Mark Zuckerberg has poured billions into his virtual reality dream, a new platform that Facebook owns.
Facebook bought oculus and has spent the last 5 years killing what it was and reinventing it as a Facebook-scale company. it has dumped most of the co-founders, brought in Zuck
loyalists to take over the most important decisions
and shifted towards accessibility over appeasing the company’s early supporters.
Facebook’s latest release is the realization
of all that.
The company’s Quest product, which they released on Tuesday, offers a streamlined version of
high-end virtual reality whereas leveraging time-honed software system to make the process of getting up-and-running immeasurably easier. It’s most likely the best VR product that’s
been built yet, and one that has the mainstream firmly in view.
Facebook needs to lean in on the new device and move away from what got it there.
With past VR releases, there’s always been a key
technology to blame or
a key feature that was missing, however if
the oculus Quest
fails, Facebook may have to think about that the
entire product category doesn’t
hold the mass attractiveness it
hoped for. Of more immediate
concern should be why
they’re maintaining such a differentiated product line in in pursuit of the mainstream when the quest is
basically alone in appealing to the mainstream customer that they actually want.
As the closing of the oculus acquisition approaches its
fifth birthday, one wonders where Facebook’s
10-year-plan for virtual reality begins to show some signs of critical success. even as the corporate has built up a niche group of VR gamers and
shipped millions of headsets, the corporate remains grappling with coaxing a
mass audience and recouping what it’s invested.
Whether or not the quest succeeds, you can only wonder how they’ll aim to streamline their current line of merchandise as the blank checks from Facebook begin running out.
The underpowered $199 Go proved to be a pleasant piece of hardware
for the price, however the year-old system remains ultimately a very forgettable introduction to the medium for new users. How much does oculus gain
from growing the user base of a product that’s best use case is watching Netflix in isolation?
Samsung and oculus made such a concerted push with the Gear VR,
throwing free headsets at users, however ultimately
developers aren’t investing in
these platforms and that’s only going to grow truer.
Meanwhile the company’s bread-and-butter
PC-based headset line could have a murky future in addition. The most recent Rift S which also launched this
week to lesser fanfare is
basically a lateral move for oculus and suggests that the corporate likely isn’t
willing to push boundaries on the high-end whereas it aims to
gain its footing in
the mainstream. Whether or not the quest succeeds or
fails, I’d not
be shocked to see the corporate fade the high-end into its standalone line over
time. The pc will always drive the
most high-end experiences; however it’s no place to stake a platform that still has to prove itself.
Maintaining 3 distinct product lines isn’t just expensive from
a hardware R&D point-of-view, it immensely complicates the company’s relationship with the
developers its backing to build stuff
that’s worth playing. The economics for VR game developers
is already dodgy at the best,
if oculus has
determined that pc isn’t
somewhere it wants to innovate with hardware it should simply let the
merchandise class run
its course and prioritize using the latest mobile chipsets in future standalone releases.
Oculus is a large organization; however it’s more redundant than a corporation setting the stage
for a new platform can afford to be. Facing its
prolonged degradation, Nintendo reshaped its mobile and home consoles into a single product. Oculus has to do the
same, and they already have.
In 2014, Facebook bought a company that was promising
to shape the future of VR by kickstarting
it. Appealing to the high-end earned it millions of loving early users on pc and millions of mobile users that gained an early taste of the platform. As
Facebook has absorbed oculus deeper
into its org structure and promoted its own vision for making a mass audience, the corporate has created something nice with the
quest, perhaps something worth killing the
merchandise lines that got it there.