No, it is factually true. JC on Twitter: "I have a deep respect for the technical scale that FB operates at. The cyberspace we want for VR will be at this scale."

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/448631430533246976

If Oculus's plan all along was to create a giant MMO powered by Rift headsets, then this is the first I've heard of it. Interesting. I think a bunch of smaller apps created by developers has a better chance of being successful.

EDIT: By "giant MMO" I mean "metaverse from Snowcrash," not "video game."

Well, Carmack has always wanted to create the metaverse. And the Oculus founder has wanted that too. It seems this acquisition might be the best for their plans, if Zuck is on board with it.

Well Second Life is instructive here, I felt they ran into scaling problems. You could also consider Eve's non-sharded world - OK Eve is a game, but a sufficiently complex and elaborate one as to be a good proxy for an immersive virtual environment.

I don't know exactly what Oculus's plan was but it'd be foolish to ignore this obvious application, and that certainly seems to be where Mark Zuckerberg sees the value in it, if we are to take his speech on the conference call at face value.

After thinking about this some more, I think it's going to come down to: "Can they make their Metaverse cool?"

Zuck probably has some tricks up his sleeve to accomplish this goal. And he's been able to learn from G+ about how not to go about it.

Whether the Metaverse is cool will make or break its popularity. It's what made Facebook's.

The coming years are going to be pretty interesting.

Eve is also a sharded world, the system there just tries to implement transitions are transparent. The abstraction leaks sometimes, though. (Each system in Eve is a shard, and when events in that game happen 'at scale', scaling issues abound.)

Don't forget that facebook has an app platform. Even if personally I find all the apps loathsome the experience is relevant.

Floating avatar heads doesn't seem to be the future of VR. Personally, I hope the metaverse has users strapped into a cockpit.