As many of you guys have heard by now, earlier this year Facebook acquired Oculus VR, the company behind the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. Now we know that Facebook is no stranger when it comes to paying bounties to users who find bugs in its services, and it looks like Facebook is now extending those bounties to the Oculus Rift as well.
The headset is far from ready for mass consumption and currently exists as a developer’s kit, meaning that there are probably some kinks that need to be worked out, and possibly even some modifications that need to be made before it can be released for end users. So with Facebook placing a bounty on bugs, hopefully this will help speed things along.
Under this incentive program, security researchers can report bugs directly to Facebook where the minimum reward offered is $500, and there does not appear to be a cap set on the maximum. In fact back in 2013, Facebook reportedly paid out $1.5 million in bug bounties, so safe to say one could make a fair amount of money just by spotting bugs.
According to Facebook security engineer, Neal Poole, the Oculus Rift offers a new challenge in terms of bugs due to the fact that it is a piece of hardware, unlike Facebook or Facebook’s other services which are software. “A lot of the issues that come up with Oculus are not necessarily in the hardware yet. Potentially in the future, if people were to go explore and find issues in the SDK or the hardware, that is definitely of interest to us.”
Filed in . Read more about Facebook, Oculus Rift and Wearable Tech.