds.
For now, users have not been really fond of the device for now due to the motion sickness it sometimes causes. However, Oculus are right now working on means of fixing this issue.

Oculus is mainly used for games and 3-d television.

Oculus is a California-based company, founded by 21-year-old Palmer Luckey in 2012, home schooled kid who started his career in IT by repairing old Apple Inc iPhones. After that he worked as an engineer at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies.

Luckey managed to raise over$2.4mln from a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of company’s first product.

The CEO of Oculus, Brendan Iribe previously worked for a company called Gaikai, that offered its customers “cloud gaming” technology, that allowed streaming of videogames over the Internet pretty much like the Netfix streams movies.

Facebook’s previous purchase, WhatsApp already had 450 mln users, Oculus, however, is just selling prototypes to the developers for $350.

This deal puts Facebook from being only a software company to the hardware business too.

According to Mr. Iribe, they met with Zuckerberg in November last year and he visited Oculus headquarters in February.

Mark Zuckerberg said that when he tried the technology it was "different from anything I've experienced in my life."
According to Iribe, about 10 days ago Zuckerberg said he was interested in acquiring Oculus. The deal was done in just a few days.

As the statement of Facebook says, it will let Oculus operate independently, just like it previously managed Instagram and plans to manage WhatsApp.

Oculus has previously raised over $90mln from such venture capitalists including Matrix Partners, Spark, Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz and Formation 8.

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