Oculus Co-Founder Quits as VR Firm Promises a New Rift Headset

[Guest]

Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe departed amidst reports that he butted heads with Facebook execs, who may also have canceled the Rift 2 headset.

Oculus Co-Founder Quits as VR Firm Promises a New Rift Headset : Read more

 

[stdragon]

When is John Carmack no longer on the FB leash. If I recall, he went to FB after Oculus was acquired. He could have joined after the acquisition; I don't recall.

Either way, FB is dragging him down I'm sure.

 

[ikaz]

I think the writing was on the wall once they got acquired, I mean FB goal is to get as many people using there platform as possible. Currently and for probably the next 10 years plus "good" VR will require GPU/CPU power that the common FB users may not have access to or want to spend the money on. So why would FB bother to invest in top of line Rift headset if less than 1% (just making up numbers here) of their uses could even afford to purchase the required system to run it. It would make more business sense to try to make a mass market device that easy to run and use for the "common" FB user.

 

[Co BIY]

The cynic might think that a headset tied down to a PC isn't able to access nearly as marketable private user data as a mobile one.

 

[racksmith101]

The writing was on the wall the moment Facebook bought out occulus. They are only interested in ad revenue and making money selling your info. So they aren't interested in PC gamers they just want a cheap vr system they can tie into Facebook and its revenue potential.

 

[computerguy72]

Facebook/Oculus didn't actually deny the report or anything in it. That denial was *very carefully crafted to say new hardware would come out but specifically didn't refute that the CV2 and higher end HMD's from Oculus would be released. Basically their statement opens the door for literally any minor change to count as "new" hardware. They have specifically denied that anything shown in the recent prototypes would actually appear in any device. IMHO I think they are trying to walk away from PC VR.

 

[araczynski]

Can't say I'm surprised, this is why I haven't recommended the Oculus to anyone interested in VR since FB took it over. It's been kind of a "duh" since day 1.

 

[extremepenguin]

People who are interested in high end VR are going to steer more towards the Odyssey+ or the Vive Pro at this point, they have mass developer support and don't have to worry about the stigma surrounding FB. Any successor to the Oculus should try to focus on the $200 point and cater to their mass numbers of casual FB gamers. They need either a stand alone unit or something that pairs with a phone that is is cheap enough for mass adoption with a crap load of basic games that are targeted to their mass amounts of casual game players.