Facebook Will Start Putting Ads in Oculus Quest Apps (theverge.com) 77
Facebook will soon begin testing ads inside its Oculus Quest virtual reality system. In the coming weeks, ads will start appearing inside the Resolution Games title Blaston as well as two other unnamed apps. From a report: Facebook will later expand the system based on user feedback, saying it aims to create a "self-sustaining platform" for VR development. Facebook introduced ads on the Oculus mobile app last month, and it's used limited Oculus data to target Facebook advertising since 2019, but this is its first major foray into putting ads inside the Oculus VR platform itself. "Once we see how this test goes and incorporate feedback from developers and the community, we'll provide more details on when ads may become more broadly available across the Oculus platform and in the Oculus mobile app," the company said in a blog post.
Gee... good thing we sold that to Facebook, right? (Score:1)
I can't imagine what sort of bad things would have happened if anyone else had bought it and let the competition run rampant with it. /sarcasm
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Who would you sell it too? Can you name a platform that doesn't use advertisement? I mean the Playstation Network doesn't sell Axe body spray. Microsoft happily put adds right in your start menu. I guess Nintendo hasn't stooped that low yet, but advertisements are literally a part of the gaming world now.
Sure fuck Facebook in every possible way, especially how you need a Facebook account to use your headset, but honestly I'd be surprised if Oculus wouldn't have come up with this idea independently.
It's all
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Microsoft happily put adds right in your start menu.
Not in my Start menu, but I'm hoping that'll be a feature in the next release of Linux Mint.
Re:Gee... good thing we sold that to Facebook, rig (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft happily put adds right in your start menu
They also put subtracts, multiplies and divides there: it's called the calculator. Really useful!
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Jokes aside I wonder how many people realise MS actually embedded the calculator into the start menu. Like has anyone ever tried hitting the windows key and simply typing an equation?
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Why are you typing in full. Don't try to outsmart Windows, it knows what you want. Just hit start, type "upd" and hit enter.
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Oh yeah I forgot about their mobile games.
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I would have perhaps sold it to Valve, who didn't renege on their promise of Linux support. Or maybe just any company without both a history and stated ongoing goal of using their monopoly powers to illegally destroy open standards and competing communication services.
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To be fair, even if their stated ongoing goal was to use monopoly powers to legally destroy open standards and competing communication services it'd still be pretty shitty.
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I would have perhaps sold it to Valve, who didn't renege on their promise of Linux support
Officially, they did not. But the Linux version of SteamVR is lacking in features, growing in regressions and in general hasn't been receiving any _real_ updates for a while :-(
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I would have perhaps sold it to Valve
And that changes things how? Valve basically invented in game advertising. Gabe Newell even talked about how it was going to be a pillar of funding free to play games like Counterstrike back 15 years ago.
Oh my (Score:3, Insightful)
Didn't see that one coming...
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Oblg. Futurama (Score:3)
Why does this visual vomit have to pollute everything?
I'm always reminded of that Futurama S2E9 episode A Bicyclops Built for Two [youtube.com] where it basically predicted VRChat and how ads have taken over the internet forcing us to use adblockers.
Re: Oblg. Futurama (Score:5, Interesting)
Waters ended his diatribe by bringing up FaceMash, the pre-Facebook website that Zuckerberg created at Harvard in 2003 to compare the looks of women on campus. The incident was dramatized in the 2010 film The Social Network. "How did this little prick who started out as âShe's pretty, weâ(TM)ll give her a four out of five, she's ugly, we'll give her a four out of five,' how did we give him any power?" Waters asked. "And yet here he is, one of the most powerful idiots in the world."
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On the one hand, fuck Facebook, and good on Roger Waters for resisting an opportunity to sell out.
On the other hand... Roger Waters trying to put someone down over something like FaceMash is like if John Lennon got upset over musicians mixing politics with music. Yeah, Roger, I'm totally sure you've never had a shallow attitude towards women and certainly never banged groupies back when you were a dumb 20-something in the absolute heyday of casual sex for rock stars. It just rings a little hollow for a 70s
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Re: Oblg. Futurama (Score:2)
You're right. I also wouldn't say what Waters said, though, so...
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It doesn't matter if Roger Waters ate babies in the 70's: it doesn't alter the fact that Zuckerberg also did pretty obnoxious thing. If that is what he did. I need to go away and check the story.
