Now that we know the pricing of Samsung Gear VR, I’m not so certain that the acquisition price paid by Facebook for Oculus at $2bn is really that high. Granted, at the time of the acquisition, the notion of Virtual reality was still very murky and limited to the gaming world. If we assume the current projections for virtual reality market, one would assume that VR device products would lose their price elasticity after a point. For the premium VR experience —Once you hit that point, price really does not matter.  Those who can afford to buy it will do at any cost in that range. Given the brand value of Oculus in the space of Virtual Reality, one can expect it to be priced at the luxury end of the spectrum. If you assume the pricing at least 4 times that of Gear VR at $400 a pop, that’s a mere 5 million units in sales to cough up the $2bn invested for the acquisition. I’m sure you will agree with me that Mark Zuckerberg didn’t buy Oculus to make money of SKU’s from Oculus Rift. There’s definitely going to be more to the Virtual Reality offerings from Facebook other than the Oculus headsets.

Some headlines last year mentioned Facebook’s Teleportation app via virtual reality. At this point it may not be anything more than VR live streaming. The live stitching and streaming was done in Video-Stitch’s app Vahana VR. On the player side, the Gear VR app was a Facebook custom-made app (not released yet).

Oculus acquisition was made in March 2014. Interestingly Facebook also acquired a few other Virtual reality patents from a company that had already folded operations in Silicon Valley in Sept 2014. FB acquired about 10 patents from Vega Vista. It is also important to note that at the time of the acquisition Oculus had less than 5 patents, two of which where related to the gear (D738374 and D701206).

So who are these other guys whose patents makes complementary sense for the virtual reality play for Facebook after its Oculus acquisition?

The 10 patents from Vega Vista focus on different issues varying from motion detection and tracking systems, wearable displays and methods to a virtual computer monitor. Interestingly, they also have two patents that deal with “Methods and systems for relieving eye strain”. I looked around and found two very interesting profiles from these patents that FB purchased last year from Vega vista.

The first person that I found is Sina Fateh. Sina was the Executive VP at Atheer Labs where he was managing the development of the VR and AR optical/vision systems as well as the strategic partnerships. Prior to that he was the Founder and CEO of Vega Vista, Inc. pioneering “motion based technology”. He is currently focused on health care applications with specialties in Remote eye care, digital health, digital eye care, smart glasses, VR, AR and eye surgery. Although Sina is no longer with Atheer labs, one can clearly see some of the interesting enterprise offerings from Atheer in the area of Augmented reality.

The second person from Vega Vista whose patent was acquired was Arthur Zwurn. A Harvard educated entrepreneur, who has Researched, developed, and commercialized numerous 3D computer vision inventions using DoD/Intel R&D contracts. Breakthrough deployments included the world’s top-performing face recognition solution (per DARPA/NIST), the first integrated GPS/inertial/vision navigation solution for drones among others.

One wonders what the upcoming offerings from FB will be given the different patent acquisitions after its Oculus purchase. No matter what, Oculus was one of the largest acquisitions in the VR space. We need to wait and see how FB complements the virtual reality acquisitions into its core offering to provide value in the coming months and years. Given it’s collaboration with video-stitch and others, you can definitely expect offerings in all the 7 steps of value enablement, and not just VR based advertising to its millions of consumers. Perhaps by utilizing one of the Vega Vista patents, it may be able to figure out a novel way to deal with issues related to relieving eyestrain while using VR devices.