Oculus, maker of the virtual reality device Oculus Rift has been acquired by Facebook. It doesn’t make sense to me. Although I wasn’t happy with it, it at least made some sense to me when they bought Instagram. There are some service and technology synergies there. But to me, Facebook buying Oculus is like Google buying Motorola Mobility (oh yeah they did, and promptly undid). Or like Microsoft buying the monitor division of Samsung. To me, Oculus is viewing hardware. It needs application (i.e. games for now) support to work. Now Facebook could be planning or working on some virtual reality system a la The Matrix. But other viewing hardware should be able to view it also. They could lock it into Oculus but that won’t help adoption. Maybe they really are just genuinely interested in pushing the state of the technology, provide Oculus the resources to make virtual reality a… reality. Or maybe they’re diversifying. Or maybe they could just as well have bought DropBox :P