By Ryan Nakashima, Business Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) --Virtual reality, oddly enough, isn't immune to the problems that arise in practical reality. Just ask would-be fans of the Oculus Rift headset, many – possibly most – of whom are still waiting for their $600 gadgets more than four weeks after they started shipping .
The delay, naturally, has sparked online grousing and even some data-based activism, including the creation of a crowdsourced spreadsheet for tracking who received their prized VR gear and when. Some longtime supporters of Oculus have declared themselves alienated by the company's inability to deliver; others have defected to rival VR systems, or are at least considering it.
Christian Cantrell, a software engineer and science-fiction author in Sterling, Virginia, put in his pre-order roughly 15 minutes after Oculus started accepting them in January – and is still waiting. It's been a "bummer," he says, because he passed up buying a rival headset, the HTC Vive, hoping to be part of a VR "renaissance" with Rift.
"I've been kind of like an Oculus believer," he says. "But if they bump it again, I might just order a Vive."
It's too soon to say how the delays will affect Oculus, much less the overall acceptance of VR, a technology that submerges users in realistic artificial worlds. (Early VR "experiences" consist primarily of video games .) In other contexts, big companies like Apple have managed to weather shortages and shipping delays for products such as the Apple Watch and its new iPhone SE.
But some find the Rift delays intolerable, especially given that Oculus is no fledgling startup, but part of Facebook – the social network bought it two years ago for $2 billion. "There's an element of inexcusable incompetence going on," says J.P. Gownder, a Forrester Research analyst, who placed his preorder in the first 10 minutes but doesn't expect his Rift until mid-May.
Experienced hardware manufacturers would have set up suppliers months or years in advance to avoid these types of problems, Gownder says. The fact that Oculus managed to bungle its launch with more than three years to prepare, plus the backing of Facebook, is "scandalous," he says.
Oculus, which has blamed the delays on an "unexpected component shortage," declined to comment on specifics. It told the AP in a statement it has moved to address the shortage and expects deliveries to accelerate in coming weeks. By way of apology, Oculus said it will offer free shipping to customers who ordered before April 1.
Few have been as disappointed as some of the company's earliest supporters. Back in January, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey announced that 5,600 of the company's first Kickstarter backers would be eligible for a free headset. He then tweeted on the eve of first deliveries that the gifts would "start arriving" two days before others, giving the impression Kickstarter backers would get theirs first.
It didn't happen. Unhappy customers gathered on Reddit to complain and to figure out where they stood in line; one poster catalogued the frustration on a crowdsourced spreadsheet. While not necessarily representative of the entire Oculus customer base, that data shows that of the 131 early Kickstarter backers who submitted responses, only 28 report receiving a unit. Of 1,399 pre-order customers, just 165 say they got a Rift.
The virtual reality boom is just getting going, and the competition is growing. Sony will release its PlayStation VR headset later this year. Google is expected to expand on its primitive Cardboard viewer, and recent Apple acquisitions suggest that it may also be jumping into the field soon.
Meanwhile, the Rift is losing some of its first-mover appeal. Some games originally designed to be Oculus exclusives have now been hacked to work on the HTC Vive, which launched about a week after the Rift, but hasn't experienced shipping delays. Customers who bought Rift games before receiving their headset can now get digital keys so they can play the games in real reality, on a regular PC.
Bill Ellis, a 30-year-old computer engineer in Houston, has been playing with his Vive since it arrived April 5, and may not keep the Rift after it arrives. His plan, he says, was always to buy both, and sell the one that didn't live up to expectations: "The one that hasn't shown up is the one that hasn't lived up to my expectations so far."
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More