Also, I doubt if you know anything very much about Roger Waters' sexual history, so it might be that your comment is defamation.
Re: Oblg. Futurama (Score:2)
Your calling my comment defamation is, by proxy, calling me a defamer, and as my comment was not defamation, you are guilty of either defamation or a really piss-ignorant understanding of the law. Your choice!
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I''m always reminded of that Futurama S2E9 episode
Which was preceded by this episode [youtube.com].
Re:Oblg. Futurama (Score:5, Interesting)
Why does this visual vomit have to pollute everything?
Because money, and because we've let advertisers get away with it since at least as far back as colonial times. People still accept it; they complain, but their dislike and discomfort aren't strong enough to motivate them to look for alternatives. People still use Windows - even those people whose needs would be fully served by a Linux box. They still use stock browsers without ad-blockers and other readily-available extensions that would give them some degree of privacy. They still flock to Facebook.
For the greatest part, humans lack either analytical capabilities or the urge / curiosity to apply them to their own lives and their own culture. They see ads as mostly annoying, sometimes entertaining, but ultimately harmless. Most don't understand that the primary accomplishment of advertising isn't simply that it convinces some people to buy a product they see in an ad. Advertising targets people's insecurity and inadequacy, and then dupes them into believing that purchasing something will make those bad feelings go away. And buying in does make them feel better, for a short while. Then the bad feelings return... Advertising has shaped our daily experience, our view of our own world and ourselves, in ways that few people even notice, much less comprehend.
As far as I'm concerned advertisers are exactly analogous to pushers. They get people hooked on things and behaviours that are ultimately destructive and life-denying, both to themselves, their fellow humans, and the planet - and they do it out of pure greed. But then, corporations are psychopathic - how did we ever expect any other kind of behaviour from them?
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Because money, and because we've let advertisers get away with it since at least as far back as colonial times. People still accept it; they complain, but their dislike and discomfort aren't strong enough to motivate them to look for alternatives.
Today I advised a friend to use ad-blocker. She responded that she likes ads.
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Why does this visual vomit have to pollute everything?
Because you're a cheapass and won't pay for everything.
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I pay for things that I deem are worthwhile.
Spewing commercial propaganda is not the way.
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In the book Altered Carbon people have computers interfaced to their brains, and the taxis have to be Faraday cages to prevent them getting bombarded with ads.
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Why does this visual vomit have to pollute everything?
Because people want things for free and yet things cost money to make.
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S1E6
Leela : Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?
Fry : Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky.
They promised keeping Facebook and Oculus separate (Score:3)
I distinctly recall this being mentioned on every single interview, back when Facebook bought then Carmack's Occulus circa 2014.
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That ship sail, hit an iceberg, sank, and had a movie made about it long ago. I mean you need a Facebook account to use your Oculus device. In comparison in app adverts are the least of anyone's concerns. Hell most games and apps monetise through ads these days, I'm surprised it took Oculus so long.
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I'm assuming OP's talking mostly about mobile F2P when he says "half of", though EA does banner ad the shit out of their sports games.
Beyond that, I mean, it's not exactly a recent phenomenon. there's this [gamespot.com] (also EA) and, back in the day, this [mobygames.com] and this [mobygames.com] and this [mobygames.com] and the Pizza Hut promotion in this [mobygames.com], and way back in the day you had this [mobygames.com] and this [mobygames.com], just to name a few of the most flagrant examples that come to mind. You also had stuff like the completely-unnecessary "choose your team" in California Games (an excus
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Cite, please. I've never seen in-game ads for real world products.
There's plenty of examples, all through gaming history, from static ads to dynamic ones in modern games.
F2P games such as Fornite are notorious for this, but they're hardly the only omes. EA was recently caught adding full-on ads on UFC 4, for example, months after its official release [theverge.com].
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Have you ever played a racing game?
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LOL they promised Linux support!
Re:They promised keeping Facebook and Oculus separ (Score:4, Insightful)
Germany promised to stop annexing territories after the Munich agreement.
A promise is no more trustworthy than whoever makes the promise.
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It is. These are Occulus ads, not Facebook, no?
If you think that's bad (Score:2)
"We notice you've been watching a WHOLE lot of porn"
Here are some nearby sex shops and massage parlors, follow the yellow or green lines on your headset.
