A job listing from Oculus parent company Facebook posted this week makes mention of a new headset and new platforms for its social VR plans.
According to a LinkedIn posting, Facebook is looking for an Innovation Tech Specialist to join its Social VR team in Menlo Park. The successful candidate will work on a range of social projects, including Spaces, which launched in beta last year and allows Facebook friends to meet up in VR, share media and play games. The posting can also be seen on Facebook’s careers page via a Google search, though the page is not available when you click through.
At one point, the listing notes that the candidate will “Build and extend workstations with productivity in mind, especially as we add PSVR, Windows Headsets, Monterey & Mobile.”
This suggests a lot of big things for Spaces and Oculus as a whole. The most eye-catching part is the mention of ‘Monterey’, which seems to confirm a new codenamed headset. Oculus has a tradition of codenaming its prototype hardware after coastal areas; DK2’s prototype was codenamed Crystal Cove, CV1 was codenamed Crescent Bay and the company’s upcoming six degrees of freedom (6DOF) standalone headset is currently codenamed Santa Cruz.
We’ve actually already heard the Monterey codename before, though. Last year, just ahead of Facebook’s F8 developer conference, Variety reported that this was the codename for an updated prototype for Santa Cruz. While that still may well be the case, Santa Cruz was shown later on in the year at Oculus Connect under its original codename, despite the device having made plenty of progress since its 2016 reveal. It’s also very possible that Monterey was a codename assigned to the soon-to-release Oculus Go standalone headset, which debuted as a full product and not a prototype. If not that, then perhaps this could be a codename for a new Oculus headset we’re yet to see.
Of course, the listing also makes mention of Sony’s PlayStation VR (PSVR) and the new Windows headset, which suggests Spaces or other social VR projects might soon arrive on both. The platform may have debuted on the Oculus Rift last year but it was also one of the first pieces of Facebook-developed VR software to be made available on the HTC Vive (whereas the Rift itself still gets exclusive games). It’s not too surprising to see PSVR and Windows VR support on the roadmap for the platform, then, especially for the former considering Sony’s PlayStation 4 integrates with Facebook for its user profiles.
We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the listing.
