Facebook acquired “Oculus VR”, the company behind the Oculus Rift Gaming headsets in a stock and cash deal valued at $2 Billion. The deal includes 23.1 million shares of Facebook common stock and $400 million in cash.
“Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.
Oculus VR never released consumer version of its Virtual Reality Headset, but more than 70,000 developers had already started receiving developer kits to involve in that technology. Oculus will continue to work from Irvine and will continue developing the Oculus Rift platform.
Last month Facebook acquired WhatsApp Messenger for a whopping $19 billion. Now this is the second big acquisition of that social giant within 35 days.
Zuckerberg described Oculus VR acquisition as “a long term bet on the future of computing.” If Desktops and mobiles are the current computing platforms, virtual reality could be the platform of the future.
Chris Dixon from Venture capital firm “Andresseen Horowitz” described in his blog that “”the more we learned, the more we became convinced that virtual reality would become central to the next great wave of computing.”
Zuckerberg said “Imagine not just sharing moments with your friends online, but entire experiences”.He said Oculus is “years ahead in terms of technology” and “all the best and brightest in the space already work there.”