INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Facebook virtual reality arm may soon find itself in the unfamiliar position of playing catch-up with hardware competitors.
Last week,
TechCrunch reported that Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe had decided to leave Facebook partially due to his &fundamentally different views
on the future of Oculus& and decisions surrounding the cancellation of a next-generation &Rift 2& project.
The company prototype &Rift 2&
device, codenamed Caspar, was a &complete redesign& of the original Rift headset, a source familiar with the matter tells us
Its cancellation signified an interest by Facebook leadership to focus on more accessible improvements to the core Rift experience that
wouldn&t require the latest PC hardware to function
Iribe did not agree with the direction, with a source telling us that he was specifically not interested in &offering compromised
experiences that provided short-term user growth but sacrificed on comfort and performance.&
Former Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe sharing
details on the Oculus Rift in 2015
In the wake of the overhaul cancellation, the company will be pursuing a more modest product update —
possibly called the &Rift S& — to be released as early as next year, which makes minor upgrades to the device display resolution while
more notably getting rid of the external sensor-tracking system, sources tell us
Instead, the headset will utilize the integrated &inside-out& Insight tracking system, which is core to Facebook recently announced Oculus
Quest standalone headset.
The &Constellation& tracking system on the current-generation Rift offers precise accuracy thanks to the static
external sensors that track the headset and Touch controllers
While the Insight system would likely offer users a much more simplified setup process, a clear pain point of the first-generation product,
&inside-out& tracking systems have greater limitations when it comes to the lighting conditions they work in and are generally less accurate
than systems with external trackers.
While Oculus has long led the way on hardware advances, this release could be seen as the company
playing catch-up with competitors like Microsoft, which has partnered with OEMs including Samsung, Lenovo and LG to release headsets on its
Windows Mixed Reality platform that also feature inside-out tracking as well as higher resolution displays than the Oculus Rift.
&While we
don&t comment on rumors/speculation about our future products, as we shared last week, PC VR remains a part of our strategy and is a
category we will continue to invest in
In addition to hardware, we have a robust software roadmap and are funding content well into 2020,& an Oculus spokesperson told
TechCrunch.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introducing the $399 Oculus Quest
There are some clear benefits for Oculus pushing iterative
hardware in an iPhone-like &S& manner, especially around affordability, as a more drawn-out device life cycle gives both Oculus and PC
component manufacturers time to reduce VR high barrier to entry in terms of cost.
The cancellation of its Caspar &Rift 2& project does
suggest a less aggressive pace of innovation for the company with its flagship premium VR product
The move away from a redesign could alienate early adopters and send them to other platforms
It also could lead Oculus into a situation where new titles that take advantage of the latest systems aren&t compatible with Rift
hardware.
At its Oculus Connect developer conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared that the Oculus Rift, Quest and Go represented
&the completion of its first-generation of VR products.& As Zuckerberg continues to double-down on his long-term goal to bring 1 billion
users into VR, the need to build the Oculus user base is growing more important, but it unclear how essential the company believes leading
the high-end PC VR market is to defining that early mainstream success.
