[booruguru]

That's like saying the iPhone is just a touch screen with a battery and a CPU.

VR has been nothing more than a pipe dream for decades. But the problem isn't just merely optics and gyros...it also needs to be lightweight and super-responsive in order to prevent headaches, motion sickness, and disorientation. And also I think there are some complicated things they have to do in order to simulate stereo vision.

These challenges are hardly trivial and there's still a lot that needs to be learned in order to refine the technology.

$2 billion is a lot of money, more than it would cost to develop from scratch. But, in the past, others have tried to perfect this technology and failed.

Facebook (or Apple or Google or Microsoft) could spend $2 billion developing their own VR hardware and easily end up with nothing more than vaporware. Occulus Rift has the benefit of being a real product that works...while only being a few iterations away from a consumer-ready product.