The moment Facebook’s planned Oculus acquisition was announced yesterday, John Carmack’s Twitter feed was swamped with questions. Far too many for a busy man to answer himself – and Carmack is still very busy.
“For the record, I am coding right now,” he said. “Just like I was last week.”
The ex-id tinkerer was able to distance himself from the deal far enough to offer a touch of commentary.
“I expect the FB deal will avoid several embarrassing scaling [crises] for VR,” he wrote.
“I have a deep respect for the technical scale that FB operates at. The cyberspace we want for VR will be at this scale.”
His assessment echoes of that of Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who reassured Redditors that the company “continues to operate independently”, and said that PC developers would benefit from Facebook’s infrastructure.
“We are going to remain as indie/developer/enthusiast friendly as we have always been, if not more so,” he said. “This deal lets us dedicate a lot of resources to developer relations, technical help, engine optimizations, and our content investment/publishing/sales platform.”
Luckey mentioned that Oculus users and developers would not need a Facebook account – but Carmack is warming to the idea regardless.
“I suppose I will get a FB account now,” he mused. “So that may lead to some writing a little longer than tweet length…”
Carmack joined Oculus as chief technology officer last year – and described now as a “special time” for VR.
“I believe that VR will have a huge impact in the coming years, but everyone working today is a pioneer. The paradigms that everyone will take for granted in the future are being figured out today,” he said upon taking up the post.
“It’s certainly not there yet. There is a lot more work to do, and there are problems we don’t even know about that will need to be solved, but I am eager to work on them. It’s going to be awesome!”
John Carmack, working (indirectly) for Facebook. Did you ever think we’d see the day?