Commercializing Reality - An Oculus into VR’s Incorporation
When was the last time you felt the overwhelming urge to escape reality? Whether it was by playing games, watching movies, or reading books, human beings have always invented new ways to escape reality and construct new ones. This leads to the overwhelming popularity of media like The Matrix where our world is just a front, hiding the true, more exciting, and adventurous “real world.” However, the physical manifestation of this has been in the works and developed for over a decade now: Virtual Reality. From the garage of a sixteen-year-old tech developer to now one of the leading industries in the world, Oculus poses as a perfect example of Adorno & Horkheimer’s notion of incorporation; the mainstream corporate industry commercializing a niche object that just became too popular.
The origins of Oculus, now better known as Meta, extend far past its first prototype. Years before its conception, VR had already been tried and tested. However, from the Sword of Damocles first introducing head-mounted augmented reality in 1968 to the infamous and catastrophic failure of the Nintendo Virtual Boy Console, the negative stigma against virtual reality became apparent as an ‘impossible sci-fi imagination.’ Then enter Palmer Luckey, a sixteen-year-old tech aspirant who just got his hands on a failed Virtual Boy console. After three years of tinkering and after-school dumpster diving, he had made the first prototype of his very own virtual reality headset. To separate his aspiring company from the heavily stigmatized image of Virtual Reality at the time, Luckey named his prototype, and eventually his entire brand, the Oculus.
Oculus was never initially intended for public consumption. Luckey’s first readily available headset was dubbed the Development Kit #1 as it was specifically intended for the niche group of tech and game developers that would use this headset to further progress their own projects and create prototypes in 3D space. However, sooner or later Luckey would need financial means to support Development Kit #1 that did not come out of his own pocket. So, in 2012 Luckey turned to Kickstarter, a global public crowdfunding platform. The Kickstarter campaign for Oculus’s Development Kit #1 aimed for a $250,000 goal but instead received a whopping $2.4 million in contributions. Oculus’s rise to fame did not end here though, it also went on to be featured at the CES awards show where it received multiple awards and commendations.
However, as Adorno & Horkheimer state, “Once his particular brand of deviation from the norm has been noted by the industry, he belongs to it” (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944, p. 5). Oculus was noticed by not only one industry, but by the whole batch. Valve, Sony, Samsung, and countless other leading tech and gaming industries came to Luckey with offers of partnership and integration. Yet, what finally took Oculus home with them was none other than Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. However, this deal was no partnership, Facebook had offered Luckey $2.3 billion for the complete acquisition of Oculus (Barnard, 2022). With such an offer he could apparently not refuse, Facebook successfully incorporated Oculus into the mass media conglomerate of Facebook.
Only after Facebook had acquired Oculus did consumer-oriented products begin to be developed. Hence, the Oculus Rift was released to the mass consumer market in 2016. This release was also primarily intended to combat the contesting, new, and emerging VR consumer products created by Valve, Sony, and HTC. As VR was introduced to the consumer market, it introduced a system of standardization in the VR industry where supposedly different products are introduced yet remain fundamentally the same creating an impression of consumer differentiation (Adorno & Horkheimer, pp.2-6). Additionally, as stated by John Fiske, a select few dominant groups benefited from these explorations of VR (Fiske, 2010, p.18).
This commercialization of virtual reality extended further when Oculus’s business strategy shifted from providing high-end advancements in VR to providing affordable VR headsets. Prior to this, the world of VR still remained relatively exclusive despite becoming commercialized and open to consumers. Headsets would range from $500 to $1000+, causing them to be unaffordable to a majority of leisure consumers. Yet, Oculus made the decision to scale down processing power and decrease graphical clarity to provide an affordable, standalone headset at a lower price of $300 called the Oculus Quest. This posed a shift of direction for Oculus from creating new innovations in VR to commercializing and making VR largely available.
To further cement the incorporation of Oculus, Palmer Luckey, the original founder and creator of Oculus, was fired in March 2017. No explanation was provided by either Facebook or Luckey except for a brief statement indicating it was a “specific personnel matter” (Robertson, 2018). With Luckey no longer being a contributing partner of Facebook, Oculus was completely shifted into the control of Mark Zuckerberg. To maintain its dominance over the VR industry and Oculus itself, Facebook put the final nail in the coffin by combining with Oculus and rebranding itself as Meta in 2021. This indicated the supposed end of Oculus with its complete and final incorporation into Meta.
The origin, rise, appropriation, and eventual dissipation of Oculus serve as a textbook embodiment of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Fiske’s conceptions of incorporation. What originated as a tool for a marginal, niche group of tech creatives was eventually consumed and commercialized by a hegemonic, dominant industry, Facebook, that introduced virtual reality to effects of the culture industry such as standardization and consumer differentiation. In order to then maintain the systems that advantaged them, Facebook cemented the incorporation of Oculus by not only disposing of the original founder but then further appropriating it into their primary brand and liquifying its original name and vision. With yet another niche and marginal element of pop culture now belonging to the industry, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Fiske seem to be somewhat spot on when it comes to the processes of incorporation by hegemonic groups.
Works Cited
Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (2020). The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception. Dialectic of Enlightenment, 94–136. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804788090-007
Fiske, J. (2010). Understanding popular culture. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203837177
Robertson, A. (2018, April 10). Mark Zuckerberg says he didn't fire Palmer Luckey out of anti-conservative bias. The Verge. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/10/17221042/mark-zuckerberg-palmer-luckey-ted-cruz-senate-hearing-political-bias-firing
Dingman, H. (2021, March 29). Five years of VR: An oral history from Oculus rift to quest 2. Tech at Meta. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://tech.fb.com/ar-vr/2021/03/five-years-of-vr-an-oral-history-from-oculus-rift-to-quest-2/
Barnard, D. (2022, October 6). History of VR - timeline of events and Tech Development. VirtualSpeech. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://virtualspeech.com/blog/history-of-vr
Big 3 Media. (2021, November 22). A Brief History of Meta and The Evolution of Facebook. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.big3.sg/blog/a-brief-history-of-meta-and-the-evolution-of-facebook
Comments
Post a Comment