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That's not too bad. Compare this to "your wife's tinder has become active, follow this line for a private detective and this line for a divorce lawyer".
Ernest Kline warned us (Score:5, Insightful)
When IOI is trying to take over the OASIS their plan for exploiting it becomes clear.
"We can sell up to 80 percent of a user's visual field before inducing seizures"
(Ready Player One)
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I think you're missing the point.
The entire movie was *FULL* of callbacks to almost every conceivable corner of nerd culture.
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Fry: So you're telling me they broadcast commercials into people's dreams?
Leela: Of course.
Fry: But, how is that possible?
Farnsworth: It's very simple. The ad gets into your brain just like this liquid gets into this egg. [He holds up an egg and injects it with liquid. The egg explodes, covering him and Leela in yolk.] Although, in reality, it's not liquid, but gamma radiation.
Fry: That's awful. It's like brainwashing.
[Leela wipes the yolk from her hair.]
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?
Fry: W
You play a dangerous game Facebook (Score:3)
So right now, I would say the Quest is hands down the absolutely best way to experience VR. It's just so practical, being able to pick up and use pretty much anywhere not tied to a system. And of course the controllers are great and track really well.
But others are coming. Apple is coming with augmented reality glasses in the next few years, Sony will have a new VR unit next year as well.
It seems like Facebook building a system that becomes more and more crowded with ads, will be terrible timing and push people right into the arms of other new VR systems when they come out.
But maybe Facebook will show enough restraint, or maybe the Quest will maintain enough market dominance, for the ads not to matter.. we'll see!
As if they need that ... (Score:2)
Facebook ... aims to create a "self-sustaining platform" for VR development.
With even more ads because they're so poor... From Facebook Earnings Q1 2021 Facebook revenue rises 48% [cnbc.com]
The company reported revenue of $26.17 billion for the quarter, which was up 48% compared with a year prior. Facebook's net income grew 94% to $9.5 billion, from $4.9 billion a year prior.
But when (Score:3)
But when will we be able to have ads in our dreams?
I have some great dreams but they would be way better if some crappy jingle interrupted them every 30 seconds to sell me cat litter or tampons. Or even better, tampons with cat litter in them.
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Personally, I won't be happy until we go full Truman Show and my co-workers and loved ones are trying to hock cooking utensils and cocoa mixes.
Though I guess if one's friends are wannabe Instagram influencers then this is already happening. And one could really do with better friends.
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Only thing Influencers influence me to do is to ignore them and shun them. Effing attention whores....
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Such a shame (Score:2)
Play stupid games (Score:2)
Win stupid prizes.
I am amazed everytime NoScript is (Score:2)
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The entire reason I only use Chrome on YouTube and Amazon. Everywhere else, it's a quagmire.
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My preference is to run with ad blocking turned on, and fully active, but noscript enabled on request--typical usage being when I attempt to view a website that queers up the information with a "you are using an ad blocker" overlay a second after the page loads? This tends to work for 95% of the sites out there...unless the site content gets loaded dynamically via JS (in which case I look elsewhere)....
Time to switch to Wifi-Link and VR-capable PC... (Score:2)
I've enough games available for some time (Beat Saber takes much on my VR time anyway)... So, it's time to think about a better PC (mine is 8yo), some correct Wifi-6 AP and switch to PC-streaming to Oculus...
Next device will probably *not* be an oculus... The principal drive was the PC-less experience anyway... And I'm mostly a Linux User.
I can't wait (Score:2)
Burma Shave ads in GTA.
User feedback? (Score:2)
I bet 99% of the user feed back will consist of two words. And they won't be "more, please!"
And really, is anybody actually surprised? (Score:2)
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uhh.. (Score:2)
Hmmm.... (Score:2)
another reason not to buy one of those....
You spend money on something, and you STILL get ASSAULTED with ads....
LOL "user feedback" (Score:2)
So what Facebook actually means is "fuck you there are ads", and the only user feedback they want back is whether people saw them and whether they felt they were relevant enough. I'm sure they'll pretend that the
OK, stupid question: where exactly? (Score:2)
Never used Oculus but I thought it is a technology where one:
* pays for the device and software to display the VR on the device
* pays for the software that shows VR e.g. a game
So why the fuck should there be any ads anywhere? Or is this about some free stuff that can be used with Oculus getting ads placed in VR?