Will Facebook's virtual reality arm start playing catch-up with its competition? That's an interesting one to mull over.
We got a report from TechCrunch sometime last week indicating that the founder of Oculus Brendan Iribe had decided to leave Facebook partially due to his "fundamentally different views on the future of Oculus"
Iribe is also alleged to have partially left Facebook due to some decisions revolving around "Rift 2" project cancellation.
According to a source familiar with the matter, it has been revealed that the prototype "Rift 2" device, codenamed Caspar, was a "complete redesign" of the original Rift headset. It turns out that the project cancellation was informed by the interest of Facebook's leadership to focus on more accessible improvements to the core Rift experience.
On the other hand, Iribe was not on the same page with the leadership, he was specifically not interested in "offering compromised experiences that provided short-term user growth but sacrificed on comfort and performance."
Following this issue, Facebook will be pursuing a more modest product update. We're possibly going to see the "Rift S" which will be released as early as next year. The device will have some minor upgrades on its display resolution as it gets rid of the external sensor-tracking system.
The headset will deploy the integrated "inside-out" Insight tracking system. This is core to Facebook's recently announced Oculus Queststandalone headset.
The current-generation Rift has the "Constellation" tracking system which offers precise accuracy thanks to the static external sensors that track the headset and Touch controllers. Although 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.
Remember that Oculus has long led the way on hardware advances. There's a great probability that 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.
"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.
During the 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." We know that Zuckerberg has been incessant on his long-term goal to bring 1 billion users into VR. This is part of the reason we're seeing that the need to build the user base is ever growing.
