Just a few hours ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will acquire Oculus VR.  For those who don’t know, Oculus has been working on the Oculus Rift for a few years now.  The Oculus Rift is a virtual reality, head-mounted display — a headset you wear that allows for  the sort of VR applications you might remember from such classics as The Lawnmower Man.

In all seriousness, though, Oculus is the real deal.  There’s a lot of speculation about what will or will not work in tech — the initial launch of the iPad, Google Glass, etc — but this one is kind of hard to deny.  One of the best ways to predict if something is going to be a game changer is to look at just who is getting behind it.

Oculus initially raised $2.4 million on Kickstarter.  The crowd has certainly thrown their wisdom behind it.  Later, no less than Marc Andreessen got behind the company and helped them raise another $75 million.  And most impressive, in my opinion, legendary game developer (the legend, to be quite honest) John Carmack came on as CTO.

Now Facebook — a company which has some serious buying power — has got on board.  I think its safe to say that the Oculus is going to make some waves.

I was able to demo the Oculus Rift developer kit (version 1) a few weeks ago.  It was interesting to say the least, but I went into it knowing they had some kinks to work out.  Most of those issues have been solved, and Oculus recently announced the version 2 dev kit which, according to Oculus, is pretty close to the final product that will sell to the public.  My initial impression of the v1 kit was that it definitely had a way to go — I almost instantly became nauseated after wearing it only a few moments.  But that’s one of the issues said to be fixed, so my optimism for the headset remains strong.